The Motet in the Late Middle Ages

The Motet in the Late

Middle Ages
MARGARET BENT
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Bent, Margaret, author.
Title: The motet in the late middle ages / Margaret Bent.
Description: [1.] | New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. | Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022044679 (print) | LCCN 2022044680 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190063771 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190063801 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190063788
Subjects: LCSH: Motets—500-1400—History and criticism. |
Motets—14th century—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML190 .B45 2023 (print) | LCC ML190 (ebook) |
DDC 782.209/02—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044679
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044680

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190063771.001.0001

Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

The publisher gratefully acknowledges support from the Kenneth Levy Fund of the
American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
 Amicis optimis

Bonnie, Leofranc, and David

 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements  xi

About the Companion Website  xv
List of Illustrations  xvii
List of Tables  xix
List of Music Examples  xxi
List of Sound Clips  xxv
List of Manuscripts  xxvii
Other Abbreviations  xxxv

Introduction  1

PA RT I . C OM P O SI T IO NA L T E C H N IQ U E S 15

1. Theoretical and Terminological Issues  17

2. What is Isorhythm?  39

PA RT I I . T H E M A R IG N Y M O T E T S , B EYO N D FAU V E L ,
A N D V I T RY 6 5

3. Fauvel and Marigny: Which Came First?  67

4. Tribum que non abhorruit/​Quoniam secta latronum/​Merito hec patimur
and its ‘Quotations’, and Garrit gallus/​In nova  83
Appendix: Commentary to Tribum/​Quoniam; Commentary to
Garrit/​In nova  108
5. Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me  111
6. Floret/​Florens: Intended for Fauvel?  131
7. Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry  139
8. Vos quid admiramini/​Gratissima virginis species/​Gaude gloriosa  151

PA RT I I I . M AC HAU T 169
9. Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9  171
10. Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number in Machaut’s Motet 15  197
11. The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass  209
viii Contents

12. Machaut’s Motet 10 and its Interconnections  231

13. Motet 18: Bone pastor Guillerme/​Bone pastor, qui pastores/​Bone pastor  245
14. Text–​Music Relationships in Motets 4 and 8  263

PA RT I V. M U S I C ORUM C OL L E G I UM :
T H E M U SIC IA N M O T E T S 2 8 1

15. Apollinis eclipsatur, its Progeny and their Sources  283

16. Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​In omnem terram and
Later Versions with Added Parts  301
Appendix: Commentaries to Web Transcriptions for the Pieces
with Multiple Sources  321
17. Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili and the Musicians Named
in Apollinis and Musicalis  325
18. Musicorum collegio/​In templo Dei/​Avete  343
19. Alma polis religio/​Axe poli cum artica/​[Et] in ore eorum and its
Named Musicians  353
Appendix: Commentary Notes to Example 19.1, Alma polis religio/​Axe
poli cum artica/​[Et] in ore eorum  367
20. Sub arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium/​In omnem terram and
its Musicians  369
Appendix: Variants in Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium/​In omnem
terram  388
21. Fragmentary Motets and Other Possibly Linked Compositions  389

PA RT V. E N G L I SH M O T E T S C . 1 4 0 0 –​1 4 2 0 399

22. The Yoxford Manuscript and the Motet O amicus/​Precursoris  401

Appendix: Musical Transcription of O amicus/​Precursoris (Ex. 22.1),
with Musical and Textual Commentary  423
23. The Yoxford Credo  431
Appendix: Notes to Credo Transcription (Ex. 23.1)  443
24. Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets in the Old Hall Manuscript  445
25. Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple  465
 Contents ix

PA RT V I . I TA L IA N M O T E T S 495

26. The Fourteenth-​Century Italian Motet  497

27. The Motet Collection of San Lorenzo 2211 (SL2211) and the
Composer Hubertus de Salinis  531
28. The Motets of Johannes Ciconia  551
29. Ciconia, Prosdocimus, and the Workings of Musical Grammar as
Exemplified in O felix templum and O Padua  575

PA RT V I I . M U SIC F O R P O P E S A N D T H E C OU RT S
O F BU R G U N DY A N D C Y P RU S 6 0 3

30. Early Papal Motets  605

Appendix: Music for Popes John XXII(?) to Eugene IV  638
31. Trémoïlle Revisited  641
Appendix: Transcription of Incipits as Listed in the Trém Index,
with Identifications and Sources  653
32. Some Aspects of the Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets  661
Appendix: The Cyprus Motets  682

Bibliography  687
Index of Compositions  715
Index of Manuscripts  723
General Index  727
 Preface and Acknowledgements

Like Fauvel, this book is a hybrid in more than one sense. It is part print and part digital;
many music examples essential to the text but too large in format to be printed legibly
in the book are displayed only as downloadable files on the companion website; see
p. xv. The book is also a hybrid in that it was neither conceived ab initio, nor is it a simple
collection of previously published writings. Had it started from a blank slate, the cov-
erage would have been more even, more comprehensive. It was originally planned and
commissioned as a compilation of the many articles I have published on various aspects
of late medieval motets over several decades, together with a significant proportion of
previously unpublished material that had arisen from teaching and from work on indi-
vidual motets presented at seminars and conferences. Almost half the chapters are com-
pletely new, most substantially those of Part IV (Chs. 15–​21) on the musician motets,
but also most of Chapters 1, 6–​8, 13, 14, 25 and 28. But as I came to work on the updating
commentaries planned to introduce or frame each chapter, I felt the need to rewrite or
extensively revise most of the previously published work (about half of the book), both
to take account of revisions necessitated by discovery of new sources and of more recent
work by myself and others. It made sense to group related chapters into the seven Parts
of this book, with new material worked in. Suzanne Ryan, then commissioning editor
for OUP, readily agreed that this would make a better book.
I also eliminated some duplication and intermediate stages towards my current
views, which include, I hope, a clearer understanding of the appropriate use of terms
such as isorhythm, and of distinctions between, for example, diminution and propor-
tion. I have tried to indicate where and how my stance has significantly changed over
the years, and my views are often differently nuanced; but for the record, most of the
older articles (written before the internet) are available on the web, some on my aca-
demia.edu page.
The chapters vary considerably with respect to technical and notational description,
and hence of the level of readership addressed. Chapter 9, for example (on Machaut’s
Motet 9, with sound examples), was designed for pedagogical use as an introduction
suitable for students, while chapters with more detailed analysis and technical details of
notation and commentary are directed at specialists or advanced graduate students. In
many cases, readers will be able to skip the more technical discussions if their interests
lie more in verbal texts and contextual considerations. The Introduction gives an over-
view of the contents which may guide readers to the chapters most relevant to their
interests.
The original form of some of this work dates back over many decades. Some has never
been published, some only in occasional or obscure publications that are not currently
accessible online. Despite attempts to do justice to work by others more recent than my
original articles, coverage and acknowledgements are inevitably incomplete, especially
with respect to older oral contributions by colleagues and students.
xii Preface and Acknowledgements

Many colleagues have given me valuable feedback over the years. Foremost among
them are the three long-​standing friends to whom this book is dedicated: Bonnie
Blackburn, Leofranc Holford-​Strevens and David Howlett. It was a huge privilege that
Bonnie was willing not only to undertake copy-​editing prior to submission but also to
prepare the index. Her thorough vigilance has saved me from many errors, omissions
and inconsistencies, though it is inevitable in a book of this size that many will remain,
and for these I am responsible. In Leofranc and David I have benefited from two of the
most resourceful Latinists anywhere: Leofranc has been ready to answer queries and
translate difficult Latin, and the stimulus of collaborating with David in the late 1980s
opened my eyes to a range of textual subtleties.
Much of the work presented here has been enriched by those and other interdis-
ciplinary contacts that I have been fortunate enough to enjoy over the years. Kevin
Brownlee had major input on the French texts of Machaut motets in Chapters 10, 12
and 14 on which we worked together and presented in seminars. I observed that he
had read every word Machaut wrote except the motets, and that someone as deeply
concerned as he with intertextuality should find a rich harvest in motets with simul-
taneous texts in which each syllable had a precise placement in time and in relation to
the other text. He rose magnificently to the challenge. Chapter 5 presents my contribu-
tion to our published collaboration on the Fauvel motet Aman novi. Colleagues who
joined Andrew Wathey and me in the seminars and conferences that resulted in Fauvel
Studies have provided stimulus, often ongoing: especially Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Ardis
Butterfield, Emma Dillon, Christopher Page, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Alison Stones
and Jane Taylor.
I had not intended to inflict the entire text of the book on any one colleague for pre-​
publication reading, but Lawrence Earp, after giving sharply focused and critical feed-
back on several chapters at an early stage, has now gone through the entire manuscript;
I am most grateful to him and to Michael Scott Cuthbert for saving me from numerous
errors and omissions. Exchanges with Jacques Boogaart about Machaut motets and
with Elena Abramov-​van Rijk on Italian matters have been particularly helpful, as were
conversations about thirteenth-​century precedents with Catherine A. Bradley and Sean
Curran.
It would be impossible to list all my scholarly debts over a lifetime. I beg forgive-
ness of any I have neglected to list below among the many other friends, colleagues
and students who, in addition to those named above, have contributed observations
and helpful criticism over the years in seminars, conversations and correspondence.
I am grateful to Cristina Alís Raurich, Jon Michael Allsen, Alexander Blachly, Calvin
Bower, Roger Bowers, Anna Maria Busse Berger, John Caldwell, Antonio Calvia, David
Catalunya, Alice Clark, Suzannah Clark, Lisa Colton, Karen Cook, Julie Cumming,
Karen Desmond, Brianne Dolce, Richard Dudas, Ross Duffin, Theodor Dumitrescu,
David Fallows, Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Sarah Fuller, Paweł Gancarczyk, Julian Gardner,
Maria Carmen Gómez, Barbara Haggh-​Huglo, Anne Hallmark, Elina Hamilton, George
Harne, Jared Hartt, Jan Herlinger, Andrew Hicks, Martin Horyna, Anthony Hunt,
Andreas Janke, Jonathan Katz, Andrew Kirkman, Paul Kolb, Karl Kügle, Elizabeth Eva
Leach, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Peter Lefferts, Christian Thomas Leitmeir, Manon
Louviot, Grantley McDonald, Pedro Memelsdorff, John Milsom, John Nádas, Virginia
Newes†, Robert Nosow, Alejandro Enrique Planchart†, Yolanda Plumley, Harold
 Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

Powers†, Susan Rankin, Zoltán Rihmer, Anne Robertson, Edward Roesner†, Kévin Roger,
Uri Smilansky, Jason Stoessel, Anne Stone, Reinhard Strohm, Johanna-Pauline Thöne,
Philippe Vendrix, Andrew Wathey, Rob Wegman, Elżbieta Witkowska-​Zaremba, Mary
Wolinski, Peter Wright†, Anna Zayaruznaya, Emily Zazulia and Francesco Zimei.
This list includes some with whom brief exchanges or conversations have proved
stimulating on individual points or chapters, and some with whom I have had more
wide-​ranging exchanges. Specific debts are acknowledged in place, and I am grateful to
them all. In particular, I have almost certainly failed to incorporate some contributions
of more recent scholarship, for which I apologise. Errors and inconsistencies inevitably
remain. All shortcomings are mine alone.
Transcriptions are provided in scored diplomatic copies in an adapted form of the
original notation, or in modern notation, for most but not all of the motets discussed in
detail, either in the book or on the companion website (see p. xv). Manuscript images for
most of the compositions are available on https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​, https://​www.diamm.
ac.uk/​, or the websites of individual libraries. A few music examples have been taken
over from previous publications, notably those set for Chapter 29 by Vincent Besson.
Most of the transcriptions of whole motets are on the companion website, and are
mine unless otherwise stated. Most of those, and music examples throughout the book,
have been newly set by Timothy Symons, who was able to transform my handwritten
copies into things of beauty before his untimely death. I was enormously relieved when
he also agreed to organise the illustrative material (figures, music examples and tables)
both for the book and for web display. Ronald Woodley has graciously allowed me to
use his Bentivoglio and Accidentals fonts for the in-​text music symbols.
My debt of gratitude to All Souls College for generous support over three decades is
incalculable. I am indebted for cooperation and many kindnesses to the staff of the nu-
merous libraries in which I have worked, to Julia Craig-​McFeely of DIAMM, and to Ugo
Giani of LIM (Libreria Musicale Italiana). Suzanne Ryan, formerly of OUP, encouraged
and handled the original proposal for this book; I am grateful to her and to her suc-
cessor Norman Hirschy, and to Rachel Ruisard of OUP. Together with the production
team at Newgen, led by Stuart Allison, they have worked together to transform this long
and complex manuscript into printed and digital form, and I thank them for their skill
and patience.
 About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/us/TheMotetintheLateMiddleAges

Oxford has created a companion website to accompany The Motet in the Late Middle
Ages. Material that cannot be made available in full form in the book, namely larger-
format music examples and tables, is provided here, and can be downloaded. Examples
and figures are each numbered consecutively in each chapter, whether they are in the
book or on the website. The reader will need to consult this essential resource in con-
junction with the chapters. Examples available online are indicated in the text with
Oxford’s symbol .
Chapters 9 and 13 also have audio clips, numbered as mp3 files and linked to the
numbered music examples. To download the audio clips individually, right-click (on
a Mac: Control-click) on the audio player and save the file to your computer. You may
need to select ‘Allow Download’ if your browser asks permission to download the file.
There is also the option to bulk-download a zip file that contains all audio clips for
Chapters 9 and 13, found under the ‘Resources’ tab.
 List of Illustrations

3.1 A much-​simplified diagram of part of the Fauvel narrative, left to right, and
historical narrative, right to left  80
4.1 Schematic diagram of Tribum/​Quoniam/​Merito  93
4.2 Palindromic rhythm of the (first) tenor talea of Garrit gallus in Paris146, f. 44v  102
4.3 Garrit gallus in Pic, f. 67r  103
4.4 Periodic structure of Garrit gallus  105
5.1 Triplum incipit of Aman/​Heu in Paris146, f. 30  114
5.2 Notated sharp in Paris146, f. 30, tenor, bottom staff  123
8.1 The tenor and contratenor taleae of the two colores of Vos/​Gratissima  158
8.2 The chiasm of triplum Vos–​Ista alternations  162
8.3 Some instances of prevalent rhythmic motives (Vos and Gratissima)  164
8.4 Ivrea, f. 9r, staff 4: ‘eye music’ in Vos/​Gratissima  164
8.5 The hockets of Vos/​Gratissima  165
9.1 Motetus rhyme-​words in Machaut, Motet 9  188
9.2 Some verbal correspondences between triplum and motetus in Machaut, Motet 9  189
13.1 Texts with hockets in Machaut, Motet 18, bar 97–​end  249
13.2 Paris146, Lescurel, f. 58r: rests in Belle com loiaus  257
13.3 Proposed original notation of the tenor of Machaut, Motet 2  261
16.1 Staggered periods in Apollinis  306
17.1 Musicalis sciencia in Pic, f. 67v  327
17.2 Opening rhythms of Musicalis sciencia and Musicorum  330
19.1 Tenor and contratenor of Alma polis in Chantilly, f. 68  361
20.1 Opening triplum rhythms of Apollinis and Sub Arturo  381
21.1 Non eclipsis atra ferrugine in Leiden2515 f. 1v
23.1 Structural diagram of the Yoxford Credo
23.2 Responsory Omni tempore, AS, pl. 317  433
23.3 Tenor talea of Yoxford Credo as notated, with ligatures resolved, followed
by the reducing derivations. Breves altered in perfect mensurations are so marked  435
25.1 Tenor of Byttering, En Katerine, tenor Sponsus amat sponsum [sic] in OH, f. 111  467
xviii List of Illustrations

25.2 Text of Carbunculus ignitus lilie, with aligned isorhythm, showing that rests never
divide words  470
25.3 Tenor of Sturgeon, Salve mater/​Salve templum in OH, f. 92  479
27.1 The structure of Gathering XIX of SL2211  532
28.1 The three stages of O felix templum in Q15; also at Fig. 28.1  557
28.2 Tenor of Doctorum principem in Q15, f. A299v  562
 List of Tables

5.1 Comparative editions of the triplum text of Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu

me, tristis est anima mea
6.1 Textual correspondences between the prose Carnalitas and the motet triplum Floret  134
7.1 Contents of Br19606  141
8.1 Texts and translations of Vos/​Gratissima by David Howlett  152
9.1 Cadencing opportunities in Machaut, Motet 9  182
9.2 Machaut motets with one or both texts in Latin (out of a total of 23)  184
9.3 Distribution of text in Machaut, Motet 9  186
9.4 Rhythmic vocabulary of upper parts in Machaut, Motet 9  191
9.5 Calendrical dimensions in Machaut, Motet 9  191
10.1 Texts of Machaut’s, Motet 15  204
12.1 Verses lined up with taleae in Machaut, Motet 10  233
13.1 Texts and translations of Machaut, Motet 18; translations by Leofranc
Holford-​Strevens  246
13.2 The hocket passage laid out by stanzas in Machaut, Motet 18  250
14.1 Texts and translation of Machaut, Motet 4  264
14.2 Texts and translation of Machaut, Motet 8  273
22.1 Texts and translation of O amicus/Precursoris  407
25.1 Inventory of the Royal Choirbook (RC)
25.2 Distribution of the sequence texts in Dunstaple’s motets nos. 32 and 33  489
25.3 The Dunstaple motets classed by Bukofzer as isorhythmic  490
26.1 Italian motets c. 1310–​1410  504
27.1 Motets in SL2211  534
27.2 Mass music and motets by Hubertus de Salinis  540
27.3 Songs by or possibly by Salinis  546
28.1 Ciconia’s motets (numbered as in PMFC 24)  554
32.1 The ‘O’ Antiphons  677
 List of Music Examples

‘Modern notation’ is specified for complete transcriptions or substantial excerpts. Unspecified

complete transcriptions (mostly on the website) are in a scored form of the original notation. Shorter
examples are notated as convenient for that example.

1.1 Standard 10/​6–​12/​8 cadence, and non-​coincidental final cadences in three

Machaut motets (M4, M10, M15)  22
1.2 The end of M17 from Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart (modern notation)  24
1.3 Endings of O Maria/​O Maria: (a) Pad1106; (b) Q15; (c) MuEm  27
4.1 Transcription of Tribum que non abhorruit/​Quoniam secta latronum/​
Merito hec patimur
4.2 Tenor and chant of Merito hec patimur  92
4.3 Three notes of the chant as used in the motetus of each block of Tribum  95
4.4 Triplum of Tribum showing chant paraphrase of tenor Merito  96
4.5 Transcription of Garrit gallus/​In nova
4.6 Musical relations between Garrit Gallus/​In nova fert and Tribum/​Quoniam  106
4.7 Musical relations between Garrit Gallus and Tribum at the word leo  108
5.1 Edition of music of Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me, tristis est anima mea  119
7.1 Tenor of Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores: three taleae, three statements  148
8.1 The tenor of Vos/​Gratissima  154
8.2 Transcription of Vos/​Gratissima by Richard Dudas, based mainly on Durham20
8.3 The main structural junction of Vos/​Gratissima, demonstrating several
instantiations of simili  166
9.1 Transcription of Machaut, Motet 9, Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris feritas/​Fera
pessima
9.2 Structure of the tenor of Motet 9  176
9.3 The tenor color of Motet 4, and its articulation by talea repetition  178
9.4 Opening of tenor of Motet 16  179
9.5 Chant tenor of the Fauvel motet Tribum/​Quoniam/​Merito hec patimur  179
9.6 Standard cadences in Motet 9  182
9.7 Partial cadences in Motet 9  183
9.8 Displaced cadence in Motet 9, B47–​B49  183
9.9 Displaced cadences in Motet 9 in B112–​B115  184
9.10 Motet 9: inversion (upper brackets) and retrograde (lower brackets)
patterns in the tenor color  193
xxii List of Music Examples

9.11 Similarities between openings of Motet 9 and Motet 15  194

10.1 Machaut, Motet 15, Amours qui a le pouoir/​Faus Samblant m’a deceü/​Vidi
dominum (modern notation)  198
11.1 Gloria of Machaut’s mass, excluding Amen (modern notation)  216
12.1 Transcription of Machaut, Motet 10, Hareu! hareu! le feu/​Helas! ou sera pris
confors/​Obediens usque ad mortem
12.2 The tenor of Motet 10  235
12.3 Prominent motives in Motet 10  236
12.4 Openings of Motets 15 and 10 and the ‘Amours’ motive  243
13.1 Machaut, Motet 18, from Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart (modern notation)
14.1 Transcription of Machaut, Motet 4, De Bon Espoir/​Puis que la douce/​Speravi
14.2 The tenor color of Motet 4, showing its overlap with Motet 9 and its
articulation by talea repetition  266
14.3 Transcription of Machaut, Motet 8, Qui es promesses/​Ha! Fortune/​Et non est qui
adjuvat
14.4 Tenor of Motet 8, showing leaps of 4ths and 5ths, the x and y motives and
their retrogrades and inversions, and the derivation of four-​note minim
formulas of the top parts from the chant  276
14.5 Similar phrases leading to death in Motet 10 and Motet 8  278
16.1 Transcription of Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​In omnem terram
16.2 Transcription of Apollinis with textless triplum from Barc853
16.3 Transcription of Apollinis with added triplum Pantheon abluitur and
textless quadruplum from LoTNA and SL2211
16.4 Transcription of Apollinis with added triplum Psallentes zinzugia and
contratenor from LoTNA
17.1 Transcription of Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili
18.1 Transcription of Musicorum collegio/​In templo Dei
18.2 Chant melisma on Avete (GS 120) and the tenor of Musicorum  349
19.1 Transcription of Alma polis religio/​Axe poli cum artica/​[Et] in ore eorum
19.2 Comparison of the tenor of Alma polis with chant melody from Fribourg2  358
19.3 The first talea pair of each color of Alma polis in simplified modern notation  361
20.1 Transcription of Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium
20.2 Tenors of Apollinis and Sub Arturo  376
21.1 Transcription of Arta/​Musicus est ille (modern notation)
21.2 Arta/​Musicus est ille: contratenor with three isorhythmic taleae  390
21.3 Opening rhythm in motetus of Sub Arturo/​Fons citharizancium and
triplum of Fons origo musicorum  395
22.1 Musical Transcription of O amicus/Precursoris (Ex. 22.1), with Musical and
Textual Commentary (modern notation) 423
22.2 Comparison of tenor of O amicus with proposed chant  403
 List of Music Examples xxiii

22.3 Solus tenor, tenor and contratenor of O amicus  413

22.4 Tenor and contratenor of O amicus  413
23.1 Transcription of the Yoxford Credo (modern notation)
23.2 Tenor of Yoxford Credo, with relevant portions of chant 434
24.1 Transcription of Post missarum sollennia/​Post misse modulamina (modern
notation)451
24.2 Reconstructed tenor of Post missarum458
24.3 Tenor of Are post libamina459
24.4 Tenor of Herodis in pretorio/​Herodis in atrio/​Hey, hure lure from Durham20459
25.1 Transcription of Dunstaple, Descendi in ortum meum (modern notation)
25.2 Transcription of Dunstaple (?), Gaude flore virginali (modern notation)
25.3 Transcription of Dunstaple, Gloria in canon (modern notation)
26.1 Excerpt from fragmentary motet on S. Cristina in Ox16 (modern notation)  518
26.2 Florentia mundi/​Marce pater, transcribed from Egidi and SL2211 (modern
notation)  521
26.3 Transcription of O Antoni expulsor demonum (modern notation)
27.1 Salinis, Jhesu salvator, first textless interlude with strict rhythmic canon  549
27.2 Salinis, Jhesu salvator, second textless interlude, with two strict rhythmic canons  549
27.3 Salinis, Psallat chorus, first textless rhythmic sequential passage  550
28.1 Final systems of O virum omnimoda (modern notation)  559
29.1 Johannes Boen, Musica, example from Se grace/​Cum venerint, Mass of Tournai  580
29.2 Prosdocimus, Contrapunctus, example of musica ficta  584
29.3 Ciconia, Venecie mundi splendor, bb. 85–​end (modern notation)  587
29.4 Ciconia, O felix templum jubila, bb. 1–​27 (modern notation)  591
29.5 Ciconia, O felix templum jubila, contrapuntal reduction of bb. 1–​27
(modern notation)  592
29.6 Ciconia, O felix templum jubila, bb. 47–​62 (modern notation)  595
29.7 Ciconia, O Padua (modern notation)  596
29.8 Ciconia, O Padua, bb. 9–​10, showing the contrapuntal reduction of each
upper voice with the tenor (modern notation)  599
31.1 Plausu querulo, transcribed by Richard Dudas
31.2 Tenor of Plausu querulo  651
 List of Sound Clips

These can be downloaded individually or in bulk; see p. xv for instructions.

9.1.mp3 Machaut Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1)

9.2.mp3 Chant segment (Ex. 9.2a)
9.3.mp3 Structure of the color (Ex. 9.2b)
9.4.mp3 Rhythmicised tenor (Ex. 9.2d and 9.2e)
9.5.mp3 Color and talea (Ex. 9.2f)
9.6.mp3 Tenor of Motet 4, marking color and talea (Ex. 9.3)
9.7.mp3 Tenor of Motet 16, beginning (Ex. 9.4)
9.8.mp3 Chant tenor of Tribum/​Quoniam (Ex. 9.5)
9.9.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, tr B18–​B19, B33–​B34; mo B16–​B20, B31–​B35)
9.10.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, tr B63–​B65, B77–​B79; mo B65–​B67, B84–​B86; tr B51–​B54,
B92–​B95)
9.11.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, mo B17–​B21, B137–​B140)
9.12.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, tr B25–​B32.1)
9.13.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, tr and mo, B25–​B32.1)
9.14.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, tr, mo, tenor, B25–​B32.1)
9.15.mp3 6/​3–​8/​5 cadences (Ex. 9.6a and 9.6b)
9.16.mp3 10/​6–​12/​8 cadences (Ex. 9.6c)
9.17.mp3 Partial cadences, B24–​B25, B123–​B124 (Ex. 9.7)
9.18.mp3 Simple cadence form (Ex. 9.8a)
9.19.mp3 Displaced cadence, B47–​B49 simplified (Ex. 9.8b)
9.20.mp3 Displaced cadences, B112–​B115 (Ex. 9.9a–​9.9d)
9.21.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, B46–​B83)
9.22.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, mo alone, B91–​B115)
9.23.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, motetus progressions: B100–​B102, B111–​B114.1)
9.24.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, a3, B91–​B115)
9.25.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, tr B6–​B9)
9.26.mp3 Motet 9 (Ex. 9.1, mo B109–​B111)
9.27.mp3 Openings of Motets 9 and 15 (Ex. 9.11)
13.1.mp3 Machaut Motet 18, hocket section, b. 97–​end, triplum
13.2.mp3 Machaut Motet 18, hocket section, b. 97–​end, motetus
13.3.mp3 Machaut Motet 18, hocket section, b. 97–​end, all three parts
 List of Manuscripts

Items not in bold are either manuscripts cited without a siglum or names for groups
of fragments or parts of a manuscript. Most archival documents are footnoted but not
listed here.

Aachen Aachen, Stadtbibliothek Aachen, MS Beis E14

Ao Aosta, Seminario Maggiore, MS 15 (olim A 1o D 19)
Apt Apt, Basilique Sainte-​Anne, Trésor, MS 16bis
Arras983 Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 983 (766), flyleaf
Autun152 Autun, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 152
Bamberg Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Lit. 115
Barc853 Barcelona, Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya (olim Central), MS 853c/​d
(BarcA, BarcE)
Barc971 Barcelona, Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya, MS 971 (BarcC)
Basel71 Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität, MS F.IX.71 (formerly
Musikfragment I)
Basel72 Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität, MS N.I.6 Nr 72 (formerly
Musikfragment II)
Belfast Belfast, Queen’s University Library, MS 1-​21-​1
Ber49 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS lat 2o 49
Ber190 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS
germ. 8° 280
Bergamo589 Bergamo, Civica Biblioteca ‘Angelo Mai’, MS MA 589 (Delta VIII.26)
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS Mus. theor. 1325
Bern Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS A 471 (flyleaves of A 421)1
Bologna See also Q1, Q15
Boverio Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS T.III.2
BOZ1 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, BOZ 61, treatise 1
BOZ2 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, BOZ 61, treatise 2
BOZ3 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, BOZ 61, treatise 3
Brescia5 Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana, MS C.VI.5
Brive, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1
Brno Brno, Archiv města Brna (City of Brno Archive), Fond V 2, Svatojakubská
knihovna, 94/​106, rear pastedown
Brussels758 Brussels, Archives du Royaume, Archives Ecclésiastiques, MS 758
Brussels5170 Brussels, Algemeen Rijksarchief, Fonds Sint-​Goedele, MS 5170 (olim 758)
Br19606 Brussels, KBR, MS 19606
Bu2216 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 2216
Bud298 Budapest, Egyetemi Könyvtár, MS U.Fr.l.m. 298

1 Also known as MS A 421. The ambiguity arose from an original cataloguing error, but it is now standard

to refer to the host MS as A 421, the music fragments in its binding as A 471, following Steiger, Das Berner
Chansonnier-​Fragment.
xxviii List of Manuscripts

Cambridge See also Pepys

Cambridge, MA See Houghton
Canberra Canberra, National Library of Australia, Nan Kivell Calligraphy
Collection, MS 4052/​2/​1 (part of RC)
Ca29 Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’agglomération, Médiathèque
municipale, Bibliothèque municipale), MS 29
Ca165 Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’agglomération, Médiathèque
municipale, Bibliothèque municipale), Inc. B 165
Ca1328 Cambrai, Le Labo (olim Médiathèque d’agglomération, Médiathèque
municipale, Bibliothèque municipale) MS B 1328
Cant128/​6 Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, CCA-​DCc/​AddMS/​128/​6 (olim CANT 3)
Ce70 Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 70
Ce300 Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 300
Chantilly (or Ch) Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de Chantilly, MS 564 (olim 1047)
Chicago See Newberry
Civ57 Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Cod. LVII
Civ98 Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Cod. XCVIII
Columbia New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Goff
T172 (previously noted as Butler Library, and on Digital Scriptorium as
Incunable T-​172) (part of RC)
Cop17a Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Fragm. 17a, inv. 2400–​2409
Cortona1 Cortona, Archivio storico del Comune, Frammento Musicali Medioevale
(uno foglio) ‘Cortona 1’
Cortona2 Cortona, Archivio storico del Comune, Frammento Musicali Medioevale
(due foglia) ‘Cortona 2’
Cu710 Cambridge, University Library, Add. MS 710 (the Dublin Troper)
Cu4435 Cambridge, University Library, Add. MS 4435 (16) (part of RC)
Cu5963 Cambridge, University Library, Add. MS 5963 (8) (part of RC)
Cyprus Turin, Biblioteca nazionale universitaria, MS J.II.9 (TuB)
Darmstadt521 Darmstadt, Hessische Landes-​und Hochschulbibliothek, MS MS 521
Darmstadt3471 Darmstadt, Hessische Landes-​und Hochschulbibliothek, MS MS 3471
Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek MS 705
Dor Dorchester, Dorset History Centre (D.H.C.), D-​FSI, acc.10959
Douai74 Douai, Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-​Valmore, MS 1105/​3
fragment 74.4/​1
Durham20 Durham, Chapter Library, MS C I 20
Egerton London, British Library, Egerton MS 3307
Egidi Montefiore dell’Aso, Biblioteca-​Archivio di Francesco Egidi (lost)
Esc10 Escorial, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial, Biblioteca y
Archivo de Música, MS O.II.10
Fauvel This refers to the interpolated version of the Roman de Fauvel in Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds fr. 146. Paris146 includes other
contents of the volume
Faenza Faenza, Biblioteca comunale, MS 117
Ferrell(Vg) Private Collection of James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell, Kansas City, United
States, MS 1 (Machaut manuscript, formerly Vogüé, Wildenstein)
Fleischer Rochester, New York, Sibley Music Library, Fleischer Fragment 44
Florence See also Redi71, SL2211
Florence29 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Pluteus 29.1
Fountains London, British Library, Add. MS 40011B
 List of Manuscripts xxix

Fp 26 Florence, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, MS Panciatichiano 26

Franus Hradec Králové, Muzeum východních Čech (Regional Museum, Library),
MS II A 6 (Franus Cantional)
Fribourg2 Fribourg, Bibliothèque des Cordeliers, MS 2
Fribourg260 Fribourg, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, MS Z 260
Gdańsk2315 Danzig, Stadtbibliothek, MS 2315, lost since Second World War
Ghent3360 Ghent, Rijksarchief, MS 3360
GR219 Grottaferrata, Biblioteca del Monumento Nazionale (olim Biblioteca
dell’Abbazia di S. Nilo (Badia Greca)), Kript.Lat. 219 (olim 374 or E.β.XVI)
GR224 Grottaferrata, Biblioteca del Monumento Nazionale, Kript. Lat. 224, olim
Collocazione provvisoria 197 [belongs with Dartmouth College, MS
002387 (olim Santa Barbara, collection of Denis Stevens)]
GRss Grottaferrata, Biblioteca del Monumento Nazionale, Grottaferrata
fragment s.s.
Houghton122 Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, fMS Typ 122
Innsbruck See WolkB
Ipswich See Yox
Ivrea Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare, MS 115
Jena105 Jena, Thüringer Universitäts-​und Landesbibliothek, MS Buder 4o 105
Karlsruhe82 Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Codex Lichtenthal 82, flyleaf
Kassel1 Kassel, Universitätsbibliothek Kassel; Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche
Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel, 4° Ms. med. 1
Koblenz701 Koblenz, Landeshauptarchiv, Best. 701 Nr. 243
Kras See Warsaw8054
Kremsmünster149 Kremsmünster, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 149
Lausanne8076 Lausanne, Bibliothèque et Archives de la Ville, fonds C 09 (service de la
culture), carton 8076
Leiden342A Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Fragment L.T.K. 342A
Leiden2515 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Fragment B.P.L. 2515
Leiden2720 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Fragment B.P.L. 2720
Leipzig223 Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek der Karl-​Marx Universität, Fragm lat. 223a
(taken from D-​LEu MS 1440)
Leipzig431 Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek der Karl-​Marx Universität, Fragm lat. 431
Lo4 London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius E. IV
Lo6 London, British Library, Royal MS 12 C VI
Lo12 London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius D. XII
Lo13 London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. XIII
Lo24 London, British Library, Cotton MS Titus D. XXIV
Lo36 London, British Library, Cotton MS Titus A. XXXVI
Lo53 London, British Library, Harley MS 53
Lo565 London, British Library, Harley MS 565
Lo763 London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 763
Lo861 London, British Library, Harley MS 861
Lo978 London, British Library, Harley MS 978
Lo1776 London, British Library, Sloane MS 1776
Lo4909 London, British Library, Add. MS 4909
Lo24198 London, British Library, Add. MS 24198
Lo29987 London, British Library, Add. MS 29987
Lo36579 London, British Library, Add. MS 36579
Lo40725 London, British Library, Add. MS 40725
xxx List of Manuscripts

Lo41667 London, British Library, Add. MS 41667

Lo54324 London, British Library, Add. MS 54324
Lo62132A London, British Library, Add. MS 62132A
London see also Egerton, Fountains, McV, OH, Robertsbridge, V&A
LoTNA London, The National Archives, E.163/​22/​1/​24
Lwa12185 London, Westminster Abbey, MS 12185
Lwa33327 London, Westminster Abbey, MS 33327
Lucca184 Lucca, Archivio di Stato, MS 184 (including 2 folios discovered in 1988
and 4 folios discovered in 1998) (also known, with Perugia3065, as the
Mancini codex)
MachautA Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 1584
MachautB Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 1585
MachautC Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 1586
MachautE Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 9221
MachautG Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 22546
Maidstone Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, PRC 50/​5 (olim PRC 49/​20)
Mainz, Stadtbibliothek, MS II 375
Mancini Codex See Lucca184 and Perugia3065
McV London, British Library, Add. MS 41667 (the McVeagh fragment)
Melk391 Melk, Benediktinerstift, Stiftsbibliothek MS 391
Melk950 Melk, Benediktinerstift, Stiftsbibliothek MS 950
Michaelbeuren10 Michaelbeuren, Stiftsbibliothek, Man. Cart. 10
Mo Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section médecine, H 196
ModA Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, MS α.M.5.24 (formerly lat. 568)
ModB Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, MS α.X.I.11 (formerly lat. 471)
Montefiore See Egidi
Montefortino Archivio di Stato Ascoli Piceno, Notarile di Montefortino, vol. 142
Morgan396 New York, Morgan Library, MS M.396
Morgan978 New York, Morgan Library, MS M.978
Mu716 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 716
Mu3223 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS 3223
Mu3224 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS 3224
Munich 3232a See MuEm
Mu15611 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 15611
Mu29775 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 29775/​10 (formerly Clm 5362
Kasten D IV and [31])
MuEm Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS clm 14274 (formerly mus. MS
3232a) (Codex St Emmeram)
New York See Columbia, Morgan396, Morgan978
Newberry Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 54.1
Norwich6 Norwich, Cathedral Library, T6
Nuremberg9, 9a Nuremberg, Stadtbibliothek, Fragments lat. 9 and lat. 9a (originally from
binding Cent. V 61, and Nuremberg 25)
OH London, British Library, Add. MS 57950 (Old Hall)
Ox7 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Mus. 7
Ox16 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. ital. 16
Ox27 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 27
Ox31 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. b. 3l (part of RC)
Ox32 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Don. b. 32 (part of RC)
Ox42 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. e. 42 (Missale Bugallense,
Codex Lowe)
 List of Manuscripts xxxi

Ox81 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 81

Ox112 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Class. lat. 112
Ox213 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. misc. 213
Ox229 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Pat. Lat. 229 (PadA)
Ox271* Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 271*
Ox308 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308
OxAS56 Oxford, All Souls College, MS 56
OxC118 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 118
OxM267 Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 267
OxNC362 Oxford, New College, MS 362
OxS26 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B26
OxU192 Oxford, Bodleian Library, University College MS 192
Pad14 Padua, Archivio di Stato, S. Giustina, catastico VII, busta 14
Pad658 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 658 (PadC)
Pad675 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 675 (PadD)
Pad684 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 684 (PadA)
Pad1106 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1106 (PadD)
Pad1115 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1115 (PadB)
Pad1225 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1225 (PadD)
Pad1283 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1283 (PadD)
Pad1475 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1475(PadA)
PadA =​ Ox229, Pad684, Pad1475
PadB =​ Pad1115
PadC =​ Pad658
PadD =​ Pad675, Pad1106, Pad1225, Pad1283
Paris146 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 146; see also Fauvel
Paris196 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 196
Paris279 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 279
Paris568 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. it. 568 (Pit)
Paris571 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 571
Paris837 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 837
Paris844 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 844 (trouvère MS M;
chansonnier du roi, from Artois)
Paris934 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 934
Paris2195 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. fr. 2195
Paris2444 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. 2444
Paris3343 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. lat. 3343
Paris4917 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 4917
Paris11411 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. lat. 11411
Paris12044 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. lat. 12044
Paris14741 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, f. lat. 14741
Paris22069 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 22069
Paris See also Fauvel, Machaut, Pic, Reina, Trém
Pepys1594 Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepysian Library, MS 1594
Perugia2 Perugia, Biblioteca Sala del Dottorato dell’Università degli Studi, Inc. 2 (olim
Cas. 3, Incunabolo inv. 15755 N.F.), ‘Cialini fragment’. (‘Cas. 3’ was the old
location of the Incunabolo, even if Brumana-​Ciliberti in their book used the
inventory number (15755 N.F.). The fragments are now held together with
the incunabulum—​though detached—​with the new shelfmark “Inc. 2”)
Perugia3065 Perugia, Biblioteca comunale “Augusta”, MS 3065 (with Lucca184 forms
of the Mancini Codex, ManP)
xxxii List of Manuscripts

Philadelphia15 Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, MS 15

Philadelphia614 Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, MS 614
Philadelphia658 Philadelphia, Free Library, MS Lewis T658 (olim T 489b)
Pic Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection de Picardie 67, f. 67,
in black and white on Gallica at https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv​1b10​
0339​04t/​f211.item and https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv​1b10​0339​04t/​
f212.item
Pra9 Prague, Státni knihovna CSSR-​Universitní knihovna, XI E 9
Pra103 Prague, Archiv Pražského Hradu, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapituly,
MS M.CIII
Princeton103 Princeton, University Library, MS 103
Q1 Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, MS
Q.1 (olim Cod. 12)
Q15 Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna, MS
Q.15 (olim Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, MS Q.15; olim Liceo
Musicale 37)
RC Eighteen fragments from a dismantled royal choirbook. See EECM 62
for description, inventory and facsimiles; an abbreviated inventory is
in Table 25.1. The manuscripts involved are: Canberra; Columbia;
Cu4435; Cu5963; Ox31; Ox32; OxM267; OxU192; Tallinn; V&A
Redi71 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Redi 71
Reina Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 6771 (codex Reina)
Robertsbridge London, British Library, Add. MS 28550
Rochester See Fleischer
Rostock Rostock, Universitätsbibliothek, MS. Phil.100/​2 (Rostock Liederhandschrift,
compiled by Rostock students between 1465 and 1487), http://​ros​dok.uni-​
rost​ock.de/​reso​lve/​id/​ros​dok_​docu​ment​_​000​0000​269
San Marino See SM19914
SanGiorgio Venice, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, frammento musicale
(currently lost)
Seville25 Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS 5-​2-​25
Siena30 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS L.V.30
Siena36 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS L.V.36
SienaRavi3 Siena, Archivio di Stato, Fondo Vicariati, Vicariato di Gavoranno, registro
Ravi 3 (1568–​69)
SL2211 Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, MS 2211
SM19914 San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, HM 19914
Solsona109 Solsona, Arxiu Diocesi, MS 109
Speciálník Hradec Králové, Muzeum východních Čech (Regional Museum, Library),
MS Hr-​7 (II A 7) (Codex Speciálník)
Sq Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Cod. Mediceo Palatino 87
St Petersburg See Warsaw378
Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS V.u.22
Stras Strasbourg, Bibliothèque municipale (olim Bibliothèque de la Ville), MS
222 C.22 (destroyed 1871); see Coussemaker, Le Manuscrit musical M 222
C 22 for partial transcription
Tallinn Tallinn, Estonian Theatre and Music Museum (Tallinn, Eesti Teatri-​ja
Muusikamuuseum) ETMM M8: 2/​1–​1 (part of RC)
Tarragona1 Tarragona, Archivo Histórico Archidiocesano, Fragment 1
Tarragona2 Tarragona, Archivo Histórico Archidiocesano, Fragment 2
 List of Manuscripts xxxiii

Todi Todi, Biblioteca comunale Lorenzo Leoni, Fondo Congregazione di

Carità Istituto dei Sartori
Toul94 Toulouse, Bibliothèque d’Études et du Patrimoine (olim Bibliothèque
municipale), MS 94
Tourn27 Tournai, Chapitre de la Cathédrale, MS A 27 (olim 476)
Trém Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. MS 23190 (olim
Serrant, Duchesse de la Trémoïlle)
Trent Trent codices
TR Refers to the first part of Tr87 and the second part of Tr92
Tr87 Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, Monumenti e Collezioni Provinciali
(olim Museo Provinciale d’Arte), MS 1374 (olim 87)
Tr90 Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, Monumenti e Collezioni Provinciali
(olim Museo Provinciale d’Arte), MS 1377 (olim 90)
Tr92 Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, Monumenti e Collezioni Provinciali
(olim Museo Provinciale d’Arte), MS 1379 (olim 92)
Tr93 Biblioteca Capitolare/Museo Diocesano di Trento, MS BL [‘Trent 93’]
Troyes1397 Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1397
Troyes1949 Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1949
Turin10 Turin, Archivio di Stato, J.b.IX.10
Turin See also Cyprus
Utrecht37 Utrecht, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS 6 E 37 (Cat. 1846), part I
V&A London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings Study Room,
Level E, Case I, shelf 197, box 5, Circ. 526–​1923 (part of RC)
Vat307 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 307
Vat1260 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1260
Vat5321 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 5321
Venice24 Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, MS lat. app. cl. VIII/​24 (coll. 3434)
Venice97 Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, Lat. CI. XII.97 [4125])
Venice145 Venice, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, MS ital. IX,145 (coll. 7554)
Venice See also SanGiorgio
Vg See Ferrell(Vg)
Vienna123a Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Fragm 123a
Vienna661 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Fragm. 661
Vienna922 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Fragm. 922
Vienna2856 Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2856
Vienna3244 Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 3244
Vienna4195 Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 4195
Vienna5094 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 5094
Vienna See also WolkA
W1 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-​August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst.
Warsaw378 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, MS Lat. F. I. 378 (olim St Petersburg,
Imperatorskaia Publichnaia biblioteka (Imperial Public Library), Lat. F. I.
378). Manuscript lost; known through photographs in Poznań
Warsaw8054 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, MS III. 8054 (olim Biblioteka
Świdzińskich, then Biblioteka Krasiński 52)
Warsaw See also BOZ
Washington1400 Washington, Library of Congress, MS M2.1 C6 1400 Case
WashingtonJ6 Washington, Library of Congress, MS ML171 . J6 Case
WolkA Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2777 (WolkensteinA)
WolkB Innsbruck, Universitätsbibliothek, MS without shelfmark (WolkensteinB)
xxxiv List of Manuscripts

Worcester160 Worcester Cathedral, MS F.160 (olim 1247)

Wrocław16 Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, MS IV Q 16
Wrocław411 Wrocław, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, MS I Q 411, olim Ak1955/​KN 195
Würz Würzburg, Franziskanerkloster, MS I 10
YorkN3 York Minster, MS xvi.N.3
Yox Ipswich, Suffolk Record Office, HA30: 50/​22/​13.15
 Other Abbreviations

AfMw Archiv für Musikwissenschaft

AH Analecta Hymnica
alt. alteration
AM Acta musicologica
AMS American Musicological Society
AAV Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (formerly Archivio Segreto Vaticano, ASV)
AS Antiphonale Sarisburiense, ed. Walter H. Frere, Plainsong and Mediaeval
Music Society (London, 1901–​25)
B breve
b bar
BJHM Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France
C Cantus, color or clef, depending on context: (CI =​Cantus I; C1 =​color or clef)
CAO Corpus Antiphonalium Officii, ed. René-​Jean Hesbert and René Prévost
(Rome, 1963–​79)
CCR Calendar of Close Rolls
CEKM Corpus of Early Keyboard Music (The American Institute of Musicology)
CM Current Musicology
CMM Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae (The American Institute of Musicology)
1/​2 Guillaume Dufay, Motetti [isorithmici dicti], ed. Guillaume De Van, Opera
Omnia, 2, CMM 1 (Rome, 1948) re-​edited with current numbering as:
1/​1 Guillaume Dufay, Motetti, ed. Heinrich Besseler, Opera Omnia, CMM 1
(Rome, 1966)
1/​6 Guillaume Dufay, Cantiones, revised ed. David Fallows, Opera Omnia,
6, CMM 1 (n.p., 1995) (commentary volume is Fallows, The Songs of
Guillaume Dufay)
8/​3 The Collected Works of Laurentius Masii de Florentia, Donatus de
Florentia, Rosso da Collegrano, and Nine Anonymous Pieces, ed. Nino Pirrotta,
CMM 8/​3 (n.p., 1962)
11/​1–​7 Early Fifteenth-​Century Music, ed. Gilbert Reaney, 8 vols., CMM 11
(n.p. and Neuhausen, 1955–​83). Vol. 1 (1955), Vol. 2 (1959), Vol. 3 (1966),
Vol. 7 (1983)
21 The Cypriot-​French Repertory of the Manuscript Torino, Biblioteca
Nazionale, J.II.9, ed. Richard H. Hoppin, 4 vols., CMM 21 (Rome, 1960–​3)
29 Fourteenth-​Century Mass Music in France, ed. Hanna Stäblein-​Harder,
CMM 29 (Rome, 1962)
35/​1–​2Johannes Brassart, Opera Omnia, ed. Keith E. Mixter, 2 vols., CMM 35
(n.p., 1965).
39 The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, Musée Condé, 564 (olim 1047) and
Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24 (olim lat. 568), ed. Ursula Günther,
CMM 39 (n.p., 1965)
46/​1–​3 The Old Hall Manuscript, ed. Andrew Hughes and Margaret Bent,
3 vols., CMM 46 (n.p., 1969)
xxxvi Other Abbreviations

50/​1 Leonel Power, Complete Works, ed. Charles Hamm, CMM 50 (n.p., 1969)
53/​1–​3 French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Willi Apel,
3 vols., CMM 53 (n.p., 1970–​72)
col. coloration
CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls
CS Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series, ed. Edmond de Coussemaker,
4 vols. (Paris, 1864–​76; repr. Hildesheim, 1963)
CSM Corpus Scriptorum de Musica (The American Institute of Musicology)
5 Anon., Notitia del valore delle note del canto misurato, ed. Armen
Carapetyan, CSM 5 (n.p., 1957)
8 Philippe de Vitry, Ars nova, ed. Gilbert Reaney, André Gilles and Jean
Maillard, CSM 8 (n.p., 1964)
13 Anonymous, De musica mensurabili (ca. 1380), ed. Cecily Sweeney 1971.
Anonymous, De semibrevibus caudatis (ca. 1400), ed. André Gilles and Cecily
Sweeney, CSM 13 (n.p., 1971)
Ct Contratenor
Curtis–​Wathey Gareth Curtis and Andrew Wathey, ‘Fifteenth-​Century English Liturgical
Music: A List of the Surviving Repertory’, Royal Musical Association Research
Chronicle, 27 (1994), 1–​69. Revised version by James Cook and Peter Wright
(2017) available at http://​www.eecm.ac.uk/​media/​sites/​resea​rchw​ebsi​tes/​
eecm/​Revi​sed%20Cur​tis-​Wat​hey%20h​andl​ist%20(2017).pdf)
DIAMM Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music; https://​www.diamm.ac.uk/​
DSB Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. G. Gillespie, 16 vols. (New York,
1970–​81)
EECM Early English Church Music
22 Fifteenth-​Century Liturgical Music, II: Four Anonymous Masses, ed.
Margaret Bent, EECM 22 (London, 1979)
42 Fifteenth-​Century Liturgical Music, IV: Early Masses and Mass Pairs, ed.
Gareth Curtis, EECM 42 (London, 2001)
55 Fifteenth-​Century Liturgical Music, VIII: Settings of the Gloria and Credo,
ed. Peter Wright, EECM 55 (London, 2013)
62 English Fifteenth-​Century Polyphonic Fragments: A Facsimile Edition, ed.
Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, EECM 62 (London, 2022)
EM Early Music
EMH Early Music History
GR Graduale Sacrosanctae Romanae Ecclesiae de tempore et de sanctis (Graduale
Romanum) (Tournai, 1974)
GS Graduale Sarisburiense, ed. Walter Howard Frere (London, 1894; repr.
Farnborough, 1966)
GS Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra Potissimum, ed. Martin Gerbert,
3 vols. (Sankt Blasien, 1784; repr. Hildesheim, 1963)
HMT Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie (Wiesbaden, 1971–​2006).
JAF Journal of the Alamire Foundation
JAMS Journal of the American Musicological Society
JM Journal of Musicology
JMT Journal of Music Theory
lig. ligature
L long
LML Lexikon Musicum Latinum Medii Aevi =​Wörterbuch der lateinischen
Musikterminologie des Mittelalters bis zum Ausgang des 15.
 Other Abbreviations xxxvii

Jahrhunderts =​Dictionary of Medieval Latin Musical Terminology to the End

of the 15th Century, ed. Michael Bernhard, Bernhold Schmid, and Calvin
M. Bower (Munich, 1992–​2016)
LU Liber usualis (Tournai, 1959)
M minim
Mo motetus
M&L Music & Letters
MB Musica Britannica
8 John Dunstable, Complete Works, ed. Manfred Bukofzer, MB 8
(London, 1953)
8rev John Dunstable, Complete Works, ed. Manfred Bukofzer, rev. edn. by
Margaret Bent, Ian Bent, and Brian Trowell, MB 8rev (London, 1970)
MD Musica disciplina
MGG1 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume (Kassel, 1949–​86)
MGG2 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd edn., ed. Laurenz Lütteken
(Kassel, 1994–​2008)
MMMA Monumenta monodica medii aevi (Kassel, 1956–​)
mo Motetus
MQ The Musical Quarterly
MR Music Review
MT The Musical Times
Mx maxima
NDB Neue Deutsche Biographie, 4 (Berlin, 1957)
NG1 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie
(London, 1980)
NG2 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn., ed. Stanley Sadie
and John Tyrrell (London, 2001)
PM Processionale monasticum
PMFC Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century
1 The Roman de Fauvel; the Works of Philippe de Vitry; French Cycles of the
Ordinarium Missae, ed. Leo Schrade, PMFC 1 (Monaco, 1956)
2–​3 The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Leo Schrade, PMFC 2–​3
(Monaco, 1974)
5 Motets of French Provenance, ed. Frank Ll. Harrison, PMFC 5
(Monaco, 1965)
12 Italian Sacred Music, ed. Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, PMFC 12
(Monaco, 1976)
13 Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music, ed. Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto
Gallo, PMFC 13 (Monaco, 1987)
15 Motets of English Provenance, ed. Frank L1. Harrison; texts ed. and trans.
Peter Lefferts, PMFC 15 (Paris and Monaco, 1980)
16–​17 English Music for Mass and Offices, ed. Ernest H. Sanders, Frank Ll.
Harrison, and Peter M. Lefferts, 2 vols., PMFC 16–​17 (Paris and Monaco,
1983–​86)
23A, 23B French Sacred Music, ed. Giulio Cattin and Francesco Facchin,
2 vols., PMFC 23A, 23B (Monaco, 1991)
24 The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark,
PMFC 24 (Paris and Monaco, 1984–​85)
PMM Plainsong and Medieval Music
p.mus. pieces in Fauvel as numbered in Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel
xxxviii Other Abbreviations

PRMA Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association

Qu Quadruplum
RBM Revue belge de musicologie
RC Royal Choirbook
RIM Rivista italiana di musicologia
RISM Repertoire international des sources musicales
RM Revista de musicología
RMA Royal Musical Association
S semibreve
SaM Il saggiatore musicale
SBM Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft
SIMG Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft
SMed Studi medievali
SMus Studi musicali
ST Solus tenor
TKVNM Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis
T Tenor (or talea, depending on context)
TML Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum; http://​www.chmtl.indi​ana.edu/​tml/​
tr triplum
TVNM Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis
WA Antiphonaire monastique, XIIIe siècle: Codex F. 160 de la bibliothèque de la
Cathédrale de Worcester, Paléographie musicale, 12 (Tournai, 1922)
 Introduction

The Preface acknowledges at least some of the many collegial debts I have incurred over
several decades. It also sets out the genesis and mechanical aspects of this book, whose
relationship to the companion website is explained on p. xv. The examples on the web-
site are mostly too large to be printed in the book, but form an essential part of the
chapters under which they are located on the website. Here I give an overview of the
contents of the book, and of what I see as some of its contributions. But first a few words
on the origins and definitions of the motet.

What was a Motet?

Just as generic terms such as symphony, concerto, fantasy and sonata have changed their
meanings over the centuries, so also ‘motet’. From the eighteenth century onwards the
term was understood mostly to denote a sacred choral work of a very different sort from
the genre that had its origins in the early thirteenth century. Jared C. Hartt’s A Critical
Companion to Medieval Motets covers many aspects of early motet composition; his
Introduction stresses their plural characters. Building on work by previous generations
of scholars, more than half of the contributions to that book focus on the thirteenth cen-
tury, some drawing attention to exceptional cases that do not fit well with our broader
narratives of the genre.1 I will not attempt to synthesise those narratives here. The pre-
sent book is mostly about motets in the fourteenth century, extending in some chapters
into the early fifteenth. It starts with some of the more advanced motets in the Roman
de Fauvel (Paris146). Rather than tracing continuities and disjunctions from earlier
repertories, the focus is largely on individual compositions, teasing out something of
the range of strategies employed to serve their uniqueness and interrelationships.
Definitions of the motet from this period point to a multi-​voice composition to
which verbal texts are fundamental, as the name suggests (‘mot’ =​word). The famous
definition by Johannes de Grocheio (c. 1300) is explicitly polyphonic and polytextual
(‘Motetus vero est cantus ex pluribus compositus, habens plura dictamina’: a motet is a
song put together from several, having several texts), with a tenor which may or may not
be texted (‘quia quilibet debet habere dictamen et in aliquibus non, tenore excepto’).2
Even such a minimal definition as this is challenged by the existence of monophonic
motets without tenors (albeit a minority) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
They are perhaps implied in the ‘Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis’, now dated after

1 For some of these exceptional cases see Bradley, ‘Origins and Interactions’.
2 Besseler’s dating c. 1300 was upheld by Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio’, 17, which I find more plausible
than the reversion to Ernst Rohloff ’s dating as c. 1275, in Johannes de Grocheio, Ars Musice, ed. Mews et al.,
10–​12, q.v. for bibliographical references to datings by earlier scholars. The definition quoted is on pp. 84–​85.
Grocheio here distinguishes the tenor from the ‘cantus’ parts; it is not always clear if the tenor is counted as
one of those plural texts.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0001
2 Introduction

1332: ‘Motteti sunt cantus applicati verbis . . . Fiunt etiam ad unum et ad plures cantus’
(motets are melodies applied to words. . . . They are made with one or more melodies).3
‘Cantus’ could of course apply to melodies added to a tenor, but no mention is made of
a tenor. The modern editors of this treatise understand it to mean monophonic motets,
but comment that none are transmitted, though they were acknowledged by Ludwig,
and more recently investigated by Judith Peraino, Elizabeth Eva Leach and Gaël Saint-​
Cricq.4 So what remains of the traditional definition of a motet? Given the plurality al-
ready apparent thirty years ago, I ventured that ‘ “A piece of music in several parts with
words” is as precise a definition of the motet as will serve from the thirteenth to the late
sixteenth century and beyond’.5 But given recent revisions and exceptions, all that re-
mains is ‘music with words’.
By contrast, a much higher bar for motet definition was set by Frank Ll. Harrison
for his editions in PMFC 5, thirty-​three complete fourteenth-​century motets of French
provenance from Paris146 and Ivrea and, a bit later, Chantilly.6 Fragmentary sources
considerably augment this number, and discoveries continue. In addition, of course,
there are the twenty-​three motets by Machaut, which form a very significant proportion
of the surviving French motets. Harrison required two differently texted upper parts,
a cantus firmus and, usually, isorhythm.7 Because fourteenth-​century French motets
were the first to be discovered, codified and edited, some of their normative criteria were
misfittingly applied to English and Italian motets, which survive in much more frag-
mentary form, and whose distinctiveness was recognised only decades later. In PMFC
15 (36 motets of English provenance), Harrison implicitly acknowledged that the strict
criteria he had set for French motets had to be applied more flexibly for England. He
nevertheless admitted Salve cleri speculum (PMFC 15, no. 11) to honourable status as a
motet, qualified by having chant paraphrase in the tenor, although only from section 2
onwards. But he excluded its generic companions, A solis and Hostis Herodes, likewise
voice-​exchange motets from the same manuscript, Ox81 (the Hatton MS), both with
chant paraphrase, not in the tenor, but at the beginning of the upper parts. These were
relegated to less prestigious categories in PMFC 16 (nos. 94–​95 and 96), thus applying
an artificial criterion to separate identically structured compositions.8
For motet definition we can also turn to instances of contemporary labelling and
classification. Fourteenth-​century manuscripts, indexes or lists which describe pieces
as motets cast the net wider than Harrison’s restrictive definition. The Paris146 index

3 See Ch. 26 and n. 44 for this passage and Elena Abramov-​van Rijk’s recent dating. Originally made known

in Debenedetti, ‘Un trattatello’, and more recently in an edition and translation by Burkard and Huck, ‘Voces
applicatae verbis’. This definition appears to invert the motet definition: ‘Ballade sunt verba applicata sonis’.
Burkard and Huck (p. 21) caution against treating this as a chronological claim for the order of words and
music in either case.
4 ‘Weder überliefert noch anderswo besprochen’; ibid., 12; but see Ludwig, Repertorium, i/​1, 305–​15.

Peraino, ‘Monophonic Motets’, explains how monophonic refrains and grafted monophonic melodies were
associated with the term ‘motet’ in the 13th c., and observes that scholars have not ‘stepped outside a principal
concern with polyphonic genres or questions of compositional procedure’ (pp. 644, 646). Among other recent
accounts of monophonic motets see Leach, ‘The Genre(s) of Medieval Motets’, and Saint-​Cricq, ‘Motets in
Chansonniers’.
5 Bent, ‘The Late-​medieval Motet’, 114.
6 Paris146 dates from the late 1310s, Ivrea has been dated between c. 1360 and 1390, Chantilly to the early

15th c. The Chantilly motets were also edited by Günther in CMM 39.
7 See Ch. 2 for a historiographical unpicking of this over-​widely used modern term.
8 For more on voice-​exchange motets, see Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus.
 Introduction 3

classifies motets as ‘motez a trebles et a tenures’, for three-​part motets, and ‘motez a
tenures sanz trebles’ for two-​part motets.9 With very few exceptions, thirteenth-​and
fourteenth-​century motets are named and indexed by their motetus parts, at the end
of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth by tripla.10 The Trém index is classified in
two columns as ‘motez’ and ‘balades et rondeaus’ respectively. Motets are indeed listed
by motetus parts, but that column also includes chaces and mass movements; I suggest
in Chapter 31 that the division may be practical rather than generic, separating long
pieces from shorter songs that could serve as page-​fillers. Motets are also labelled thus
in the table of contents of MachautA, and their sections so headed in the other Machaut
manuscripts.
We also have the authority of theorists who attach the term to titles of known motets.
After Franco, these include fourteenth-​century treatises attributed to Philippe de Vitry,
Johannes de Muris, Robertus de Handlo, John of Tewkesbury, Johannes Boen, Philippus
de Caserta, Theodoricus de Campo, Heinrich Eger von Kalkar, and many anonymous
authors. As in the preceding century, it is sometimes clear that a whole motet or a
specified voice-​part is being referred to, and sometimes the reference is just to the epony­
mous motetus voice.11
Moving into the fifteenth century, the thirteen motets in Chantilly are grouped to-
gether at the end and headed ‘Motes’ in the table of contents. OH also groups its motets
together, but they are not so labelled and there is no index. ModB is unique in having
a table of contents with musical incipits. The section headed ‘Hic incipiunt motteti’
includes the newer ‘song’ or cantilena motets (with a texted top part and accompanying
tenor and—​usually inessential—​contratenor, both usually untexted), as well as peri-
odically structured compositions with isorhythm.12 Q15 was originally planned with
sections devoted to mass movements (mostly paired) and to motets, though not so la-
belled.13 Cantilena motets are again grouped with periodic motets; the motet section
also includes Du Fay’s setting of Petrarch’s Vergene bella, classified by Heinrich Besseler

9 A similar classification occurs in the slightly earlier Lo978 (the Harley index): ‘Moteti cum una littera et

duplici nota’, ‘Moteti cum duplici littera’, ‘Moteti cum duplici nota’.
10 A few motets are already cited by triplum in treatises in the 14th c., including Orbis orbatus. The index

of MachautE of the 1390s lists the motets by triplum, that of the earlier MachautA mostly by motetus, except
that Motets 1 and 18 are exceptionally cited by triplum. Both indexes are analysed in Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’,
52–​82. The often-​cited Rex Karole (late 1370s) is never named other than by its triplum. The thirteen motets of
Chantilly are all listed by triplum except for Ida capillorum, the motetus, which is presented there and in Ivrea
as the triplum; see Ch. 31.
11 Motetus can refer to the whole composition: ‘In moteti tenore qui vocatur . . .’ (as in the tenor of the

motet called . . .) and similar formulations occur repeatedly in Vitry, Ars nova, Boen, Ars, and elsewhere. Or
it can refer just to the motetus voice: Jacobus Leodiensis, Speculum musicae, VII ch. 3: ‘Cum autem quis facit
discantum qui triplum vocatur, debet aspicere non solum ad voces tenoris, sed etiam moteti, ut concordet et
cum tenore similiter et cum moteto’ (Whoever who makes a discant called triplum should look not only at
the tenor notes, but also those of the motetus, in order that it may concord with both tenor and motetus). The
Lexikon Musicum Latinum (LML) accordingly defines motetus as (1) Genre of mensural music based on a
tenor and with different texts in individual voices; (2) Term that designates the voice of a motet immediately
adjacent to the tenor, giving supporting citations. For more on the term, see Hofmann, ‘Zur Entstehungs-​und
Frühgeschichte des Terminus Motette’.
12 For the distinction between classified indexes and lists of contents in Machaut, see Earp, ‘Scribal

Practice’, 52–​82. The index of MachautA is a prescriptive table of contents from which the manuscript made
some departures. The index of MachautE is a post facto table of contents. For a more general discussion, see
Bent, ‘Indexes’ and, more specifically, for Chantilly see Bent, ‘The Absent First Gathering’, also ‘The Trent 92
and Aosta Indexes’. For an Italian list of mostly non-​extant pieces, see Zimei, ‘Un Elenco veneto’ and Ch. 26.
13 See Bent, Q15. There appears originally to have been a section (subsequently removed) devoted to songs,

but songs were also added as page-​fillers late in the first stage of compilation.
4 Introduction

(CMM 1/​VI) as a song. By the time of Q15 and ModB, such groupings imply a broader
understanding of motets to embrace newer styles.
Gradually in the fifteenth century, these new song-​like kinds of motet came to the
fore.14 Simpler styles have been broadly related to humanist impulses, placing more em-
phasis on rhetorical communication and new approaches to the expression of semantic
meaning, though mostly now using existing and often liturgical texts, which sets them
apart from the predominance in the fourteenth century of texts newly composed in
close conjunction with their music. It may have been these new trends that partly in-
formed Tinctoris’s famous statement in the 1470s that only music of the last forty years
was worth hearing, though his writings address complex notational issues.15 The general
move towards simpler textures might be compared to the eighteenth-​century shift to the
style galant, insofar as that was a reaction against perceived contrapuntal complexity.
Major composers in the fifteenth century, however (including Du Fay and Dunstaple),
continued to cultivate both types of motet. The delight in puzzles, notational subtleties
and ingenious constructions continued alongside newer forms throughout the century
and beyond; the fascination with intellectual challenges was never lost.

Overview of This Book’s Contents

Most of the motets discussed here date from the fourteenth century. Some are from
the first two decades of the fifteenth century, notably English motets in Part V, some
Italian motets in Part VI, the Cyprus motets in Chapter 32, and the later papal motets
in Chapter 31. The book thus, by chance rather than design, somewhat complements
the thirteenth-​century concentration of Hartt’s Critical Companion.16 Datings of motets
are a continuing challenge. Recent scholarship has refined the dating of some of the
manuscripts containing (or treatises naming) them, thus changing termini ante quem
for their contents. Occasions for composition or performance have been proposed or
removed; suggested dedicatees have been revised, and competing narratives of stylistic
and notational development continue to play out. Several new datings of individual
works are proposed. Chronology is hampered by the fact that most compositions are
anonymous, and that few known composers, apart from Machaut and Vitry, have known
careers and death dates. A cluster of dates in the 1370s helps orientation: Machaut
died in 1377, which obviously provides a terminus for any late works not included in
manuscripts prepared earlier in his lifetime. The enormous repertory indexed in the
largely lost manuscript Trém must date mostly from before a 1376 inscription, though
later additions may extend a few years beyond that (Ch. 31). Not in Trém was the motet
Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis, dated c. 1375 by Günther, 1378 by Carolann Buff (see Ch. 27

14 The standard survey and classification of 15th-​c. motets is Cumming, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay,

who notes their amorphous character.

15 Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477), Prologue: ‘Et si visa auditaque referre liceat nonnulla vetusta

carmina ignotae auctoritatis quae apocrypha dicuntur in manibus aliquando habui, adeo inepte, adeo insulse
composita ut multo potius aures offendebant quam delectabant’ (I have had in my hands certain old anon-
ymous songs, called apocrypha, so stupidly and absurdly composed that they rather offended than pleased
the ear).
16 And an entire recent book has been devoted to the eighth fascicle of Mo: Bradley and Desmond,

The Montpellier Codex.

 Introduction 5

n. 8), which must in any case antedate the 1380 death of its dedicatee Charles V. It was
adjacent (in Basel72) to what appears to be a contrafact (Novum sidus) of the little-​
known Gaudeat et exultet (in Basel72), a motet which celebrates a French antipope and
must date from soon after 1378 (Chs. 30 and 26). The newest and most exciting addi-
tion to this cluster is a unique motet in Douai74, Ferre solet/​Anatheos, deciphered by
Manon Louviot. It is internally signed through an acrostic by the composer, Johannes
Vavassoris, and dated 1373.17 However, proposed datings for individual pieces can vary
by at least twenty years where such help is lacking.
The two chapters of Part I address various aspects of compositional technique that
underpin fourteenth-​century motets. Chapter 1 considers the often-​cited prescriptions
for motet composition traditionally attributed to ‘Egidius’ and proposes restoring the
treatise to anonymity. Also addressed are the phenomenon of middle-​voice tenors
with a lower motetus, the definition and terminology for introitus and cadentia, the
problem of non-​coincident or dissonant endings, and the status of lower parts. I have
dealt in other publications with questions of musical grammar, counterpoint, and the
roles of solus tenor and contratenor parts.18 The principles set out in those studies will
be alluded to but not repeated in detail here, though they underlie my compositional
assumptions.
Chapter 2 is an only slightly adapted version of a previously published paper on the
history and limitations of the modern term isorhythm. A preamble to the chapter notes
recent work by Lawrence Earp and Anna Zayaruznaya. I suggest that the term has been
misapplied in ways that distort the historiography of the motet and imply more uni-
formity than is justified by the rich variety of techniques and strategies encountered.
Many chapters in this book (some originally published decades ago but to varying
degrees rewritten) draw attention to some of these strategies, constructional, nota-
tional, and particularly the role of text and music together in shaping each motet as an
individual conception, some of these in ways little noticed previously.
The early chapters in Part II (the Marigny motets, beyond Fauvel, and Vitry) are
adapted from previously published articles, reordered and now amplified with unpub-
lished material: Chapter 3, ‘Fauvel and Marigny’ (1998); Chapter 4, ‘Tribum’ (1997),
here with added material on Garrit gallus/​In nova; and Chapter 5, Aman/​Heu, my con-
tribution to the joint article with Kevin Brownlee, ‘Icarus, Phaeton, Haman’ (2019).
Chapter 6 on Floret/​Florens has been added, partly moved from ‘Fauvel and Marigny’;
also new are Chapter 7, with observations on related manuscripts, and on motets by or
perhaps by Vitry, and Chapter 8 on the intimate relationship of words and music in his
Vos/​Gratissima.
The chapters of Part III deal with individual motets by Machaut and address var-
ious aspects and audiences. Chapter 9, on Motet 9 (Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris
feritas/​Fera pessima), was written in 2003 with pedagogical intent and is accompanied
by sound clips accessible on the companion website. It suggests a number of hitherto

17 Presented in a seminar at All Souls College on 20 Nov. 2020. See Louviot, ‘Uncovering the Douai

Fragment’.
18 Bent, Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta (2002) includes previously published articles. See

ch. 8 on the Solus tenor, and especially the Introduction with updating commentaries. Subsequent relevant
publications include ‘The Grammar of Early Music’ (1989); ‘Naming of Parts: Notes on the Contratenor’
(2008); and ‘Reading, Memory, Listening, Improvisation’ (2014).
6 Introduction

unremarked or little-​remarked directions and opportunities for motet analysis, some of

which have since been extended by others. Chapter 10 on M15 (Amours qui a le pouoir/​
Faus Samblant m’a deceü/​Vidi dominum) is a revised version of a 1991 paper twinned
with one by Kevin Brownlee (‘Machaut’s Motet 15’), part of our otherwise largely un-
published collaboration (in seminars) on some of Machaut’s French-​texted motets.
This collaboration also included Motet 10 (Hareu! hareu! le feu/​Helas! ou sera pris
confors/​Obediens usque ad mortem), on which his contribution on the texts appeared
as Brownlee, ‘Fire, Desire, Duration, Death’, mine not until 2018 as ‘Machaut’s Motet
10’, and here Chapter 12. Chapter 13 addresses issues of notation and dating in Motet
18 (Bone pastor Guillerme/​Bone pastor qui pastores/​Bone pastor, extracted and ex-
panded from Bent, ‘Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9’), with a new postscript on
the tenor of Motet 2 (Tous corps qui de bien amer/​ De souspirant cuer dolent me pleing/​
Suspiro). Chapter 14, on Motets 4 (De Bon Espoir/​Puis que la douce/​Speravi) and 8 (Qui
es promesses de Fortune/​ Ha! Fortune, trop suis mis/​Et non est qui adjuvet), is previously
unpublished but was delivered as lectures together with Brownlee’s comments on the
texts, which were summarised in his ‘Textual Polyphony in Machaut’s Motets 8 and 4’.
These discussions were also directed towards an interdisciplinary audience and should
be considered together with, and in some cases updated by, more recent work by others
on these motets. Chapter 11 is not about a motet but a mass movement, the Gloria of
Machaut’s Mass, raising questions of compositional and contrapuntal priority that are
also relevant to motet composition.
The chapters of Part IV (Musicorum collegium: the Musician Motets) are hith-
erto unpublished, though much of the material has been presented in lectures and
seminars from the 1980s onwards, most recently in a draft circulated to participants
in the International Symposium on Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Music,
Novacella 2017. As elsewhere, these chapters are designed to be read in conjunction
with the musical transcriptions on the companion website, in addition to examples
in the printed book. Early work on this repertory received stimulus from dialogue
and joint presentations with David Howlett, and I am grateful for his insights on the
verbal texts. Plans for joint publication stalled when our views diverged on the extent
to which his ingenious letter countings, anagrams and golden sections should domi-
nate the discussion. I hope he will publish his work on these texts separately. Readers
of my earlier articles may notice that in some revisions in Parts II and III I now place
less emphasis on irrational proportions such as the golden section, except where the
counted components are objectively (structurally) separated, as for example, in Part IV,
between the two texts of Musicorum discussed in Chapter 18, or the musical division
between the color statements of Arta/​Musicus in Chapter 21. That chapter considers
incomplete compositions that may be connected to the family of musician motets,
and also lists other compositions, not so connected, that deal with music or musicians.
Chapter 20 addresses the unique and brilliant English motet with named musicians,
Sub Arturo plebs, an English contribution to this originally French subgenre, and its
disputed dating. It thus forms a bridge from the mainly French motets considered so far
to English compositions around and after 1400 in Part V, and then to Italian motets be-
fore and after 1400 in Part VI.
A word of explanation is needed as to why Part V (English motets c. 1400–​1420)
includes nothing relating to my interests in the rich tradition of English motets dating
 Introduction 7

from most of the fourteenth century. A much-​revised version of my reconstruction of a

major English motet from before 1326, Rota versatilis, is now published in Bent, Hartt
and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus, which includes a new survey of English fourteenth-​
century motet composition superseding anything else I might have included here.
The first quarter of the fifteenth century was a remarkably productive time for English
music, though not necessarily more so than the fourteenth, which is marked by a great
variety of inventive compositional strategies surviving in numerous but mostly frag-
mentary forms, a tragic shadow of what must have been.19 Although some French
motets are found in English sources from the mid-​fourteenth century (Durham20 and
Ox7), there is no evidence of travel in the opposite direction. None of the identified
motets listed in Trém in the late 1370s (Ch. 31) has English sources or can be confi-
dently claimed as English on stylistic grounds, though questions have been raised about
its inclusion of at least two motets on St Thomas Becket, who was, however, also widely
venerated on the Continent. The new century is better documented in the toweringly
important Old Hall manuscript (OH), the first English music book to survive in any-
thing approaching complete form since the Winchester Troper 400 years earlier.20 This
Part addresses, first, two unique and complex compositions in the Yoxford fragment
(Yox), O amicus/​Precursoris and the Credo Omni tempore, and then motets in the Old
Hall manuscript and by Dunstaple. Chapters 22–​25 bring together revised forms of pre-
viously published and unpublished work on these English compositions from the years
around 1400, some of them conceptually and notationally quite complex.
Part VI (Italian motets) begins with a paper first presented at Certaldo in 1984, here
revised as Chapter 26, in which I sought to define the distinctive genre of the Italian
motet, despite its absence from the large retrospective anthologies of the early fif-
teenth century dominated by the madrigal, ballata and caccia. Much that I said then
has now been absorbed into mainstream scholarship, its arguments taken further by
others. Most of those motets are fragmentary; a few were included in PMFC 12–​13.21
Most or all of Ciconia’s motets date from the first decade of the fifteenth century (PMFC
24) and spawned a flow of similarly formed compositions in the ensuing generation.
Many features distinguish them from French motets. Some are isorhythmic in the truest
sense, two sections of which the second rhythmically replicates the first; such cases were
discounted as too simplistically constructed to qualify as isorhythmic by older inflated
definitions. The upper parts usually have different texts, but increasingly often a single
text; those parts are usually of equal or nearly equal range and activity. Most have freely
composed tenors; exceptions are Marchetto’s only surviving motet and those by Du Fay
a century later. It still remains for the motet output of Du Fay to be fully evaluated in the
light of his absorption of Italian precedents.

19 Complete compositions are published in PMFC 15–​17. Some idea of the further range and extent of

English motet composition furnished by fragments can be gained from the path-​breaking dissertation of
Peter Lefferts, ‘Motet in England’ (1983), and especially from his musical appendix (available on DIAMM
resources).
20 The possible exception to this generalisation would be W1: a book of Parisian polyphony that was at St

Andrews early in its life, and was almost certainly produced in Scotland—​which is not England. None of this
changes the fundamental problem that there is a dearth of near-​complete insular sources.
21 Those volumes were published in 1976 and 1987, the latter including reconstructions based on material

signalled by me.
8 Introduction

Chapter 27 is an almost unchanged version of my assessment of the motets in the

palimpsest manuscript SL2211 and the composer Hubertus de Salinis.22 Chapter 28
is a previously unpublished overview of the motets of Johannes Ciconia. Chapter 29
is an almost unchanged version of my attempt to bring the theories of Prosdocimus
de Beldemandis to bear on the analysis of compositions by his Paduan contemporary
Johannes Ciconia.23 There is no documentary evidence that they knew each other, and
their respective theoretical writings have little in common, either in content or purpose.
Nevertheless, I found it instructive to bring Prosdocimus’s counterpoint teaching into
dialogue with the background counterpoint of Ciconia’s motets, to show how the bare
counterpoint is elaborated, and how dyadic principles are mapped onto a three-​part
texture.
Part VII (Music for Popes and the Courts of Burgundy and Cyprus) brings together
three unrelated essays, all considerably revised from their original published forms.
Chapter 30, ‘Early Papal Motets’, has been reworked to take account of subsequent
writings and discoveries, including a discussion of the incomplete motet Per grama
protho paret. Chapter 31 updates my earlier essay on the Trémoïlle ‘index’ (Trém), in-
cluding some new identifications. Although for convenience I refer to it as an index, it
lies in status between a classified index and a table of contents in that it separates motets
and other long compositions from ballades and shorter works (rondeaux, a virelai and
a hymn) which evidently served as page-​fillers in this large-​format manuscript; but
otherwise it lists compositions in order as in a table of contents, and later additions
were indexed as they were copied. Some of the songs are numerically out of order, pre-
sumably listed in order of copying where space had been found for them on an earlier
opening.
Chapter 32, on the motets of the manuscript Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria
J.II.9 (Cyprus), is here enlarged with a survey of the probable origins of the repertory
and the manuscript, taking account of more recent work. Most important is Karl Kügle’s
identification of Jean Hanelle as a musician from Cambrai who, together with the com-
poser Gilet Velut, accompanied Charlotte of Bourbon to Cyprus in 1411 when she be-
came the queen of King Janus. It was already known that Hanelle was still nominally
in musical service to the new King John of Cyprus, the son of Janus and Charlotte,
when he (Hanelle) accompanied their daughter Anne to Savoy for her marriage to
Duke Louis in 1434; the continuity from Hanelle’s earlier arrival in Cyprus suggests
a role for him in the compilation and possibly the creation of this isolated repertory.
A Postscript to this chapter considers a 2012 hypothesis (Kügle, ‘Glorious Sounds for
a Holy Warrior’), finding it ingenious but unconvincing. However, at a conference in
Turin, 30 September–​1 October 2021, Kügle drew back from that hypothesis for some
of the same reasons that I found it problematic, and replaced it with a new theory that he
has yet to publish and submit to peer evaluation. I have therefore curtailed my original
draft of this critique. The many questions raised about the manuscript’s origins must
be considered work in progress, which may be taken further in the proceedings of that
conference.

22 Bent, ‘The Motet Collection of San Lorenzo 2211’.

23 Bent, ‘Ciconia, Prosdocimus’.
 Introduction 9

New Ways to Explore Motets

It is not easy to draw together what contributions these essays may have made, over sev-
eral decades, either in their original forms or in the current revisions. But what follows
is an attempt to set out some of the directions that were new at the time, or are new for
previously unpublished chapters.
A unique property of measured music is the capacity to give fixed places to words
within a relative time frame. In most fourteenth-​century motets, not just one but two
different simultaneous texts thus arranged are precisely placed in relation to each other,
with full control at the level of syllables, in a detailed design that can be as purposeful
as that of the different but coordinated musical strands attached to them. Coordinated
words and music exponentially increase the layers of integrated polyphonic complexity.
Motets of French provenance usually have two secular or semi-​secular texts, both or
either in French or Latin, and a chant tenor whose source words mirror theirs (some-
times provocatively) and implies its own biblical and liturgical context, symbolically
and semantically. Counted and coordinated lines, words, syllables are cunningly woven
together on the more familiar ground of counted musical elements. This book explores
opportunities available from such a precise and literal kind of intertextuality. Words and
music planned together can enhance and add to verbal sense; music alone can create
semantic and symbolic sense by depiction or motivic association. Beyond the purely se-
mantic, many more dimensions (three musical strands, three textual strands) are avail-
able for a complex interplay of symbolism, ingenuity and sonic adventure, including the
application of musical techniques such as recapitulation and motives associated (almost
leitmotivically) to the verbal structures, in turn conditioning the ways the texts were
composed, often in demonstrable conjunction with the musical concept. Connections
and allusions between motets abound, particularly in the musician motets of Part IV.
Unlike most other musico-​poetic genres, few motet texts (with one exception, not
even those by Machaut) were transmitted without their music; most were evidently
not reckoned to stand alone as poetry. Modern studies of lyric and narrative verbal
texts have largely ignored the polyphonic motet, even including the twenty-​three by
Machaut. Most of those texts that were copied later without music have at some time
or other been attributed to Vitry, perhaps signalling a special regard for his often dis-
tinctive learned and polemical style. There are almost no instances from this period
of pre-​existent motet texts subsequently ‘set to music’. Many motets have almost a
syllable-​per-​note relationship. In general, the relationship between words and music
is deliberate and unique; they are sometimes demonstrably conceived and planned to-
gether. Irregularities or changes of verse metre or structure may confirm this, notably
in the Marigny motets, or when the verse pattern changes for a hocket section, as in
Machaut’s Motet 18 (Ch. 13). Accordingly, contrafaction is rare; fourteenth-​century
examples involving adaptations for England are discussed in Chapter 24, and a papal
motet, Gaudeat et exultet, possibly also in a contrafacted version, in Chapters 26 and 30.
Whereas most thirteenth-​century motets had only minimal rhythmic contrast be-
tween the tenor and texted parts, the great augmentation of rhythmic vocabulary that
took place in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century allowed a higher
degree of contrast between long sustained notes in the tenor and smaller note-​values
in the texted upper parts, giving greatly increased opportunities for rhythmic variety.
10 Introduction

That variety was sometimes exploited by limiting the rhythmic vocabulary in any one
motet, the better to mark significant moments with deviations from the background
(for example, in Vos/​Gratissima, Ch. 8). At the same time, much longer compositions
became possible, their overall structure controlled by the slower-​moving tenors. Five
levels of note-​values (minim, semibreve, breve, long, maxima, variously named, al-
ready set out in the gradus system of Muris’s Notitia in 1319) were eventually further
extended by devices including augmentation, diminution, proportions and coloration.
The composers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries whose works are explored
here gleefully exploited these new resources to the full.
Several chapters draw attention to new ways of understanding and analysing motets.
Some common ground in compositional resources notwithstanding, most fourteenth-​
century motets are highly individual constructions of words and music, governed more
by the chosen material (the materia of the newly anonymised treatise discussed in
Ch. 1), subject, words and music, than by any external or received template. Liberated
from generalisations arising from umbrella (and sometimes inaccurate) definitions of
isorhythm (Ch. 2) and an assumption that composers were following templates, their
differences as original creations are often more interesting than what they have in
common. Verbal texts have usually been examined for their semantic content and any
hints they may give about the use, date and purpose of the motet. A valuable instance
is Anne Walters Robertson’s thorough and revealing study of the texts of the Machaut
motets.24 Such studies have sometimes operated at arm’s length from musical detail, the
precise fit of note and syllable, the sonic properties of the words themselves, the placing
of vowels and consonants, including alliteration and assonance, vowel rhyme and ono­
matopoeia. I consider how the mutual placement of syllables in the texted parts may
be symbolically significant, as well as their relationships to their notes; self-​imposed
disciplines that may have governed them (such as the choice to make word-​breaks
and hocket rests coincide, as exemplified in Chs. 9, 13 and 25); how puns, symbolic
constructs or citations, or the desire to place these at structurally significant musical
points, may enhance semantic sense, or even deform or obscure it where ambitious
double meanings are attempted. The embedding of a secondary or double meaning in
the text may produce an opaque result, as in the double, contrary chronology of the
Marigny motets of Part II, and in the motetus of O amicus/​Precursoris (Ch. 22), which
encodes the musical structure in the motetus text. The motetus of Sub Arturo (Ch.
20) describes the tenor structure, but more directly: ‘twice by hemiola’; and the text of
Are post libamina (Ch. 24) embodies a declaration that it is a contrafact. Recapitulations
of text and music, separately or together, are significant in Tribum/​Quoniam, in Vos/​
Gratissima, in Machaut’s motets 10 and 15, and elsewhere. Several motet texts have
proved difficult or impossible to translate and incurred the low opinion of classicists,
perhaps even because semantic sense was not their makers’ only or primary consid-
eration (notably Apta caro/​Flos virginum, not examined here). Musical techniques of
repetition and recapitulation are applied to significant words (or their synonyms) for
verbal recapitulation. Sometimes musical motives are associated with particular words
(for example, love, fire and death in Machaut’s Motet 10, Ch. 12); repeated rhythmic or
melodic motives often underscore verbal recapitulations.

24 Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims.

 Introduction 11

Many motets have what I call a main density area, often at a musically or textually sig-
nificant point, and involving musical or verbal recapitulation. Conspicuous examples
include Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8) and Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 (Ch. 14). In Machaut’s
Motet 10 this area occurs at B79–​83 (see Ex. 12.1), the three-​quarters mark, at the
start of the minim hockets, where the words Amours (love) and ardoir (burning) coin-
cide on the highest tenor note. Doublement marks the only place in the motet where a
three-​minim figure is heard twice (‘doubly’) in immediate succession, also initiating a
direct verbal and musical cross-​citation shared with Motet 15 (of the words Amours, qui
est mes chiés). Citation and allusion between texts of different motets, sometimes with
the same music, occur here, between the Marigny motets (Part II), and among the mu-
sician motets (Part IV).
Word-​painting is ubiquitous. Reversals and voice-​crossings reflect the reversal, in-
version and usurpation themes of Fauvel in Part II; see Chapter 3. Text-​driven crossing
of differently texted parts occurs in Aman novi, where Fauvel’s aspirations, Icarus’s fall
and Fortune’s putting down of Haman all occasion crossings of triplum and motetus
(Ch. 5). In Machaut’s Motet 9 (Ch. 9) extremes of range convey height and depth;
Lucifer flies high before his descent, and the triplum crosses below the motetus for
abysses and caverns. Depiction goes far beyond madrigalisms such as simple ascent and
descent, and even ascent and descent here are not simple when two different texts are
involved. The crucifixial sharps in Aman novi are both visible and audible (Fig. 5.2). In
Vos/​Gratissima, ‘occulum occulo’ (eye to eye) is made visible and audible by an exact
repeat (‘eye music’) which sets itself purposefully apart by momentarily departing from
the expected isorhythm (Fig. 8.4).
Local puns abound. In Machaut’s Motet 9, the rhyme scheme is reversed following
the words retro pungit (stings from behind), and pungit is represented by puncturing
hockets. Solmisation puns may be direct (mi-​fa in Musicorum, Ch. 18), or by vowel
rhyme. Alliteration or vowel rhyme between the texted parts can unite them sonically.
The same word from the two different texts may be given emphasis by being made to co-
incide, as when both voices sing amours together in Machaut’s Motet 4. Sometimes there
is semantic play when the two texts interact, as in the second section of Vos/​Gratissima,
where the audible insertion of triplum words while the motetus rests changes (even if
not grammatically) the sense of the motetus text. Onomatopoeia is effectively used in
Motet 9, with abundant ‘ss’ for the hissing serpent.
Structural puns are also a major resource. In Musicorum collegio (Ch. 18) the junc-
ture of the two color statements falls between acuto and gladio (cum bis acuto | gladio);
it is cut ‘with a twice-​sharp sword’, recalling an earlier structural join on a cutting
word: nemo . . . posset incide-​| re (no one will be able to cut). Talea means a cutting,
what tailors do; words of division or proportion often mark such structural points. In
Tribum (Ch. 4), the words trans metam ascenderit (‘should ascend across the limit’) take
us across the midpoint of the sixty-​two triplum words, and cross the boundary to the
second color. In Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8) the structural join is marked and laid bare by a
wound-​word (vulnere), the recapitulations nudged by simili. In Machaut’s Motets 10
and 4, the word souvenir (memory) underlines a structural or a verbal and musical re-
capitulation. In Machaut’s Motet 4 (Ch. 14), an unsignalled shift to perfect modus is
punningly marked by blesse (wound) in TI, Je ne puis avoir duree (‘I’m unable to last’,
referring to use of a longer measure) in TII, and desmesuree (beyond measure) in TIII,
12 Introduction

again attesting the close planning of words and music together. Particularly striking in
O amicus/​Precursoris is the realisation in a tenor mensuration canon of the Baptist as
precursor of Christ (Ch. 22).
In Bent, ‘Polyphony of Texts and Music’, on Tribum (now incorporated into Ch. 4),
I argued that its pre-​existing material—​the classical couplets that end each verbal text,
and the chant tenor—​were fundamental constructional pillars for both text and music,
and that neither preceded the other. In other motets that show a tight syllabic connec-
tion (such as Machaut’s Motet 18, Ch. 13), the composer and poet were either one and
the same, or worked in very close collaboration, neither preceding the other. Linkage
and cross-​reference between the three Marigny motets in Fauvel (Chs. 3–​6) also suggest
a single hand, that of Vitry, as does their carefully crafted double narrative conveying
opposite chronological directions (Ch. 3), reinforced by calendrical play. Other groups
of motets, notably the musician motets of Part IV, are rich in citation and mutual refer-
ence, but obviously by different composers over time—​some are internally signed. The
similar placing of linking factors between some of these motets (composer signatures,
or the naming of Boethius at the textual midpoint) confirms deliberate modelling.
It is a commonplace that most tenors were chosen for their verbal relevance to the
theme of the texted parts, even if this involved, for example, a bold if not blasphemous
juxtaposition of earthly and heavenly love. Symbolic or numerical musical play with the
tenor’s words is found in the double cantus firmus derivation of the tenor of Aman novi
(Ch. 5), in the cosmic message of the musician motets (In omnem terram, Chs. 16, 20),
in the precise words of the chant fragment selected for the tenor of O amicus/​Precursoris
(Ch. 22), and in the six mensurally varied statements of the Credo Omni tempore, whose
tenor punningly so labelled has only a loose relationship to the only identifiable chant
with those words (Ch. 23).
But it seems that chant excerpts were often selected for their purely musical properties
as well, as a note-​row might be chosen: for suitably placed stepwise progressions that
would suit cadences; for the number and divisibility of its notes into—​sometimes
overlapping—​colores and taleae, and for how it facilitated disposition of those taleae
around structural joins and cadencing points; for its properties of range, interval,
number, symmetry or palindrome. It may have been selected for its depictive quali-
ties: for the restraint of using a limited pitch range; for its intervallic tenor leaps as in
Machaut’s Motet 8; or the serpentine slithering quality of the entirely conjunct tenor
of Machaut’s Motet 9 (Ch. 9). Sometimes a chant is musically related to another, dif-
ferent chant (the short tenor melody of Machaut’s Motet 9 is wholly contained in that of
Motet 4). A tenor may have textual identity with another, different chant: two different
In omnem terram chants are used for two of the musician motets, a form of reference
which is unmistakable but not literal. Allusion or citation with difference is ubiquitous
in the musician motets and may be deliberately varied; often just one or two out of the
three elements of text, rhythm, melody suffice to mark a quotation, not all three.
Calendrical allusions and their expression in number are fundamental to the man-
aged chronology of the Marigny motets (Ch. 3) and to the interrelated musician motets
of Part IV. The tenor of Musicalis is a Christmas Alleluia, that of Musicorum an Easter
Alleluia. Musicorum cites the Apocalypse, Sub Arturo Genesis, the last and first books
of the Bible, reflecting the global reach (In omnem terram) of the A–​Z of Apollinis/​
Zodiacum. The number of musicians celebrated in each is reflected in the ways both
 Introduction 13

music and text are counted: the zodiacal twelve musicians named in Apollinis/​Zodiacum
(Ch. 16) are embedded in the 122 (144) breves of the motet’s length, disposed in three
color statements, each of two 24-​breve taleae and in the number and multiples of lines
and syllables, totalling 240 +​120 =​360 (see Ex. 16.1), as David Howlett observed.
They are counted as bis sex, twice six, counting the months of the year as well as the
signs of the zodiac. Musicorum goes one better than six with its seven musicians (Ch.
18 and Ex. 18.1) embodied not only in the Apocalyptic seven candlesticks and
the seven churches of Asia, but in a descending scale of seven notes borrowed from
Apollinis, and in seven statements of a quoted motive (rhythm and text), also from the
parent motet. Calendrical aspects are woven into both the text and music of Musicorum
collegio/​In templo Dei, with sevens (for days of the week), fours (weeks in a month),
twelves (months of the year); and the total number of poetic lines is fifty-​two (weeks of
the year). Sub Arturo/​Fons (Ch. 20) nods at both these predecessors with its fourteen
musicians, twice seven. The two other motets in this group, Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie
laudabili and Alma polis/​Axe poli, both name twenty musicians (twice ten, ten being the
number of Boethius referred to in Apollinis/​Zodiacum).
Melodic material from the chant is often incorporated in the upper parts. In Tribum/​
Quoniam (Ch. 3), the tenor’s one disjunct progression (e g d) comes prominently three
times in the motetus, transposed as a c g. Machaut’s Motet 9 (Ch. 9) uses motives derived
from its conjunct and serpentine tenor in the upper parts. By contrast, for the vagaries
of Fortune in Motet 8, Machaut chose a tenor with intervallic leaps, where similar leaps
in the upper parts, together with syncopated rocking motion, underline the instability
of Fortuna (Ch. 14). Besides melodic affinities, I have noted in Motet 10 (Ch. 12) an
upper-​voice rhythm derived inversely by diminution from that assigned to the tenor.
Chapter 9 surveys some of these resources in Machaut’s Motet 9, including the re-
lationship between color and talea, criteria for tenor selection, part ranges and ca-
dence choices, the marking of talea ends, devices such as alliteration or vowel rhyme,
and exploitation of the purely sonic qualities of a specially composed text. A restricted
rhythmic vocabulary is sometimes chosen, the better to make purposeful deviations
stand out against it (instances are noted in Chs. 8 and 9).
Interesting variety is achieved by different rates of distribution of verbal texts in re-
lation to music and to each other. In Machaut’s Motet 9, the entire second half of the
motetus text is confined to the final third of the piece, and is thus declaimed twice as
fast as the first half, creating a climactic acceleration towards the end, in a similar way
to that provided musically when there is tenor diminution or upper-​part hocketing. In
Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20), each of the nine triplum stanzas is set to a new talea, three
per color. Because the colores successively reduce, the text is also delivered much faster
towards the end, the excitement further increased by complex cross-​rhythms.

Audience

Who were motets for? Who are they for? The simultaneous dimensions of the motet have
not had a smooth modern reception; bitextuality hardly meets criteria of clear and au-
dible presentation. Besseler went so far as to declare that early motets were not intended
for aesthetic enjoyment by listeners, but rather as supports to the devout for prayer and
14 Introduction

reflection—​even though many of them are by no standards sacred.25 For many unpre-
pared listeners, the sound of a modern performance can give pleasure, though Grocheio
thought otherwise: not only did the common laity not understand motets, they did not
enjoy hearing them. He famously wrote that only the litterati could appreciate motets,
and that was even before the cultivation of some of the subtler strategies documented
here.26 But for those who might aspire to count among present-​day musical litterati,
there is so much more. We have garnered plentiful evidence that the construction and
placement of those texts is not casually chaotic, as has sometimes been implied, but
deliberate and artful. The many subtleties could never have been grasped at a single or
first hearing by an unprepared listener, but this was not how the primary audience—​the
performers—​first encountered a motet. Singers, at first, saw just their own part, text and
music inseparable. Only when putting it together in sound with the other strands could
the full polyphonic texture of words and music happen, when singers were enabled to
explore and savour the interactions, the interplay, the puns, the quotations, the inge-
nuity, against the background of their shared culture (which included the Bible, the lit-
urgy, Boethius, and much more).
Some readers may find the enterprise of identifying these strategies cerebral.
This book is not for them. It was just such a debate that fuelled my exchanges with
Christopher Page in the early 1990s.27 My own appreciation of these extraordinary multi­
faceted compositions has been enhanced by teasing out at least some of the craft and
erudition that composer-​poets had lovingly woven into them. The intricate patterning
based on number, structure, word sounds as well as sense, uncovering at least some
aspects of their ingenuity, playfulness, juxtapositions, boundless invention, and even
at times subversion: all these give a precious window into the thought processes of our
medieval colleagues and enrich the overall experience of what are often stunningly
beautiful compositions, eloquent, dramatic and expressive.
In most cases, such observations arise in studies of individual motets or between re-
lated motets; the genesis of the present compilation means that these aspects have not
been treated systematically over larger repertories. There is much more to discover;
many footnotes here are invitations to follow up on little-​explored manuscripts and
pieces, and sharp observers will find much to correct and loose ends to resolve. I offer
this book to readers who are curious to pursue these and other paths, in the hope that
younger scholars in the future may find some of these directions fruitful for further
exploration of this inexhaustibly fascinating genre. To engage deeply with individual
motets allows the imaginative exercise of craft and resourceful creativity to sing to us
from many centuries ago.

25 Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 144.

26 ‘Cantus autem iste non debet coram vulgaribus propinari, eo quod eius subtilitatem non animadvertunt
nec in eius auditu delectantur, sed coram litteratis et illis, qui subtilitates artium sunt quaerentes. Et solet in
eorum festis decantari ad eorum decorationem, quemadmodum cantilena, quae dicitur rotundellus, in festis
vulgarium laicorum.’ Johannes de Grocheio, Ars Musice, ed. Mews et al., 84. ‘This kind of music should not be
presented to the common people (Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio’: lay public) because they neither observe its
subtlety nor take pleasure in hearing it; but to the educated (Page: clergy) and those who seek out subtleties in
the arts. It is customarily sung to adorn their feasts, just as the songs called rotundelli (are sung) at feasts of the
common laity.’
27 Page, Discarding Images; Bent, ‘Reflections on Christopher Page’s Reflections’; Page, ‘A Reply to

Margaret Bent’.
 PART I
C OMP O SIT IONA L T E CH NIQU E S
16 Compositional Techniques

I have dealt in other publications with questions of musical grammar, counterpoint,

and the roles of solus tenor and contratenor parts.1 The views set out in those studies
will be alluded to but not repeated in detail here, though they underlie the compositional
assumptions in this book. These first two chapters address a few other recurrent issues
of compositional technique: in Chapter 1, the prescriptions for motet composition tra-
ditionally (but unreliably) attributed to Egidius and the phenomenon of middle-​voice
tenors; the definition and terminology for introitus and cadentia; the problem of non-​
coincident or dissonant endings; lower parts; and, in Chapter 2, a slightly adapted ver-
sion of my previously published paper on isorhythm.

1 Bent, Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta (2002), which includes previously published articles.

See there ch. 8 on the solus tenor, and especially the Introduction. Subsequent relevant publications include
‘The Grammar of Early Music’ (1989); ‘Naming of Parts: Notes on the Contratenor’ (2008); and ‘Reading,
Memory, Listening, Improvisation’ (2014).
 1
Theoretical and Terminological Issues

Instructions for Motet Composition: ‘Egidius’

‘Primo accipe tenorem’ (‘first take a tenor’). Thus begins the only and often-​cited
fourteenth-​century treatise which purports to enlighten us about motet composition,
De modo componendi tenores motettorum. ‘First take a tenor’ was also the starting point
of Alice Clark’s invaluable compendium of tenor chant sources. Her title, Concordare
cum materia, gives the crucial further precept of the treatise, namely that the choice of
tenor is preceded by that of the materia of the motet; but the textual and musical nature,
relationship and priority of that materia, beyond its influence on the choice of tenor,
has fuelled continuing discussion. Modern scholars have unquestioningly assigned
this little treatise to Egidius de Morino or Murino. Its five manuscript sources were set
out by Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson, who presents most of the text, with translation and
commentary; a fuller version of the text is given more recently by Anna Zayaruznaya,
whose paragraph numbers will be used here.1 All five sources of the motet treatise also
contain a more widely distributed treatise on note-​shapes, the Tractatus figurarum,
ascribed in Faenza to ‘Philippi de Caserta’, in Newberry to ‘Magistri Phillipoti Andree’.
The authorship of this companion treatise was excellently assessed by Wulf Arlt, and
more recently edited by Philip Schreur, now with access to fourteen sources.2 The
Tractatus figurarum has been thought to date from the end of the century, though the
manuscripts containing similar note-​shapes are now dated after c. 1400; but the au-
thorship of Philipoctus is in doubt, as the note-​shapes described do not correspond to
his compositions as transmitted.3 It is ascribed to Egidius in four sources (in Lo4909
to ‘Egidium de Muris vel de Morino’, where it is followed anonymously by De modo
componendi tenores motettorum). Although the confusion of Muris and Morino
may be telling, the numerical weight of the attribution for the Tractatus figurarum is

1 The treatise is entitled De modo componendi tenores motettorum in WashingtonJ6, but the incipits of

two sources do not specify tenors: Seville25 has Incipit ars qualiter et quomodo debent fieri mottetti, Siena30
Ordo ad componendum motettum cum tribus vel quatuor. Extracts from the text of CS iii. 124–​28 (in full
on TML: https://​chmtl.indi​ana.edu/​tml/​14th/​AEG​TRA, consulted 23.3.2022) are presented in improved
form with glossed translation and variants in Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, i. 18–​24 and
Appendix I, 223; and now a fuller text with adaptation of Leech-​Wilkinson’s translation is in Zayaruznaya,
Upper-​Voice Structures, Appendix, 110–​16, with the promise of the full text in a new edition and translation
by Zayaruznaya and Andrew Hicks. Petrus Picardus’s Ars motettorum is a short treatise on mensural no-
tation which gives no motet-​specific instructions. A treatise entitled Modus componendi rotam versatilem
is tantalisingly missing from Lo6 which, according to its listed contents, once contained it. This apparently
refers to one of the most fascinating compositions of the early 14th c., a large-​scale English voice-​exchange
motet. See Bent, ‘Rota versatilis’, and its revision in Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus, ch. 5.
2 Arlt, ‘Der Tractatus figurarum’. Tractatus figurarum, ed. Schreur, gives source descriptions; the report

on Lo4909 is inaccurate with respect to these treatises and needs correction from Robertus de Handlo, ed.
Lefferts, 71–​72.
3 See Ch. 26 n. 5. Schreur, in Tractatus figurarum, sets out the case for and (largely) against the authorship

of Philipoctus.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0002
18 Compositional Techniques

diminished, as this version derives from a single witness, and Egidius is not regarded as
a candidate for its authorship. The sources are mostly of Italian provenance; it is unlikely
that such an Italianate treatise would be by a Frenchman from Thérouanne (Morino).
De modo componendi tenores motettorum is adjacent to the Tractatus figurarum in
four of its five sources (all except Seville25). It is anonymous in three sources (Seville25,
Lo4909, Siena30), but in the other two it is conflated with the Tractatus figurarum,
and ascribed at the end of both treatises: to ‘magistri Egidii’ in WashingtonJ6 and to
‘Magistrum Egidium de Murino’ in Vat5321. WashingtonJ6 also ascribes the Tractatus
figurarum at the beginning to ‘Egidium monachum’. (Coussemaker, using Vat5321,
recognised that they were separate treatises.) Since these two sources conflate the
treatises, and bear the only attributions to Egidius (now discredited for the Tractatus
figurarum), their authority for his authorship of the motet treatise too comes into ques-
tion. It is not clear whether they can be treated as separate attributions applying to the
motet treatise, but in any case, they appear not to have independent stemmatic authority.
The attribution may have gained modern traction from eagerness to attach a name to
the treatise, however tenuous the authority, and from a short-​circuited temptation to
identify the author with the Egidius de Morino named as a musician in Apollinis and
Musicalis, which we shall show to be unlikely. The content is hard to date; a general con-
sensus places the treatise in the third quarter of the fourteenth century (as assumed by
Zayaruznaya), but I now think it could date from closer to 1400. In either case, this prob-
ably excludes authorship by the earlier Egidius de Morino named in those motets datable
c. 1330, who may be identifiable with one Egidius de Flagiaco (Chs. 16 and 17).4 I pro-
pose that De modo componendi tenores motettorum should revert to anonymous status.
The motet treatise promises much but delivers disappointingly little. Indeed, the
text is specifically directed to the teaching of children (‘ad doctrinam parvulorum’,
§23);5 and although it speaks vaguely of further subtleties (for which the reader is re-
ferred to the grace of the Almighty, §24), it does not even begin to venture into most
of the territory of the advanced motets covered in this book, while at the same time
introducing other complexities, prematurely for beginners. Its many puzzling aspects
will only briefly be touched on here. Four-​part composition is introduced almost at the
beginning, §4, prescribing an (optional) contratenor above the tenor (i.e., one that is
not contrapuntally essential). These two parts are then treated as the foundation with
which the triplum and then the motetus should be concordant (§5, §8). For the tenor
and contratenor to be treated as a supporting pair in this way usually applies where
the contratenor goes below the tenor (as in Vos/​Gratissima, Ch. 8) and is contrapun-
tally essential.6 Priority is given to the triplum; it is not until the very late fourteenth

4 Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, 5, suggests that if the motet treatise could be dated decades earlier than

the Tractatus figurarum, it could be by the Egidius de Flagiaco who is a candidate for identity with the Egidius
de Morino of Apollinis and Musicalis (see Ch. 17). In support of this is that he was magister puerorum of the
royal chapel in Paris (Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 85), and the treatise is addressed to children.
But the gap between the documentation of Flagiaco and the probable date of the treatise seems to me too
wide. Egidius de Aurolia (Orleans) can be excluded as being from the wrong city, though he must be closer in
date to the treatise; he is named in the text of the very complex Alma polis as its composer (Ch. 19). Alma polis
is the only one of the musician motets composed with an original contratenor, in that case essential.
5 The paragraph numbers used here for reference are those of Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures,

Appendix.
6 The only kind of composition where the contratenor must be the next thing to compose would be those

instances where it would share the contrapuntal foundation with the tenor in such a way as to invite or
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 19

century that a shift is apparent in indexes and treatises whereby motets are more often
cited by triplum than by motetus. The motetus is described as being lower (‘at the fifth’,
‘ad quintam’), which would not apply to the many motetus parts that are closer in range
to their tripla, even if they supply the fifth at triplum-​tenor octave cadences. It is at
this stage in the treatise that there seems to be a prescription for upper-​part isorhythm
(‘figurata sicut prima pars’; ‘the same note-​shapes as the first section’, §6). Upper-​part
isorhythm was usually only partial in the early decades of the fourteenth century (as
in Vos/​Gratissima, Ch. 8, and Machaut’s Motet 9, Ch. 9). The author appears to pro-
pose four equal musical sections, not allowing for diminution. The corresponding di-
vision of the text into four equal portions (§9) likewise excludes the possibility that less
text would be required for an accelerated section.7 The detailed text distribution is left
somewhat vague (to be ‘distributed over the music as well as possible’, §§9–​10).8 Only
then come more detailed instructions to rhythmicise the tenor and contratenor (here,
colorare, §11), to manage and specify repetitions (§13), and a spelling-​out of perfect
and imperfect modus (§§14–​20). This section should probably have preceded the ad-
dition of the upper parts; advance notice is given that it is prerequisite to them (‘quod
inferius patebit’, §2). These anomalies discourage treating its statements about priority
as strongly applicable to motet composition. Indications of a date for the treatise pos-
sibly as late as c. 1400 are the precedence accorded to the triplum over the motetus (as
noted previously, from §5); the reference to imperfect notes as void rather than red
(§§15–​16); and the advocacy of arabic numerals over the roman ones of the ‘antiquos
magistros’ (‘old masters’, §13), arabic numerals not being common much before the fif-
teenth century.
Most surprising for a self-​proclaimed elementary treatise is a final section which
follows an apparent peroration (§§21–​24) and is absent from one of the five sources
(Lo4909), so it could be treated as a supplement and might therefore be a later addition.
But, given the previously noted pointers to a date close to 1400 for the body of the trea-
tise, it cannot be much later. While linked to what precedes it, this final section lurches
into ‘another way’ of composing motets by placing the tenor as the middle voice. As
noted in the next section of this chapter, only about five motets in the French repertory
have middle-​voice tenors, some of them then quite old. Why would a child attempt this
unusual type of motet when so much else goes unexplained? The description, set out
in the present Chapter 16, fits the three-​part Apollinis/​Zodiacum better than any other
known motet. §31 allows for four-​part writing with a contratenor. Finally, §32 allows

necessitate the composition of a solus tenor, which I have argued is found only in motets with contrapuntally
essential contratenors. The solus tenor, a basso seguente conflation of those parts, would then serve as a foun-
dation on which the upper parts could be more easily constructed. Examples here are in Vos (Ch. 8) and O
amicus (Ch. 22). See also Bent, ‘Pycard’s Double Canon: Evidence of Revision?’, where revisions of the lower
canon surviving in the solus tenor demonstrably show the role of that voice in the compositional process as
providing a basis onto which the upper-​voice canon could be projected.

7 See Ch. 26 n. 17 for a corresponding instance in Argi vices Polyphemus/​Tum Philemon rebus. The motet is

in four sections without diminution, and with equal distribution of text.

8 ‘Egidius’ instructions on texting have been widely quoted, but find almost no support among surviving

compositions’: Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 22. They are very far from the detailed and pur-
poseful text–​music relationships demonstrable in many of the motets discussed in this book. There are indeed
some motets where the relationship seems to be more casual, but in many cases it is so precisely calculated
that the words must have been designed for or with the music.
20 Compositional Techniques

for five-​part motets, the fifth voice being a quadruplum (§35), but there are no such
motets from the fourteenth century; the only five-​part motets are the later-​added extra
parts to Apollinis.9 In Chapter 16 I argue that this striking passage applies precisely to
the only five-​part motets from the period, namely the later-​added parts to Apollinis (one
of which is labelled quadruplum, as in the treatise), which must date from around or
after 1400, as must at least this final section of the treatise. Taken together with other
indications of late dating, this further eliminates the musician named in motets of
seventy years earlier as the author of the treatise.

Middle-​Voice Tenors

The known motets with a central tenor, triplum above it and contrapuntally essential
motetus below, are usefully assembled in Virginia Newes, ‘Early Fourteenth-​Century
Motets with Middle-​Voice Tenors’. Besides Apollinis/​Zodiacum, French motets with
middle-​voice tenors include Tribum/​Quoniam, Amer amours/​Durement (first color;
the tenor of the second is transposed down), Se grace/​Cum venerint, and D’ardant
desir/​Se fus d’amer. To these can now be added the Marian motet Flos vernalis/​Fiat
intencio, of uncertain national origin, previously known only from its intabulation in
Robertsbridge and fragments in OxAS56; further fragments of the original motet have
now been discovered by Cristina Alís Raurich in Karlsruhe82 and an almost complete
version by Karl Kügle in Koblenz701 (see Alís Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’). It
is also in the index to Trém (see Ch. 31). Italian motets with middle-​voice tenors are Ave
regina/​Mater innocencie (Marchetto), A ​ ve corpus sanctum/Protomartiris (SanGiorgio),
and Gratiosus fervidus/​Magnanimus opere.
Of the twenty-​four English motets in PMFC 15, six have a middle-​voice tenor, and
more incomplete motets also had or may have had a medius cantus.10 Given that duet
motets with central cantus firmus were favoured in England, it is interesting that of the
few motets of French provenance with middle-​part tenors, four also occur in English
sources, Apollinis (with added voices) in LoTNA, arrangements of Tribum and Flos
vernalis in Robertsbridge, and Amer/​Amours in Durham. In addition, the wide-
spread Degentis vita/​Cum vix artidici (also in the English source Yox) has the tenor and
motetus frequently crossing so that the tenor is partly in the middle. Did those motets
appeal to the English because of this scoring, comparable to the stylistic reasons I sug-
gest in Chapter 27 for the choice of Italian motets in SL2211, or did these examples in-
fluence the English habit? O dira nacio/​Mens in nequicia (uniquely preserved in Trém)
has the tenor partly in the middle, and is published as an English work in PMFC 17. The
jury is out on the national origin of this motet on St Thomas Becket, as also of two other
motets with a central tenor: Plausu querulo (also on St Thomas of Canterbury) and Flos
vernalis (mentioned previously). Apart from the keyboard arrangement of Flos vernalis
in Robertsbridge, none of the vocal versions is in an English source. All three motets
were in Trém (see Ch. 31).

9 The only other case is a fifth part added to the OH motet Are post libamina (Ch. 24).
10 For English motets see Lefferts, ‘Motet in England’ and Motet in England; Hartt, ‘The Duet Motet in
England’ and ‘A Missing Middle-​Voice Melody’.
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 21

Non-​coincident Endings

Inconsistent notation of final durations is ubiquitous, with casual interchangeability

of breves, longs, maximas or conventional decorative longs. These are invariably
and uncontroversially regularised—​usually silently—​in editions and performances.
Sometimes they are caused by the literal iteration of an isorhythmic talea, in diminution
or not, written out or not, whose last note would need to be elongated in performance
to end together with the upper parts.11 In Apollinis (see Ch. 16, Ex. 16.1) the tenor’s
isorhythm determines the last note as a breve plus rest, whereas the outer parts have a
long; the breve needs to be extended to end with the upper parts. In Alma polis ( Ex.
19.1) the homographic tenor in diminished form ends with a semibreve plus rest and
the contratenor with a breve, both of which need to be lengthened in order to finish to-
gether with the longs of the upper parts.12 Here, unusually, the triplum maintains its iso-
rhythmic pattern after the cadential arrival, but without dissonance. Such elongations
invite the simplest kind of initiative and can generally be taken for granted. Initiatives
are often required when performers have to determine empirically, in the absence of
an instruction, whether a repeated tenor color is to be diminished, how to resolve an
unsignalled canon, the entry point for a fuga or where the comes should end, or to infer
from what point in a ballade repeat to jump to a notated clos ending.13
Quite a high proportion of even the limited number of motets considered in this
book have non-​coincident endings, so notated that not only does the duration of the
final cadence not coincide in all parts, but also the arrival on it, usually on account
of the completion of an isorhythmic tenor talea which might have to be cut short if
the cadential arrival is to coincide. (Similar initiatives are needed for the comes of a
canon whose termination is unsigned.) Some instances do not incur dissonance (as in
Sub Arturo, Ex. 20.1, for a motetus talea completion) and some do. Many of these
cases are disguised in modern editions by being silently editorially ‘corrected’, which
masks the fact that they are not uncommon. The question is: given that initiatives
are expected of performers in the simpler cases just mentioned, should such endings
be allowed to stand as notated, or was it assumed that they would be adjusted to
simultaneity?
Five Machaut motets have anomalous final cadences: M4, M9, M10, M15, M17.
These include the only three of Machaut’s motets that end with 10/​6–​12/​8 cadences
on f (Ex. 1.1a): M4 (Ex. 1.1b), M10 (Ex. 1.1c) and M15 (Ex. 1.1d).14 There are many

11 This agrees with Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, i. 140 n. 76, who lists a number of motets

where a literal repetition of the talea results in such irregularity at the end, ‘disregarding the need for all voices
to conclude upon a final of theoretically equal length’, but makes no mention of the dissonant endings.
12 For the term ‘homographic’, see Ch. 2.
13 Ends of mass movements in OH show considerable notational variance, despite editorial initiatives by

the main scribe, for example, in shortening the finals of section endings in score settings from longs to breves.
Although there are no dissonant endings inviting emendation, some final decorative longs are separated from
their approach notes by single or double barlines, sometimes where they stand outside an isorhythmic struc-
ture. The last note of a diminished tenor iteration often needs to be conventionally prolonged. Instances of un-
tidy endings that would surely have been adjusted by performers are OH, no. 23, f. 19, and no. 24, f. 20, given
as alternatives in CMM 46.
14 For full transcriptions see Ch. 14, Ex. 14.1, Ch. 12, Ex. 12.1, Ch. 10, Ex. 10.1. Verbal networks be-
tween these three motets include the following: malgré near the end of the triplum of M4 and M10; morir at
the end of the motetus of M4 and near the end of the triplum of M10; -​ture as the final triplum rhyme of M10
and M15; -​oir as the final motetus rhyme of M10 and M15 and near the end of the motetus of M4.
22 Compositional Techniques

Ex. 1.1 Non-​coincidental final cadences in three Machaut motets: (a) standard 10/​6–​12/​8
cadence; (b) final cadence of M4; (c) final cadence of M10; (d) final cadence of M15
a

d
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 23

points of verbal and musical interrelationship between these three motets, and indeed
between each of them and other motets. In M4 and M10, taken literally, the tenor does
not arrive with the upper parts; in M15, it is the triplum that cadences later, with what
we would call a dissonant appoggiatura (see Ch. 10 and Ex. 10.1). M15 is also the only
instance of these three where the dissonance does not appear to result from a literal,
perhaps over-​literal, continuation of an isorhythmic pattern: M15 has no tenor dimi-
ds
nution. The last two triplum notes are , whereas the isorhythmically corresponding
places have ff∂d . The endings of M4 and M10 have been adjusted in the editions
of Friedrich Ludwig and Leo Schrade, I think rightly, by shortening the penultimate
notated tenor value so that the parts cadence together. M15, however, is transcribed
(by Ludwig, followed as usual by Schrade) with its concluding triplum appoggiatura—​
perhaps because a delayed upper-​voice resolution (Ex. 1.1d) sounds less offensive to our
ears (acclimatised by progressions such as the appoggiatura that concludes the Bach St
Matthew Passion) than does a dissonant tenor delay. I have suggested (in Ex. 10.1) a pos-
sible emendation for the end of M15, although the appoggiatura in the top part could
stand. The problem of these endings remains unresolved, and has hitherto been largely
swept under the carpet. In M15, the last words of triplum and motetus are desconfiture
and nonchaloir, which arguably justify the dissonance by affective word-​painting. But
Machaut does not consistently take such text-​suggested opportunities. If he was in-
clined to respond to unstable words with dissonant destabilising endings, he did not
do so in M8, whose last word is also desconfiture, nor in M1, which ends with ‘bitter’
(amer), nor in M2 (‘keeping too long silent’ could have prompted a delayed cadence),
nor in M7, which ends ‘exceeding moderation and good sense’ (trespasser mesure et
scens outrer), nor in M18, whose triplum ends ‘grant a stable dominion instead of this
unstable one’ (pro labili), all of which could have invited a punning depictive delay or
dissonance.15
Cases involving late or early arrival of the tenor because of the literal application of
a color and/​or talea repeat are harder to accept where the delay is in the lowest part.
In M10, it is the tenor that arrives late; are we to take the ending literally? To allow the
tenor its full notated span would require extension of the upper parts from 107 to 108
breves, making their final long perfect (possible, and yielding a nice total number), not
otherwise signalled; but more seriously, a dissonant delay in the tenor’s arrival on the
cadence to join the upper parts (Ex. 1.1c, and Ex. 12.1).16 I think singers, on balance,
would probably have decided to arrive together, by delaying the upper parts’ cadence by
a semibreve, or by shortening the penultimate tenor breve, and cheating the tenor of its
final semibreve and semibreve rest. Ludwig simply stated that the final talea should be
truncated, and he may have been right.17 In favour of a dissonant delayed final cadence
for M10 we could invoke the textual encouragement of desnature (tr B97), ‘Ne puet
longue durée avoir’ (mo B101–​6) and ‘malgré Nature’ (tr B104–​6). Example 12.1
gives the dissonant version, which follows the manuscripts and the isorhythm, with the
safer option of a simultaneous ending on a small staff beneath.

15 For speculations on Machaut’s working methods that may have resulted in such irregularities see Leech-​

Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, vol. 1, 140 n. 76.

16 Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 54–​55, and Hartt, ‘Tonal and Structural Implications’, 67–​70,

also address the non-​coincident final cadence of M10.

17 Ludwig, Guillaume de Machaut, iii. 40 (144).
24 Compositional Techniques

There is disagreement between the manuscripts at a similar crux at the end of M4

(Ex. 1.1b and Ex. 14.1), where there is no comparable verbal prompt, except pos-
sibly the final motetus words ‘jusqu’au morir’. For the penultimate note two sources
(Ferrell(Vg), MachautG) follow the diminution strictly with a long, so that the tenor
cadences after the upper parts, while in two others (MachautA, MachautE) the long
has been shortened to a breve, perhaps in a failed attempt to normalise the cadence,
which only succeeds in making the tenor cadence ahead of the upper parts. Neither ver-
sion produces simultaneity, but this contemporary editorial attempt to do so may again
encourage the safer option of simultaneous arrival, as in M10. Taken in isolation, any
of these would seem to be a self-​evident case for adjustment, to avoid serious musical
anomaly. An alternative ending is indicated in Example 14.1.
All Machaut’s tenors are homographic, including those with diminution (i.e., the
diminution could have been derived from the first statement without renotation), but
all have the diminution written out in all the Machaut manuscripts, as was normal in
motets of the time. The single exception is his Motet 2, which I argue (in a Postscript
to Ch. 13) was originally homographic despite an irregularity in the currently notated
form. Singers applying what may originally have been an unnotated diminution may
have been expected to normalise the final cadences of M4 and M10. A mechanical
writing-​out of the diminution seems to prescribe the anomaly more strongly than may
have been intended had it been left to the performers to adjust the second statement.
I am inclined to reject the delayed dissonant final cadences for M4 and M10, on the
grounds that the scribe/​editor may have failed to make a self-​evident editorial adjust-
ment in that mechanical copying of the repeat.
The other two of the five affected Machaut motets have 6/​3–​8/​5 final cadences. Both
M9 and M17 have undiminished tenor repeats, marked for repetition but not written
out. In M9, if the isorhythm is followed literally, the tenor resolution on g is delayed by
a semibreve rest, leaving an unsupported fourth between the upper parts until the final
note sounds, but no other dissonance. Here there is no verbal encouragement for a delay,
unless it be a final sting of the serpent; the materia of the ending is resolved, turning as
it does from multiple evils to the Virgin and Christ. A normalised arrival for the tenor is
given as an alternative in Example 9.1, although the delayed ending remains possible.
Not so, however, in M17, which has a more problematic 6/​3–​8/​5 cadence (see Ex. 1.2).
As in M9, there is no diminution, and no verbal encouragement. The tenor’s final

Ex. 1.2 The end of Motet 17 from Guillaume de Machaut, The Complete Poetry and Music,
ix: The Motets, ed. Jacques Boogaart, trans. R. Barton Palmer, TEAMS Middle English
Texts Series (Kalamazoo, 2018). Reproduced by kind permission of Jacques Boogaart and
Medieval Institute Publications
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 25

descent on d c (breve–​long) falls a breve later than the parallel fourths of the cadence of
the upper parts, making what is surely an unacceptable dissonance. The tenor’s long rest
before that final cadential progression has to be shortened (unsignalled) to a breve rest
in order to make the tenor d c descent coincide with the upper parts b c and f s g.
In a series of studies, Jacques Boogaart has eloquently defended Machaut’s dissonant
endings on the basis of textual clues, adopting them in his recent edition.18 He offers
some reasons why obvious opportunities might not always have been taken, or suggests
that the words are indeed depicted but in other, subtler ways. Although he allows for
alternatives, his stance provocatively propels the issue into wider notice. He believes
that such final dissonances are intentional, in Machaut and elsewhere; I maintain that at
least in some cases it was self-​evident to performers that they should be adjusted to pro-
duce consonance. Boogaart’s edition presents the dissonant ending for M17 (Ex. 1.2),
but holds the problem at arm’s length by allowing ‘Performers who prefer not to end on a
dissonance’ to avoid it, as surely must be done, and as in Ludwig’s and Schrade’s editions,
by shortening the preceding long rest to a breve rest, to make the 6/​3–​8/​5 cadence co-
incide in all three parts. In an earlier article, ‘Playing with the Performer’, Boogaart
analysed the text and music of this motet with great sensitivity, but still left a decision
about the ending to the performers. He highlighted the concluding triplum words ‘Car
qui .ij. fois vuet denree, Le marcheant conchie’ (‘he who wants goods a second time
cheats the merchant’), offering ‘disharmony’ as a synonym for conchie, referring to
the final dissonance that results if the second tenor statement is sung the same way as
the first.19 The color is notated only once and marked for (unreduced) repetition. I be-
lieve the need to shorten the rest would have been self-​evident to performers without
the need to read the text prescriptively, though they may have enjoyed the enigma by
hindsight. Boogaart, in Machaut, The Motets, transcribes—​and defends—​all the non-​
coincident endings literally, including in M17.
It is cases like M17 that raise the question more generally: were performers expected
to make the arrival on the final cadence coincide, as well as its termination? On the basis
of the more difficult instances, I have come to the conclusion that such initiatives were
indeed expected, no doubt involving trial and error, that it was not only the most chal-
lenging cases that invite adjustment, and that the need to adjust in M17 may encourage
similar adjustments in at least M4 and M10 to make the parts cadence together.
Let us now turn to some motets by other composers considered in this volume. In
Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima the tenor had to be fully written out, because the second color
is differently rhythmicised and could never have been homographic. The penultimate
tenor note is notated as a long which, preceding another long, should be perfect, arriving
after the other parts and creating a severe dissonance, with f and g sounding simultane-
ously. Example 8.2 reduces the penultimate long to an altered breve, while showing
the notated (perfect) long as an alternative.20 This adjustment, like those in M4 and
M10, invites a small departure from strict isorhythm to produce an acceptable ending.

18 See Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 15 for his defence; see here Ch. 12. Lavacek, ‘Hidden

Colouration’, discusses some of these endings, especially in Motet 4; this article came to my attention too late
to be considered here.
19 The Ferrara Ensemble (on Arcana A 305) perform the dissonant ending of M17 at Boogaart’s instigation,

but align the ending of M4 in consonance by adjusting the upper parts.

20 This transcription, adjusted in discussion, was kindly provided by Richard Dudas. See also his ‘Another

Look at Vos/​Gratissima’.
26 Compositional Techniques

In Ivrea, however, the penultimate note was originally a breve, but the shortening stem
on the ligature has been erased. Chapter 8 and Figure 8.1 demonstrate other places in this
tenor where that scribe struggled, which at the same time may give clues about his exemplar;
there are many erasures. The final talea is curtailed, as happens in other motets, including
Garrit gallus/​In nova, Example 4.5. It could be asked why, if fully written out, was the
opportunity not taken to change the tenor ending of Vos/​Gratissima. But the twinned
contratenor (unsyncopated in the second color) was suitably adjusted (compare B139
with B157 of Ex. 8.2, omitting the breve rest that in other taleae precedes the second
long), giving further encouragement that the tenor should do likewise. The problem is
avoided in the solus tenor (in Ivrea), which has three breves (e f g) for the penultimate long
(B154–​56), again confirming the arrival of the tenorizans cadence on B157.
All the instances cited here involve tenor repetition. In some cases with no diminu-
tion (M9 and M17), it might be argued that marking the tenor for repetition but not
notating it in full leaves the performer responsible for making any necessary adjust-
ment at the end of a second iteration. As noted previously, in all Machaut’s motets with
a reduced second color, the tenors are homographic and so conceived.21 But, as usual
at the time, the reductions are written out, redundantly. This has the effect of making
them appear more prescriptive than they would have been, had the realisation of the
reduction been left to performers, as just proposed for M17. Such adjustment is al-
ways (and uncontroversially) necessary when the final cadence stands outside the iso-
rhythmic structure, or when it falls on the beginning of the last modus grouping, thus
cutting short any subsequent patterning set up in previous taleae. This foreshortening
is more conspicuous when the modus is perfect: Musicorum, Example 18.1;
Tribum, Example 4.1; Machaut M8, Example 14.3; M10, Example 12.1; M15,
Example 10.1, but it also occurs in imperfect modus, as in M18, Example 13.1.
M15, as noted, is an instance of a delayed ending in a part other than the tenor. The
motetus of Sub Arturo plebs has a similar delay in Yox, which follows the isorhythm
literally and brings in the fifth of the final chord after the octave has sounded, also
making that final note a breve. Chantilly does likewise, but elongates the final note to
a maxima. This involves no dissonance, no unsupported fourths, and is shown thus in
Example 20.1. Q15, however, omits the rest, making the last two notes void (coloured)
longs, so that they arrive together; this adaptation by the Q15 scribe is noted for
Example 20.1, and may reflect what he as a performer would expect to do.
A more dramatic case of indecision which seems to confirm that an initiative was
expected and attempted is provided by the chaotically notated ending of O amicus in its
only source, Example 22.1. The final sonority stands outside the isorhythmic structure.
It is omitted in cantus I and the tenor, both of which stop abruptly after the penultimate.
Cantus I departs from the isorhythm of the preceding taleae for the last two notes of
bar 69, as if to make a strong cadence, but omits the final long, f, which clearly must be
supplied (though a b c ending in cantus I would have avoided the parallel unisons with
cantus II). The tenor mechanically reproduces the isorhythmic talea and the pitch of the
undiminished first color, whose penultimate note fails to fit with or provide the needed
resolution, ending with a dissonant red semibreve f, preceded by an S-​rest ( ) in- [ƒ f ]
stead of the editorially supplied a g in Example 22.1; here, both pitch and rhythm require

21 But see Ch. 13 for a proposal that the tenor notation of M2 was originally homographic.
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 27

adjustment. The contratenor is derived from the tenor and needs to adapt its final ca-
dence; the whole voice is bracketed in Example 22.1. Derived canonic parts, indeed,
require common-​sense initiatives from performers comparable to what I am suggesting
for final cadences. For O amicus, the manuscript provides cadential resolutions only in
cantus II and the solus tenor. Cantus II provides a suitable cadential arrival outside the
isorhythmic structure. The end of the solus tenor corresponds to the preceding taleae,
without making an adjustment to support the final progression but, unlike the tenor,
it does correctly supply the final cadential note outside that structure, together with
cantus II. There was clearly here an attempt, albeit only partially successful (i.e., not in
all voice-​parts), to take appropriate initiatives at the ending.
Another extreme example of variant readings at the end of a motet is in O Maria
virgo davitica/​O Maria maris stella (PMFC 12, no. 41), where uncertainty at the final
cadence affects the uppermost part; its three sources make three different attempts to
adapt the ending. Example 1.3a, Pad1106, comes close to a cadence in bar 82 by varying
the isorhythm in bars 81–​82 and placing the ‘unnecessary’ two minims on the first beat
of bar 82. In Example 1.3b, in Q15, cantus I faithfully reproduces the isorhythm in bars

Ex. 1.3 Endings of O Maria/​O Maria: (a) Pad1106; (b) Q15; (c) MuEm
28 Compositional Techniques

79–​83 instead of resolving with a long on bar 82. Example 1.3c in MuEm maintains
the triplum isorhythm in bars 79–​82, but might have done better, like Example 1.3a, to
squeeze the a b into the previous bar to achieve a simultaneous arrival.
The existence in the manuscripts of two versions of the end of M4, together with
the three different notations of the ending of the Sub Arturo motetus, and of the
O Maria triplum, attest different editorial attempts by contemporaries to regularise
endings. O amicus, with its partially failed adaptation of the various parts of a
single piece in a single source, similarly attests an attempted adjustment. Scribes
sometimes did take initiatives at this point, apparently attempting what performers
would have been expected to do.22 Such examples of unsuccessful or conflicting
initiatives support the claim that anomalous endings were in most cases not inten-
tional and would have been normalised. Successfully adjusted endings may have left
no such trace.
This stance goes against the judgement of several respected colleagues, and I expect
it to be controversial. But the dissonant endings, if accepted, have no precedents in the
contrapuntal vocabulary of the time, and they would raise profound questions about
how we understand the musical grammar.23 The decisions are finely balanced. How far
can normal musical procedures be transgressed in the interests of expressing the ma-
teria? I wavered in the past about M15, and still do;24 but now find at least the more
extreme dissonant endings in other motets unacceptable. With some of the other cases
we enter a grey area. A systematic study of the notation, in their various manuscript
sources, of endings that have been silently normalised in modern editions, could well
cast more light on this under-​explored issue.

Introitus

Many motets have introductions (sometimes melismatic) for the texted parts before the
lower parts enter. These may be within but are more often outside the periodic structure
of those lower parts. They may be texted or untexted, self-​contained or not. Any such
introduction is usually referred to in the scholarly literature as an introitus, and will
usually be so called here. Only a minority are thus labelled in the manuscripts. The term
seems to have been applied more or less strictly by different scribes or composers. Q15
uses the term quite restrictively, to refer only to self-​contained textless introductions.25
Machaut’s motets 21–​23 have introductions that are generally referred to as introitus.
Indeed, in MachautA all parts of M21 (Christe, qui lux es et dies/​Veni creator spiritus) are
so labelled, and in this motet alone the introitus is indeed untexted and self-​contained.

22 I long ago entitled a contribution to a Round Table ‘Manuscripts as Répertoires, Scribal Performance and

the Performing Scribe’, giving examples of scribal modifications which achieved initiatives that performers
would have been expected to take.
23 No less a scholar than Lawrence Earp (‘Isorhythm’, 98 n. 66) accepts this dissonance in Vos/​Gratissima,

as he does in the Machaut motets. He argues that the Vos triplum’s final injunction to ‘hurry’ could reflect its
earlier arrival at the cadence; but on the model of the textual clue in M17, it could equally well mean that the
tenor must hasten to its final note.
24 As pointed out by Boogaart, ‘Thought-​provoking Dissonances’, 286 n. 36.
25 See Bent, Q15 i. 151.
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 29

The lower parts enter for its last three maximas to support the cadence of the upper
parts. The complex and divergent transmission of this section in the various Machaut
manuscripts is fully expounded in Zayaruznaya, ‘[In]troitus: Untexted Beginnings’,
and commented on more briefly in Machaut, Motets, ed. Boogaart. The (unlabelled)
Introitus to M9 (Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris feritas) is discussed in Chapter 9, and the
presence or absence of such introductions noted in Table 9.2. In M23 (Felix virgo, mater
Christi/​Inviolata genitrix) the introduction is self-​contained but texted. The lower parts
again enter towards its end and are labelled introitus. But none of the sources labels the
introduction to M22 (Tu qui gregem/​Plange, regni respublica), which is short, texted,
and not self-​contained.
Of the motets in PMFC 5, nos. 1 (O Philippe/​O bone dux), 4 (Apta caro/​Flos virginum),
8 (Almifonis/​Rosa), 19, 24 and 26 (Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis) have introductions. That
for O Philippe/​Bone dux is very long, textless and self-​contained, and accompanied
by a solus tenor. It meets the stricter criteria for an introitus, though not so labelled.26
Several motets usually attributed to Vitry have unlabelled introductions, including
Tuba sacre/​In arboris and Virtutibus/​Impudenter. His Petre clemens/​Lugentium was
until recently known only from Ivrea, where it has an accompanied introduction. The
Aachen version now shows that ‘tenor’ to have been a solus tenor, and also gives the
hitherto unknown contratenor and tenor, which do not enter until breves 9 and 13 re-
spectively, leaving the imitative opening for triplum and motetus unaccompanied.27
The incomplete motet O vos omnes/​Locus iste (Durham20, f. 337v), lacking a triplum,
has a long, self-​contained, textless introduction, of which the tenor enters towards the
end and is labelled introitus tenoris. This motet could possibly be English but, partly on
grounds of its vituperative text, it has also been proposed with more confidence that it
might be added to the Vitry canon.28

Cadentia

Throughout this book, I use the terms cadentia or cadence for the two-​part progres-
sion of an imperfect to a perfect interval (3–​5, 6–​8, 3–​1), whether the progression is
closural or ongoing, and also where the two-​part progression occurs within a texture of
more than two parts, whether or not superimposed with another cadential progression.
Dyadic counterpoint theory deals almost entirely in local successions, not long-​term
goals. It does not in principle distinguish internal or ongoing progressions from closural
ones, and in most cases I do not find it useful to do so. The same term can serve iden-
tical progressions, for example in Ciconia’s Venecie mundi splendor (Ex. 29.3) at bars

26 This introitus is partly illegible and was not transcribed in Johnson, ‘The Motets’, nor, following her

without acknowledgement, by Harrison in PMFC 5. A general study of these introductions in Zayaruznaya,

‘[In]troitus: Untexted Beginnings’, includes analysis of an obscure mention of introitus by Ugolino of Orvieto;
it lists works with labelled introitus on p. 4, and presents an ingenious discussion and transcription of what she
deduces to be multiple versions of an introitus for O Philippe, pp. 23–​30 and Appendix Aii. Lawrence Earp has
drawn my attention to a partial transcription in Raitzig, Codex Ivrea, with some alternative readings in what
that author treats as a single introitus.
27 Commented and transcribed in Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices for Vitry’.
28 Lefferts, ‘The Motet in England’, 38, 157–​62, 339, 569–​75; Hamilton, ‘Philippe de Vitry in England’, 40–​44.
30 Compositional Techniques

89–​90 (ongoing) and the conclusion of the motet, in both cases superimposed pairs of
dyads, 6–​8 and 10–​12.29 Treating the two locations as different has resulted in a number
of recorded performances that fail to connect the ongoing progression at bars 89–​90 as
such, separating the antecedent from the resolution onto the beginning of the Amen,
but connecting the identical progression of the final cadence. Unlike clausula, the term
cadentia (or cadence) has no inherent meaning of closure. It literally means ‘falling’,
thus suiting the stepwise tenorizans descent of most such progressions. Sarah Fuller
(‘Tendencies and Resolutions’) proposed the now widely used term ‘directed progres-
sion’, presumably to avoid the connotations of closure acquired by the word ‘cadence’
in modern usage, connotations which the ubiquitous local processes of tendency and
resolution did not have in the late Middle Ages. While ‘directed progression’ is approx-
imately synonymous with cadentia, that term too has taken on broader connotations,
just as ‘cadence’ has acquired connotations of closure. Fuller herself extends it from
two-​part counterpoint to ‘three-​voice contrapunctus’.30 I do not recognise any theory of
three-​voice counterpoint before the late fifteenth century, but confine ‘cadence’ here to
dyadically based progressions. These include separable consideration of superimposed
dyads between different pairs of parts within a three-​voice texture that may or may
not cadence together (as shown in Ch. 29), sometimes with changing roles of those
voices within a piece. Dyadic principles also underlie contrapuntally based compo-
sition in four or five parts, just as dominant thirteenths can be explained in terms of
triadically based harmony. The relatively recent closural connotations of ‘cadence’ may
be considered problematic when using the term non-​closurally, but so may ‘directed
progression’ be for the broader and non-​dyadic connotations it has acquired. Either
term is acceptable, provided its associative disadvantages are recognised. Exercising a
general preference for an available medieval term, albeit one thinly documented, I will
use cadentia with strictly dyadic application, and without inherent distinction between
closural or nonclosural context.
Cadentia is not the only term to have just a single contemporary documentation;
others include res facta (Tinctoris in the 1470s) and opus perfectum et absolutum
(Listenius, Musica, 1537), terms which have entered common usage despite solitary and
often anachronistic attestations. Conversely, a number of terms introduced by modern
writers have taken hold with apparent authority because they have been presented in
Latin (these include minor color, extensio modi, tempus perfectum diminutum), but with
no contemporary theoretical support that I have been able to find for the meanings
assigned to them.31 In addition, terms such as tactus and integer valor have been applied
anachronistically, and with different nuance, to much earlier music than that which
their first users had in mind.

29 As this discussion of cadentia has general application, it has been moved here and extended from the

earlier version of Ch. 29. See also Ch. 9 n. 22.

30 Fuller, ‘Guillaume de Machaut: De toutes flours’, 55; see also Fuller, ‘On Sonority’.
31 For tempus perfectum diminutum see Bent, ‘The Myth’. I have elsewhere pointed out that there was no

single term for what we call either ‘pitch’ or ‘rhythm’, but rather a rich range of terms in each case, many of
which lack precise modern equivalents: ‘Diatonic ficta’, 1–​2. See also Bain, ‘Theorizing the Cadence’, 325–​26.
On the other hand, modern writers have felt the need for a single term (like isorhythm, or chromaticism, both
in various ways inappropriate) for a phenomenon which in the late Middle Ages involved circumlocutions
(color and talea, ‘the signs of musica ficta’). On minor color see Woodley, ‘Minor Coloration Revisited’.
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 31

Several scholars have invoked the relevant passages in Jacobus’s Speculum musice.32
The longer account in Speculum book IV is more informative than the shorter mention in
the better-​known book VII, and corresponds more fully to an understanding of cadentia
as the progression of an imperfect to a perfect interval. Some of the intervals named
(fourth, seventh, ninth) rarely or never occur as cadential antecedents in fourteenth-​
century counterpoint and were presumably included for completeness. Jacobus is ab-
solutely clear, however, about the contraction of a minor third to a unison, the outward
resolution of a major third to a fifth, a major sixth to an octave, and a major tenth to a
twelfth. He describes an imperfect concord striving to reach a neighbouring perfect con-
cord to which it is joined above and below, and resolves or ‘falls’ into that concord:33

Antequam concordantes, quantum Before concords are compared with

ad cadentiam, comparentur, quid sit respect to cadentia, let it be seen what a
cadentia videatur. cadentia is.
Cadentia, quantum ad praesens A cadentia, insofar as it pertains to the present
spectat propositum, videtur dicere purpose, seems to mean a certain ordering or
quendam ordinem vel naturalem natural inclination of an imperfect concord
inclinationem imperfectioris concordiae to a more perfect one. For an imperfect thing
ad perfectiorem. Imperfectum enim seems to incline by nature towards perfection,
ad perfectionem naturaliter videtur as towards [a]‌better [state of] being, and
inclinari, sicut ad melius esse, et quod what is weak aspires to be sustained through
est debile per rem fortiorem et stabilem something stronger and stable. Therefore,
cupit sustentari. Cadentia igitur in [the term] cadentia is used in [the context
consonantiis dicitur, cum imperfecta of] consonances, when an imperfect concord
concordia perfectiorem concordiam strives to reach a neighbouring perfect
sibi propinquam attingere nititur ut concord, so that it resolves (falls) into that
cadat in illam et illi iungatur secundum [perfect concord] and is accordingly joined
sub et supra, descendendo videlicet vel to it above and below, by descending or
ascendendo. ascending.
Quantum igitur ad cadentiam, una Therefore, with respect to cadentia, a second or
secunda sive tonus sub vel supra petit a tone below or above seeks a unison. Likewise,
unisonum. Et similiter una tertia in a [minor] third, the semiditone, [seeks a
semiditono. Sed una tertia in ditono unison]. But a [major] third, the ditone, seeks
petit quintum. Et similiter una quarta a fifth. And similarly, a fourth, the diatessaron,
in diatessaron, aut petit unisonum, seeks either a unison or a fifth. A fifth, a
aut quintam. Quinta, scilicet diapente, diapente, on account of its own goodness, holds
propter bonitatem suam, tenet locum its place. Nevertheless, it is perfected in the
suum. Perficitur tamen in unisono aut unison or in the diapason. The [major] sixth,
in diapason. Sexta, scilicet tonus cum namely the tone with diapente, seeks the duple
diapente, petit duplum vel quintam. [i.e., octave] or fifth.

32 Including Fuller, ‘Tendencies and Resolutions’ (1992); Bain, ‘Theorizing the Cadence’ (2003); Bent,

‘Ciconia, Prosdocimus’ (2003); and Hartt, ‘Rehearing Machaut’s Motets’ (2010). In a learned and interesting
article, David Maw (‘Redemption and Retrospection’) offers a different interpretation, reading Jacobus’s use of
the term as ‘a process whereby imperfect concords were redeemed for perfection’.
33 Jacobus, Speculum book 4, ch. 50, ed. Bragard, iv. 122–​23. Translation by George Harne, adapted.
32 Compositional Techniques

Septima in semiditono cum diapente The [minor] seventh, the semiditone with
petit diapente vel diapason, ut diapente, seeks the diapente or diapason, as
praecedens. Octava, scilicet diapason, stat the preceding [does]. The octave, the diapason,
in se ipsa, non perfectibilis per aliam, nisi stands firm, not perfectible through another,
per unisonum. Nona, idest tonus cum unless through a unison. The ninth, that is the
diapason vel bis diapente, petit diapason tone with a diapason (or the double diapente),
vel in diapente revertitur. Decima in seeks the diapason or returns to the fifth. The
semiditono cum diapason petit diapason. tenth, the semiditone with diapason, seeks the
Decima in ditono cum diapason petit diapason. The [major] tenth, the ditone with
duodecimam, scilicet diapason cum diapason, seeks the twelfth, namely the diapason
diapente, vel revertitur in diapason. with diapente, or reverts to the diapason.
Et consimiliter est de undecima, And similarly concerning the eleventh,
scilicet de diatessaron cum diapason. namely concerning the diatessaron with
Duodecima autem, scilicet diapente diapason. And the twelfth, the diapente with
cum diapason, quiescit in se ipsa, aut, diapason, rests in itself, or ascending, seeks
ascendendo, petit quintam decimam, a fifteenth, i.e., the double diapason, on the
idest bis diapason, apud eum qui part of the one [i.e., the singer] who has the
altam habet vocem, vel, descendendo, upper voice, or, descending, returns to the
revertitur in diapason. diapason.

He returns to the topic in book VII, ch. 8:

Quodsi concordia imperfecta But if an imperfect concord prior to a perfect

ante perfectam perficiatur propter [concord] is perfected on account of a ‘cadential’
cadentiam in ipsam, rationabile [movement] into it, it seems reasonable that
videtur ut concordia aliqua, puta some concord, for example, a diatessaron, may
diatessaron, augeatur ex perfectiore si be increased [in perfection] by the more perfect
communicet cum illa. [concord] if it communes with it.

Insofar as cadentia means a falling (a downward step of one part) it did not neces-
sarily have closural connotations. The absence of any mention of closure leaves open
the possibility that such cadentie (or directed progressions) can at least function as
anchors and staging posts, minor punctuation, not necessarily for closure. They are
described in purely intervallic terms corresponding to the tension and resolution im-
plied by ‘directed progression’.34 Jared Hartt makes a good distinction, using ‘cadentia
to denote a two-​voice progression (usually an imperfect interval moving to its nearest
perfect), but . . . “directed progression” in a more general sense, that which encompasses
the possibility for various paths of resolution involving three-​voice sonorities. . . . Like

34 Fuller’s ‘more generalized formulation separates the type of progression from the act of cadence’

(‘Tendencies and Resolutions’, 231); her reluctance to adopt ‘cadence’ is clear from her report that Jacobus
‘goes so far as to introduce the term cadentia for certain types of intervallic progression’ (p. 230). Indeed he
does; that is how I propose to use it here.
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 33

the directed progression, a cadentia does not necessarily feature the closure that is asso-
ciated with cadence.’35
Some cadentie do of course coincide with closure, whether at ends of pieces or
sections, such as phrase endings in most songs, where musical and poetic units cor-
respond. Two-​part pieces are straightforward, but a contratenor can artfully redefine,
weaken or subvert an otherwise clear discant-​tenor cadentia (see Ch. 29). In motets
and similarly complex constructions, internal joins are often deliberately overlapped
or elided, and text and music units do not necessarily coincide. A cadentia may form a
bridge onto the beginning of a new section, as often happens in structured motets (or
as indeed into the recapitulation in a sonata movement). The duration of the perfect
interval thus approached may bear upon whether it is perceived as closural or ongoing.
But even after a brief arrival point, the counterpoint can take off in a new direction.
The duration of the approaching imperfect interval can be deceptive. In Ciconia’s
motets, long held notes are often not points of arrival or repose (perfect intervals), but
carry the tension and expectancy of imperfect intervals awaiting resolution. The same is
argued in Chapter 11 for some of the long held notes in the Gloria of the Machaut Mass.
They may heighten expectation of closure by prolonging the approach and delaying
closure, as often happens with lengthy cadential preparation in later music. Theorists
including Prosdocimus often use terminology suggesting that an imperfect interval
aspires to resolution in perfection. Any sonority containing a third would be defined
both by Prosdocimus and by Ciconia’s own practice as an approach sonority, a penul-
timate. That third should be connected to its destination by a semitone in one part, a
major third if rising or expanding, a minor third if descending or contracting. Any per-
fect interval or superimposed combination of perfect intervals approached from such
an imperfect interval can be treated as a strong arrival point, whether or not it imme-
diately takes off on a new beginning. A cadentia is defined more by its context and ap-
proach than by the length of the perfect interval on which it arrives.
The stepwise descending tenor function in a cadence (tenorizans) can be taken by
a voice other than the tenor, for example when two upper parts form a self-​contained
duet before the tenor entry, where they are inverted, or where an essential contratenor
works together on equal terms with the tenor (as in Vos/​Gratissima: see Ex. 8.1). The
choice of a portion of chant ending with a stepwise descent is nearly universal in
motet tenors. A notable exception is Dunstaple’s four-​part Veni sancte spiritus (MB 8,
no. 32), whose tenor excerpt ends with a descending fifth. In Machaut’s motets M22
and M23 the tenor ascends at the end but, in those cases, the essential contratenor is
the lowest voice and descends by step to form the final cadence. In Vos/​Gratissima
and Machaut’s motet 21, the tenor descends by step but is not the lowest voice; it is
equally twinned with the contratenor. The only other four-​part motet by Machaut
is the probably early Motet 5 (Aucune gent/​Qui plus aimme), which presents huge
problems, though tenor and contratenor work together and are both essential. The
four-​part Gloria of the Mass, however, has a problematic and grammatically inessen-
tial contratenor (see Ch. 3).

35 Hartt, ‘Rehearing Machaut’s Motets’, 194–​95.

34 Compositional Techniques

Lower Parts

Solus tenors
All known solus tenor parts provide a conflation of the lowest notes of tenor and
contratenor, with varying degrees of exact correspondence. They survive only for
compositions where a contrapuntally essential contratenor complements the tenor to
support the upper parts, especially where the composer chose not to require a chant-​
carrying tenor to serve also as the contrapuntal tenor. Tenor and contratenor may work
together in a fully equal partnership, as in Vos/​Gratissima: Example 8.1 shows the com-
plete reciprocity of their ‘strict’ counterpoint, and Chapter 8 sets out their rhythmic
reciprocity, switching syncopating roles in the two sections of the motet. In some cases,
the members of this lower-​voice pair are referred to interchangeably as tenor and
contratenor, or in the plural as tenores.
Since the visual control of score format was not available to musicians back then,
I have argued that the solus tenor could have been an aid in the compositional
process, providing a basso seguente foundation on which the upper parts could
be erected, especially in complex pieces involving canon, or a twinned tenor and
contratenor.36 Even if they do represent preparatory work, solus tenor parts were
often retained in manuscripts, as they could provide help in rehearsal, or even sub-
stitute for the pair of lower parts. In some cases only the solus tenor was copied: for
Petre clemens/​Lugentium and O Philippe/​O bone dux in Ivrea, for O Maria in Q15
and MuEm. Zayaruznaya has uncovered the true tenor and contratenor of Petre
clemens in Aachen;37 other cases of unidentified tenors may similarly turn out to be
solus tenors. O Maria survives with all five parts in Pad1106, including tenor and
contratenor, but its tenor is unidentified (see Chs. 26, 28); Q15 and MuEm give only
the solus tenor. Rarely, there is an additional solus tenor part of unknown function;
Vos/​Gratissima also has a second solus tenor in Ivrea, marked for deletion (‘vacat
iste’). A later, textless and unlabelled addition to Br19606 gives a different version
of the solus tenor for Vitry’s Impudenter/​Virtutibus.38 In at least one case, an extra
part was composed against a solus tenor: in Basel72 the second part of Novum sidus
orientis, De scintilla, has a Contratenor cum solo tenore.39 In that second section
alone, a contratenor is essential, the qualifying condition for a solus tenor, but the
complex career of this motet and its contrafaction needs further work. Such parts
may have been provided by musicians who had access only to a solus tenor but not to
the original tenor and contratenor.

36 Bent, Counterpoint, Composition and Musica Ficta, ch. 8, and its Introduction, pp. 38–​46. Score nota-

tion at this period was confined to homophonic textures, and complex notation requiring linear contextual
reading was in any case unsuited to vertical presentation in score.
37 Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices for Vitry’. Unlike the solus tenor, the newly found tenor is the verse ‘Non

est inventus similis illi qui conservavit legem excelsi’ from the Gradual Ecce sacerdos magnus. This of course
corresponds much more closely than the solus tenor to known versions of the chant specified as Non est
inventus similis illi in Vienna4195, a text-​only source. See Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 126.
38 See Kügle, ‘Two Abbots and a Rotulus’, 146, and Table 27.1 for sources of Impudenter/​Virtutibus. For

another contratenor to Impudenter/​Virtutibus, composed against the solus tenor (in Bern), see Steiger, ‘Das
Berner Chansonnier-​Fragment’, 57–​60.
39 This motet appears to be a contrafact of Gaudeat et exultet in Basel71, with the second part Papam

querentes. See Chs. 26 and 30.

 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 35

Any deviations by the solus tenor from a strict lower-​voice conflation may betray
its origin at an earlier compositional stage, as I have proposed for Pycard’s virtuosic
OH Gloria no. 27 with double canon, where its deviations from the definitive tenor and
contratenor parts at the lower-​voice canon’s five-​breve interval may attest an earlier ver-
sion of the canon.40 In some cases, conflation would eradicate a clever compositional
conceit, as in that canon and that of O amicus; see Chapter 22.
The lower parts of Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis (CMM 39, no. 5; PMFC 5, no. 26), are
confused in Chantilly, where the only support is provided by the solus tenor. A unique
contratenor is so labelled in a different, informal script, and does not underpin the
tenor, which is absent. Stras preserves the Chantilly solus tenor, labelled ‘tenor’, and
the missing tenor, labelled ‘contratenor’. What is lacking is the original contratenor from
which the tenor–​contratenor conflation of the solus tenor was made. Terminology for
such parts, and for substitute or added parts, was quite often inconsistent.
Many motets which qualify by contratenor function are not transmitted with solus
tenors, perhaps because their preparatory role was no longer needed. This applies to
Dunstaple’s motets, most notably to the well-​known four-​part Veni sancte spiritus (MB
8, no. 32) whose chosen chant segment, as noted, does not even end with a stepwise de-
scent. The jagged texted contratenor leaps above and below the tenor and could have
been conflated to form a supporting solus tenor. A part so labelled for that motet in
Mu3224 is in fact not a solus tenor but a tenor ad longum.

Tenors ad longum

A small repertory of eight motets dating from about 1400 to 1430 survives with tenor
parts marked ad longum—​substitute parts for notationally difficult tenors: works
by Dunstaple, Binchois, Ciconia, Brassart, Velut, Carmen and Antonius de Civitate.
Ciconia’s Petrum Marcello also has a contratenor ad longum.41 As J. Michael Allsen
pointed out, at least three of the ad longum parts in these manuscripts seem to have
been later additions by the scribe who initially copied the motet. The tenor ad longum
accompanying Brassart’s Magne Deus potencie in Q15 was written on a formerly
blank staff at the bottom of the page (f. R253v). Likewise, both of the ad longum parts
in Ox213—​for Clarus ortu and Benedicta viscera—​were added at the bottom of an
opening, in a different ink colour from the rest of the motet. The tenor ad longum of
Dunstaple’s three-​part Veni sancte spiritus (MB 8, no. 33) appears only in the Tr92 copy,
and would have been necessary here to overcome the omission of rests at the end of the
tenor, which disables this already difficult part.
Perhaps the earliest instance of a tenor ad longum is for the motet Inter densas in
Chantilly, although there labelled ‘solus tenor’. Among the few motet tenors with men-
sural reinterpretation of a homographic tenor, which include Sub Arturo and Portio na-
ture/​Ida capillorum, Inter densas/​Imbribus irriguis is the most extreme instance, without

40 ‘Pycard’s Double Canon: Evidence of Revision?’, and Bent, Counterpoint, Composition and Musica

Ficta, ch. 9.
41 They have been admirably investigated by Allsen, ‘Tenores ad longum’, which discusses reasons for the

inclusion of such parts or of other rhythmic cues.

36 Compositional Techniques

precedent or consequence.42 It is an essay in difference, virtuosically exploiting the

potential of its full series of note values: the tenor color consists of just six notes: gg
fdsa . Eight statements of strikingly different overall length exploit most available
permutations of imperfection and alteration, modus, tempus, and prolation, although
there are no consistent modus-​level groupings. Despite the equivalence of the unaltered
minim in all statements, the overall lengths of its tenor statements are contrived to be as
diversely proportioned as 27:12, 12:8, 18:8, 18:8, a series framed by the cubes of 3 and of
2 but in no discernible order.
Tenor relationships of Inter densas:

statement prolation tempus Modus maximodus semibreves of ç in

g–​f f–​d d –​s s –​ a upper parts

1 3 3 3 3 54
2 3 2 3 2 24
3 2 3 2 3 24
4 2 2 2 2 16
5 2 3 3 3 36
6 2 2 3 2 16
7 3 3 2 3 36
8 3 3 2 2 12 +​Mx(8) =​20

The relationships are spelt out in a verbal canon. Without that help, and even with it, a
correct solution to the tenor of Inter densas is quite challenging, more so had it not been re-
solved in the provision of a part labelled ‘solus tenor’ (as noted, in fact a tenor ad longum).
It incorporates (sometimes only approximately) the contratenor’s short interludes only
in the rests between the long tenor statements. The contratenor provides essential sup-
port in those interludes but the only otherwise unsupported fourth it underpins is the
very first note of the motet. The tenor ad longum accommodates the actual tenor to the
major prolation of the other parts, with awkward results when the tenor statements are in
minor prolation. A solus tenor would have taken the lowest notes of an essential tenor–​
contratenor pair, which this does not do. A tenor ad longum is a simplified spelling out of
a complex or riddle tenor, relieving the singer of the need to solve a mensural rereading.
Later this would more commonly be called a ‘resolutio’. This could be done post facto as an
aid to singers or, like a solus tenor, may well have served as a basis for the composition of
the upper parts of this particularly complex piece. Perhaps significantly, the gnomic six-​
note tenor is notated after the tenor ad longum, on the same staff; perhaps this was how the
composer worked out its permutations in relation to the upper parts.
Since Ursula Günther (CMM 39) the text has been treated as referring to Gaston
Fébus, Count of Foix. If indeed it refers to him it must probably be dated in the 1380s,

42 Its tenor Admirabile is misprinted as Admirabilem in some scholarly writings, including, alas, one

of mine. This motet is also discussed in Bent, ‘The Measurement’ (1998) and Zazulia, ‘A Motet Ahead of
its Time?’, 349. Most recently, Kévin Roger has identified precisely this rhythmic sequence in the Libellus
attributed to Jean de Muris, as his ninth example of alteration. Roger, ‘La composition du tenor’, 193–​96.
 Theoretical and Terminological Issues 37

or at least before his death in 1391, which is very early for its advanced and unique
features. But Karl Kügle has recently argued (in an unpublished paper, June 2017) that
the associations described in the text apply only weakly to the Count of Foix, and that
a stronger candidate for the milieu described is the entourage of Giangaleazzo Visconti
(d. 1402), or even that of his advisor Pietro Filargo, later Pope Alexander V. This striking
conclusion has the merit of offering a more plausible dating closer to 1400. But Anne
Stone, also in an unpublished paper (December 2017), believes that it can only refer
to Gaston Fébus, and certainly the imagery suggests this. In subsequent correspond-
ence (25 November 2020) she notes that the triplum text ‘is cast as a dream-​vision, so
that the subject described appears in a dream rather than in reality’. Rather than the
poet encountering the dedicatee and his men in the forest (Günther), ‘the text actu-
ally says that the poet is in the forest, falls asleep, and then sees the red-​haired, jewel-​
encrusted figure. Could the dedicatee be someone who is no longer living?’ That would
open the possibility of a later dating. Certainly the motet tenor’s extreme mensural con-
ceit is unique, whether before or after 1400, and seems technically precocious for an
earlier date.

Tenors and contratenors

I have discussed these roles elsewhere, notably in ‘Naming of Parts’. Here I will simply
reiterate the crucial distinction in four-​part motets between contratenors that are con-
trapuntally inessential and those that are essential. The inessential kind may not always
be above the tenor; it can be omitted without damage to the texture and is indeed often
demonstrably a later addition, as in the case of Ciconia’s motets and of later versions of
Apollinis, or it is at least unstable in transmission. Essential contratenors on the other
hand were usually designed and composed together with tenors, often providing con-
trapuntal support (to otherwise unsupported fourths), especially where the chant-​
carrying function of the tenor does not allow it to be the contrapuntal basis as well. It
is presumably this kind of contratenor that the author of De modo componendi tenores
motettorum prescribed to be written immediately after the organisation of the tenor.
Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8) and Dunstaple’s four-​part Veni sancte spiritus (MB 8, no. 32) pro-
vide clear examples of essential contratenors.

Four-​part Compositional Types

Under half of the PMFC 5 motets (13/​30) are a4, and of those, only two, Rex Karole/​
Leticie pacis and Post missarum/​Post misse, have essential contratenors; both have solus
tenors. Of motets attributed to Vitry, on the other hand, four, Petre clemens/​Lugentium,
Vos/​Gratissima, Impudenter/​Virtutibus and O canenda/​Rex have essential contratenors,
and all but the last are transmitted with a solus tenor.43 Criteria for an inessential

43 Although there are no obvious reasons to attribute Post missarum to Vitry, it may be worth noting that it

has an essential contratenor and a solus tenor, and that the other three motets preserved with it in Aachen all
have a strong claim on his authorship.
38 Compositional Techniques

contratenor are that it does not provide essential support when the tenor is resting,
and that, when below the tenor, it does not support otherwise unsupported fourths.
All Ciconia’s contratenors are inessential, some demonstrably added later. Inessential
contratenors are often unstably transmitted, sometimes in alternative versions.
These criteria underlie the two main distinct types of four-​part motets and mass
compositions. Most involve the addition of a grammatically expendable contratenor
to a self-​contained three-​part structure. No solus tenor parts survive for such motets.
Some of these contratenor parts can not only be omitted without damage to the con-
trapuntal core, but they seem to operate outside the grammar of contrapuntally based
composition, their conventions little understood. The other type of four-​part motet is a
small class where the tenor carries a cantus firmus that prevents it from also supporting
the counterpoint. Here, exceptionally, the contratenor takes over or shares the tenor’s
contrapuntal role, providing some essential notes, especially by supporting structural
fourths from below the tenor, such as Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8). This is the defining char-
acteristic of all pieces that have, or any that could have had, a solus tenor part.

Conclusion

This first chapter has addressed a number of technical issues about how motets were
made, a recurrent theme of this book. Many of the following chapters raise more
questions than they answer, especially about the order in which the interrelationships
of text and music were worked out, often demonstrably together, and how they were
constrained by pre-​existent material, verbal or musical, and by self-​imposed structural
disciplines. The answers are different for each of the motets examined in detail, which,
together with the hegemony of isorhythm interrogated in Chapter 2, invites a view of
these works as unique and individual conceptions, far removed from a priori templates
or prescriptions, such as those given in De modo componendi tenores motettorum,
which opened this chapter. Apparent instances of word-painting sometimes challenge
decisions about whether musical anomalies are intentional or erroneous, as in the non-​
coincident endings treated above. All this is fertile territory for further work, for which
I hope this book may provide an incentive and an invitation.
 2
What is Isorhythm?

Preamble

My 2008 essay was an attempt to articulate and sharpen a growing discomfort with a
disjunction between the modern term isorhythm and the way it had come to be used
and understood.1 Ernest Sanders, Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson and others had drawn back
from the term, or used it with some care. My own position evolved through several
writings, notably NG2 (Isorhythm), ‘The Measurement’, and ‘Yoxford Credo’ (here Ch.
23). In most cases, my earlier statements as this view evolved have been superseded, and
in other chapters in this volume have been removed from their original locations.
I had expected that this would be one of the chapters of this book least in need of
updating, but two significant recent contributions to the subject demand notice: one is
Anna Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, the other Lawrence Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, both
published in 2018. Instead of attempting to work them into a revision of my essay, I will
preface a lightly edited version with these brief comments.
I appreciate the thoughtful critique of Lawrence Earp, rooted in his deep know-
ledge both of the musical antecedents and in detail of the writings of Friedrich Ludwig
and Heinrich Besseler. Those have led him to offer refinements to my historiograph-
ical report, while broadly accepting my premise, by arguing that although Ludwig
said ‘equal’ he often intended periodic recurrence, not in the sense of literal rhythmic
repetition—​what we might call isoperiodic rather than isorhythmic in the strict sense.2
He cites Besseler’s recognition that much of what Ludwig called isorhythmic was in fact
isoperiodic, and states ‘the problem with “isorhythm” has been that the term is too easily
interpreted in the wrong sense’; this indeed was the recognition that had prompted my
article.3 It is the wrong term. Had Besseler stuck to his preferred term, the ‘isoperiodic
motet’, much misunderstanding would have been avoided. ‘Isoperiodic’ works well
for motets without a reduced second (or third) section, like Machaut’s Motet 9 (Ch.
9), with its rhythmically identical tenor taleae, but its partial isorhythmic correspond-
ence in the upper parts is insufficient to earn their overall designation as ‘isorhythmic’
or their periods as taleae. It also serves where upper-​part periods embrace multiple
tenor taleae, as in Machaut’s Motet 15 (Ch. 10), or in rarer cases, fewer. And it could

1 This paper under the same title, ‘What is Isorhythm?’, was originally published in David Butler Cannata,

with Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie, Rena Charnin Mueller, and John Nádas (eds.), Quomodo Cantabimus Canticum?
Studies in Honor of Edward H. Roesner (Middleton, WI, 2008), 121–​43. The present adaptation is published
with permission from the American Institute of Musicology. The late Edward Roesner has been a career-​long
inspiration and a cherished friend. In dedicating the revision of this essay to his memory, I am grateful for
stimulus in all aspects of 14th-​c. music as well as for sharing his unsurpassed knowledge of Wagner perfor-
mance. Other colleagues previously thanked are now listed in the Preface and Acknowledgements.
2 Though I stand by my translation of ‘rhythmisch exakt gleich’ as implying rhythmical identity and not

merely periodic correspondence.

3 Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, 87 n. 30 and 88.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0003
40 Compositional Techniques

serve for cases where regular upper-​voice periods bounded by rests can be defined as
bridging and overlapping with tenor taleae, as for example by application of Sanders’s
modular numbers in Garrit gallus (see Fig. 4.3) or the wraparound isorhythmic ends
and beginnings of taleae in Machaut’s Motet 9 ( Ex. 9.1). But for tenor iterations that
accelerate, whether by diminution, mensural change or proportion, ‘isoperiodic’ will
serve no better than ‘isorhythmic’.
There is much agreement and some overlap in our respective accounts. Earp’s
is more concerned with the roots of repetition strategies in the thirteenth century
and their transition into the fourteenth, mine more with how the isorhythmic yoke
historiographically imposed on fourteenth-​century works has skewed the way both
they and fifteenth-​century developments are viewed. One key area of agreement is that
rhythmic replication is not in itself the goal or indeed the most interesting feature of
a motet, but rather underpins how an individual motet’s unique design serves a com-
plex web of verbal and musical meanings. Earp cites instances which might qualify as
programme music.4 Precisely. The many ways in which individual motets bear meaning
is a central premiss of this book, and I have here and previously demonstrated instances
of the wide range of ways in which this is achieved, at structural, symbolic, numerical,
verbal, programmatic and depictive levels. It will be clear from many chapters that I be-
lieve that at least the most original motets are unique creations, in no way following
templates.
Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, also published in 2018, seeks to modify the
common understanding that tenors are the primary shaping force, prior in conception
to the upper voices. Her interesting counter-​hypothesis is that in some cases the mu-
sical design of the upper voices could have been in place before the tenor was planned
or chosen. It is certainly possible that the prior materia of a motet before the choice of
tenor, as specified in De modo componendi tenores motettorum, could include musical
as well as textual material. My study of Tribum (now absorbed into Ch. 4) set out to
show that pre-​existent textual material was a building block of equal importance to the
music and text of the pre-​existent tenor in that motet. But where it can be demonstrated
(again in Tribum and elsewhere) that melodic and rhythmic material from the tenor is
worked into the upper parts, it is harder to maintain that they preceded the tenor. In
what may have been an extreme case, Zayaruznaya argues that the composer of Colla/​
Bona had already written the texts and worked out the periodic structure of the upper
parts before choosing the tenor and giving it a repetition pattern that is at odds with its
upper voices.5 Could it not equally well be that the upper parts are given a pattern that
is at odds with the tenor? At least for Vitry and Machaut, and for other internally signed
texts, it seems that motet composers usually wrote their own texts (except in rare cases
of specified collaboration). Internal evidence suggests a complex relationship between
borrowed and newly composed material, both text and music, often closely planned
and adjusted together, and with different priorities in different motets, such as to defy

4 Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, citing Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 46–​52.

5 Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, ch. 6, and ‘Materia Matters’. I find it hard to agree with her con-
clusion; and Earp, ‘ “The spirit moves me” ’, 290–​95 gives a convincing counter-​argument. Zayaruznaya, The
Monstrous New Art, 4–​5, draws attention to anticipations of parts of my argument in several contributions to
Les Colloques de Wégimont. II, 1955, L’ars nova: Recueil d’études sur la musique du XIVe siècle (Paris, 1959).
 What is Isorhythm? 41

generalisations about the order of the compositional process in these most individual
works. Zayaruznaya’s valuable contributions on the terminology of color and talea are
reported below.​

What is Isorhythm?

The isorhythmic motet is assuredly one of the most splendid creations of the mu-
sical thought of mankind. The rigid laws governing its composition brought about a
rationalisation of that most irrational of psychic activities—​artistic inspiration; and by
means of numbers, of which it is a sonorous expression, they succeeded in subjugating
the movements of musical fantasy to the solid framework of a preconceived idea,
product of the rational mind. What could be further removed from our present con-
ception of music than this art, 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. It is indeed hardly proper to call by the same word ‘music’
that product of scholastic rationalism, and the creations of today, whose fundamental
laws were edicted in order to make of music the vehicle of sentiments born in the
heart of man. . . . The isorhythmic motet is the purest expression of a hermetic art,
whose subtleness can only be grasped by the innermost regions of the mind, by those
faculties which seem to lie midway between the mens and the anima. Such music was
not written to please the ear, and those who seek therein a message for the heart must
needs be disappointed.
Isorhythmy [sic] was the finest expression of the XIVth century musical ideal, the
arcanum which only the few could penetrate, and which constituted the supreme test
of the composer’s ability. However, excessive rationalisation brought about its deca­
dence, inasmuch as the rigidity of its character determined a nec plus ultra against
which a reaction was inevitable. The embryo of this salutary escape from the sterility of
the ratio was hidden in the music of the Italian schools, animated by the golden dawn
of Humanism.6

In these elevated terms, Guillaume De Van introduced his edition of Du Fay’s motets
in 1948, less than half a century after the modern term isorhythm had first been
appropriated for musicology. The language may be unusually extravagant, but the status
of the isorhythmic motet which it presents has long been taken for granted. It is regu-
larly referred to in terms such as ‘the grandiose manifestation of the speculative medi-
eval view’, ‘that great monument of medieval rationalism’, and chapter headings such as
‘Die Spätblüte der isorhythmischen Motette’ or ‘The Pride of the Isorhythmic Motet’ are
not uncommon.7

6 CMM 1/​2, ed. De Van, pp. i–​ii. The volumes produced by De Van were later re-​edited, and the edition

completed, by Heinrich Besseler.

7 Respectively: Dammann, ‘Spätformen der isorhythmischen Motette’; Cumming, The Motet in the Age

of Du Fay, 82; Finscher and Laubenthal, ‘ “Cantiones quae vulgo motectae vocantur” ’; Strohm, The Rise, 39.
See also the important study by Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay und die isorhythmische Motette, which in ch. 2
(‘Umrisse eines Gattungstypologischen Entwurfs’) reviews the history and definitions of the term as it has
42 Compositional Techniques

It is one of three substantial genres that feature in any survey of the early centuries of
Western polyphony: organum, the isorhythmic motet, and the cyclic mass. It was on the
basis of such instances of sustained compositional planning that composers of seven
hundred years ago could be hailed, seventy years ago, as intellectually sophisticated,
worthy forebears of their more recent successors in the Western tradition. Now that
the study of music has opened up to non-​Western and non-​literate musics, criteria that
find guarantees of artistic quality in large-​scale form, musical unity and mathematical
underpinnings sound dated as a basis for value judgement.
The isorhythmic motet was compared by Heinrich Besseler to sonata form at a time
when that term carried unchallenged generic force. Charles Rosen described his book
on sonata forms as

an attempt to see what can be salvaged of the traditional view of sonata form. Its
insufficiencies, its absurdities, even, have become steadily more glaring. The more en-
lightened musicologists today apply the term to works of the eighteenth century only pru-
dently, sceptically, half-​heartedly, and with many reservations, spoken and unspoken. Yet
I think we still need the term for an understanding of that period as well as for those which
came after.8

‘Isorhythm’ has not yet undergone the unpicking that Rosen and others have applied
to ‘sonata form’, now more prudently used (as he did) in the plural; it is time that it
did. ‘Isorhythmic’ as an adjective invites more limited and critical use while, as a
genre label, ‘the isorhythmic motet’ presents serious problems, terminologically and
historiographically. This essay calls for a more critical application of the term ‘isorhythm’
(Gr. ἴσος, equal, and ῤυθμός, rhythm). It has been stretched well beyond the original
meaning for which it was first used, quite properly, in 1904, and applied to kinds of
repetition which it no longer accurately describes, namely things which are either not
equal or do not refer to rhythm or only to rhythm.
Even the word ‘rhythm’ is never used in the Middle Ages to mean what we now
understand by musical rhythm, which from at least the early fourteenth century was
expressed in terms of measure, mensura, mensuration.9 But since the intended meaning
of the ‘rhythm’ part of isorhythm is well established in modern usage I will merely signal
the problem here and use ‘rhythm’ in its commonly understood sense, hard though
modern dictionaries find that to define beyond ‘patterns of duration’, aspects of musical
movement as ordered in time. However, many instances of equality purported to be
‘isorhythm’ turn out not to require isolation of the rhythmic dimension, either because:

(1) Both melody and rhythm are repeated, whether as (a) simple repetition,
with melody and rhythm coinciding, not requiring rhythm to be isolated; or

been used; his concern is to situate the genre historically and philosophically, rather than to challenge the
appropriateness of the term and its boundaries. For the main purposes of his book, he retains the received dis-
tinction between Du Fay’s ‘isorhythmic’ and ‘non-​isorhythmic’ motets, discussing only the former.

8 Rosen, Sonata Forms, Preface.

9 See Crocker, ‘Musica Rhythmica’, and Bent, ‘Diatonic Ficta’, pp. 1–​3, for the absence of single medieval
terms for what we understand by pitch and rhythm, and Wilhelm Seidel’s thirty-​six-​page article ‘Rhythmus/​
numerus’ (1980) in HMT.
 What is Isorhythm? 43

(b) overlapping repetitions of melody and rhythm requiring separate specifica-

tion not just of rhythm, but of both melody and rhythm; or
(2) the melody rather than the rhythm is repeated. This category includes cases both
(a) where the internal relationships between repetitions are by no standards
rhythmically equal, to the extent that they require separate notation for suc-
cessive statements; and (b) where the same notation may yield different results,
whether or not the subsequent statements are separately written out or respelt.

Derivation from the same notation will here be called homographic.10

In both cases, exaggerated or misplaced emphasis on rhythm (at the expense of
melody or counterpoint) as a structuring technique has not only deformed teaching
and analysis of the motet repertory, but has also placed a central distorting construction
on late-​medieval music history.
‘Iso’, ‘equal’, is the main focus of this essay. Beyond the cases where rhythm is wrongly
emphasised at the expense of the melodic component, the claim of rhythmic equality
will be challenged on further levels (developed from 2(b), above): cases where the in-
ternal relationships, even where derived from the same notation, are described as ‘the
same rhythm but faster’. Thus, many cases of tenor repetitions in so-​called ‘isorhythmic’
motets are subjected to various kinds of (usually) accelerating transformation, some of
which result in slight rhythmic differences that again undermine the designation ‘iso’.
Where there are slight internal differences of rhythm, the result could be described as
similar (homoeorhythmic) but not ‘equal’ (iso). Where there is no difference of internal
relationships, the result might well be described as ‘the same (homorhythmic), but
faster’, where to say ‘equal (isorhythmic), but faster’ would make no sense. While both
‘homoeorhythmic’ and ‘homorhythmic’ may prove useful in describing the results of
different readings of a single notated (homographic) tenor, they may obscure, and fail to
align with, the different processes by which those results are derived. It is processes that
lie at the heart of this challenge to the concept; isorhythm describes a resulting struc-
ture, not usually the process by which it was attained. While it is true to say that ‘equal’
is not always the same as ‘same’, it is nonsense to say that ‘same’ is equal to ‘equal’. In an
isosceles triangle, two sides are equal to each other but not the same as each other. If one
of those sides is reduced to half its previous length, the triangle is no longer isosceles.

Color and talea

Medieval music theorists neither had nor needed a single term for what we call
isorhythm. They used the terms color and talea for the articulation and segmentation
of the tenor cantus firmus. It has long been known that contemporary theorists gave
inconsistent definitions of these terms, using them synonymously or even with appar-
ently reversed meanings, but the full extent of that inconsistency has only recently been

10 Leofranc Holford-​ Strevens proposed the elegant Greek-​derived word ‘isosemantic’ to replace my
mongrel ‘isonotational’, offering ‘isosemasy’ (Gr. ἰσοσημασία) for the abstract noun, noting that σημασία
(semasia) is actually found in Greek for musical notation. However, discussion with a number of colleagues
has shown a slight preference for ‘homography’ and ‘homographic’ as serviceable English words, and prefer-
able to ‘equinotational’.
44 Compositional Techniques

set out by Zayaruznaya in a challenge to current usage.11 Her useful and comprehensive
demonstration very effectively makes the point that the terms were at least as often used
with meanings other than those in current usage. Her welcome edition and translation
of the treatise discussed at the beginning of Chapter 1, De modo componendi tenores
motettorum, hitherto attributed to Egidius, is presented in the context of documenting
the varying definitions. Although the theoretical testimony favours color as a general
term for repetition of pitch or rhythm, with a bias to rhythm rather than melody, when
talea is separately defined, it does always seem to refer to the same note-​shapes, i.e.
rhythm. Unequivocal support for the modern usage comes only from the Ars cantus
mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris. While fully acknowledging this confusion, for
reasons of clarity I retain the settled modern usage of color for repeated pitch content,
talea for rhythm, pending further suggestions. Where upper-​voice periodicity subsumes
multiple short tenor taleae into larger units (as in Tribum/​Quoniam, Cum statua/​Hugo,
Vos/​Gratissima, several Machaut motets including M15), Georg Reichert called such
larger periods Großtalea, Jacques Boogaart supertalea, and Zayaruznaya blocks. The
term ‘double talea’ can apply where a pair of identical tenor taleae serves a single upper-​
voice talea, or ‘period’ where those larger units have deviations, as when the upper-​part
structures are, as often, not fully isorhythmic. I try to reserve the term talea for iterations
that are either exact or homographic.12 Despite these problems, color and talea offer a
starting point for developing a more responsive analytical vocabulary to balance the
components of motet construction. In modern usage, the single term isorhythm came
to be applied—​often misleadingly—​to a wide range of late-​medieval motet and mass
compositional strategies. The twin structuring role of melody is marginalised by a term
which sets priority on rhythm and has been wrongly used both for simple repetitions
and for melodic repeats with changed or overlapping rhythm (categories 1 and 2 above).

Origins and History

Let us review the origins and history of the term. The German word Isorhythmie was
coined for music by Friedrich Ludwig in 1904 to describe the local application of equal,
non-​diminishing, rhythmic repetitions to different melodic units in the motetus part of
the thirteenth-​century motet On parole/​A Paris/​Frese nouvele:13

Both [upper] voices have completely freed themselves from the old [rhythmic] modes, as
has the tenor. Instead, the motetus, at least for the first five bars of each period, and despite
the completely different verse metres which occur within those periods, realises a struc-
ture rhythmically exactly identical (isorhythmic), which, as I have indicated before, is the
rule for motets of the fourteenth century. The triplum, in a few noteworthy instances, also
participates in the isorhythmic treatment of the individual periods. It is not yet consist-
ently carried through for the entire motet, however, not even in the motetus. . . . While up

11 The appendix of Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, conveniently assembles the relevant theoretical

writings. See also the Preamble to the present chapter.

12 These statements are documented in Ch. 12 n. 18. See also Ch. 10 n. 4.
13 On parole/​A Paris/​Frese nouvele is in Mo, ff. 368v–​369v, no. 302 in RISM, 319 (in the editions of Rokseth

and Tischler).
 What is Isorhythm? 45

to this point it was the norm, especially for the motetus, to maintain the verse metre in its
melodic declamation, and at most to abandon it for special reasons in a few places, in this
motet [on the contrary], a purely rhythmic principle prevails over verse metre and word
accent, which soon establishes itself just as despotically as at the beginning of the history
of the motet when, conversely, text metre completely governed the musical rhythm. The
latter principle is indeed valid as an internal structural device, even if its exclusive appli-
cation can lead to monotony, short-​changing melody in the interests of rhythm. 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 unified layout of the upper
voices as well). This necessarily leads to acts of violence, which are even present in this first
composition (in a lighter genre), which takes this as its point of departure.14

As usual in these motets, the tenor part has a straightforward repetition of both
rhythm and melody, so there is no need to isolate the rhythmic element. ‘Isorhythmic’
does, however, accurately denote the rhythmic identity applied to changing melody in
the motetus. Had Ludwig and his followers simply retained that local, descriptive sense,
this essay would not be necessary. However, even here, the references to despotisch
and Gewalttätigkeiten (‘despotic’, and ‘violent acts’) already suggest the iron grip of an
a priori scheme whose ideal was to achieve a complete conformity, measured against
which other tactics were found wanting.
Ludwig next applied the term in 1905, in a long review of Johannes Wolf ’s Geschichte
der Mensural-​Notation von 1250–​1460 (Leipzig, 1904). Wolf had pointed out the short-
ening of tenor note-​values in the second part of many Machaut motets, which Ludwig
glosses as ‘Diminution, wie er es nennt’, perhaps distancing himself from this use of
the term. Ludwig comments on his transcription of Machaut’s Motet 3, Fine Amour/​
He! Mors/​Quare non sum mortuus, where the tenor color of twenty-​five notes, first
presented as longs and maximas, then as breves and longs, is divided into three and
a half völlig gleichgebaute Abschnitte (completely equally constructed sections). Wolf ’s
transcription of the first section in imperfect modus is approved, but criticised for con-
tinuing this modus into the second rhythmisch veränderten Teil (rhythmically altered

14 ‘Beide Stimmen haben sich vom alten Modus völlig gelöst, ebenso wie der Tenor; statt dessen führt der

Motetus wenigstens für die fünf ersten Takte der Perioden trotz der ganz verschiedenen Metren, die in sie
fallen, einen rhythmisch exakt gleichen (isorhythmischen) Bau durch, der, wie ich schon einmal andeutete,
in den Motetten des 14. Jahrhunderts die Regel ist. Auch das Triplum beteiligt sich an der isorhythmischen
Behandlung der einzelnen Perioden mit einigen beachtenswerten Ansätzen; eine konsequente Durchführung
für die ganze Motette liegt aber auch im Motetus hier noch nicht vor. . . . Galt es bisher besonders für den
Motetus immer noch als Regel, das Versmetrum auch in der melodischen Deklamation zu bewahren und
höchstens aus speziellen Gründen es an einzelnen Stellen aufzugeben, so hat in dieser Motette ein rein
rhythmisches Prinzip über Versmetrum und Wortbetonung den Sieg davongetragen, und bald setzt es
sich ebenso despotisch durch, wie am Anfang der Geschichte der Motette umgekehrt das Textmetrum den
musikalischen Rhythmus völlig beherrschte. Ist das letztere Prinzip etwas innerlich durchaus Berechtigtes,
wenn auch seine ausschließliche Durchführung zur Eintönigkeit führen kann und die Melodie auf Kosten
des Rhythmus verkürzt, so führt das neue, die Durchführung der Isorhythmik auch in den Oberstimmen, nur
weil der Tenor so baut und die Kompliziertheit des sich mehrere Male wiederholenden Tenorrhythmus bald
die rhythmisch einheitliche Anordnung auch der Oberstimmen als Gegengewicht verlangt, notwendig zu
Gewalttätigkeiten, die auch in dieser ersten Komposition leichteren Genres, die diesen Standpunkt aufzeigt,
nicht fehlen.’ Ludwig, ‘Studien’, 223–​24. The English term isorhythm first appears in late 19th-​c. classical
studies to describe lines with the same number of poetic feet, or for two poems in the same metre (Oxford
English Dictionary), but I have yet to find a classicist colleague familiar with the term.
46 Compositional Techniques

part), where ‘it here completely destroys the phrase structure; not only in the tenor do
the analogous notes fall in rhythmically different places, but also in the upper voices,
since these also mark out the isorhythm of the individual tenor sections very clearly’.15
Ludwig is careful to limit isorhythm (here as a noun) to the identical taleae within each
color, to refer to the second reduced section as ‘rhythmically altered’ (its note values as
analogous, not equal), and to be cautious in applying the term ‘diminution’.
The next mention is in 1910, again for thirteenth-​century motets, but recognising its
extension into the fourteenth century and beyond:

Musically, on superficial examination, the motet at first gives a more antiquated impres-
sion, since the motetus is entirely in the old second rhythmic mode. . . . But on thorough
analysis, a completely new way of disposing the periodic structure of the upper voices
becomes apparent for the first time. This new disposition, which attained absolute domi-
nance in the fourteenth-​century motet and which would continue to play this role into the
fifteenth century, is that of—​as I would like to call this structure—​isorhythm of the upper-​
voice periods in the individual tenor statements.16

Ludwig here applied this to the motet Amor vincens omnia/​Marie preconio/​Aptatur,
which has some successive phrases of equal length, but with similar rather than the
same rhythm.17 The fourteenth-​century use of this phenomenon, already a departure
from the original sense, was later called by Besseler ‘isoperiodic’, a term subsequently
explained by Ursula Günther as meaning that ‘the upper voices only follow the plan of
the lower voices in a general way, or have merely a few bars rhythmically identical in
each Tenor period’.18
Ludwig contributed the major medieval section to Adler’s Handbuch (1924),
entitled: ‘Die geistliche, nichtliturgische, weltliche einstimmige und die mehrstimmige
Musik des Mittelalters’. The heading of sub-​chapter IV reads: ‘Die französischen
Balladen, Virelais und Rondeaux des 14. Jahrhunderts; die isorhythmische Motette
des 14. und beginnenden 15. Jahrhunderts; die italienischen Madrigale, Balladen und
Cacce; die mehrstimmige Messe des 14. Jahrhunderts. Etwa 1300–​1430.’19 Here for the
first time we find recognition of ‘the isorhythmic motet’ as a genre label for the fourteenth

15 ‘zerstört er hier die Periodenbildung völlig: nicht nur im Tenor kommen jedesmal die analogen Töne

der einzelnen Abschnitte auf rhythmisch verschiedene Stellen, sondern auch in den Oberstimmen, da diese
die Isorhythmie der einzelnen Tenorabschnitte ebenfalls ganz scharf ausprägen’. Review of Wolf by Friedrich
Ludwig, in SIMG 6/​4 (July 1905), 597–​641. I owe this reference to Busse Berger, Art of Memory, 13.
16 ‘Musikalisch macht die Motette bei oberflächlicher Betrachtung zunächst einen älteren Eindruck, da der

Mot. ganz im alten 2. Modus . . . Bei eingehender Untersuchung aber zeigt sich hier zum 1. Mal eine ganz neue
Art der Disposition der Periodenbildung der Oberstimmen, die dann im 14. Jahrhundert zur Alleinherrschaft
in der Motette gelangen und diese Rolle weiter bis in das 15. Jahrhundert hinein spielen sollte: die, wie ich
diesen Bau nennen möchte, Isorhythmie der Oberstimmenperioden in den einzelnen T.-​Durchführungen.’
Ludwig, Repertorium, 444 ff.
17 Mo, ff. 321v–​322v, no. 266 in RISM, no. 283 in the editions of Rokseth and Tischler.
18 Günther, ‘The 14th-​century Motet’, 29. Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 201 n. 1, noun, Isoperiodik. The term was

also taken up by Handschin, Musikgeschichte im Überblick, 201. The observation is consonant with Ernest
Sanders’s discovery of what he calls modular numbers, isoperiodic (but not isorhythmic) upper-​voice phrases
separated by rests, sometimes strikingly juxtaposed over a different underlying number structure in the lower
parts. See Sanders, ‘The Medieval Motet’. Sanders is careful not to overwork the term: ‘It does not seem par-
ticularly helpful to apply the term “isorhythm” to motets with upper voices whose phrases, while showing an
ordered arrangement, exhibit no isorhythmic parallelisms whatsoever’ (561 n. 268).
19 Adler, Handbuch (1924), i. 228.
 What is Isorhythm? 47

and indeed the fifteenth centuries. This was followed by the Habilitationsschrift of
Ludwig’s sometime student Heinrich Besseler, published in two instalments (‘Studien’
I and II, 1925 and 1926), which demonstrated a further significant escalation of the
status of isorhythm:

From now on [c. 1316, and Paris146], all fourteenth-​century French motets are, with a
few insignificant exceptions, isorhythmic. This constructional principle, which for over
a century, i.e. until the age of Dunstable and Dufay, held ‘canonical status’, is to be named
on an equal footing with the two great forms of Baroque and classical music, the da capo
aria and sonata form. It must, accordingly, have been consciously presented for the first
time shortly before 1316, between two such closely related works as Adesto and Quoniam,
maintained and seized upon as the ideal new motet form . . . that Vitry is to be regarded as
the creator of the isorhythmic ars nova motet.20

It must have been his exchanges with Besseler that prompted the normally judicious
Ludwig to endorse this leap, first in 1924 and, more strongly after the publication of
Besseler’s work, in the revision of his chapter in the Handbuch, attested by the shared
language of their newly formulated descriptions. In Ludwig’s revision of his essay for
the 1930 edition of Adler’s Handbuch, the isorhythmic motet (note the paradigmatic
singular) has moved up to take pride of place: ‘Die isorhythmische Motette des 14.
und beginnenden 15. Jahrhunderts; die französischen Chaces, Balladen, Virelais und
Rondeaux des 14. Jahrhunderts; die italienischen Madrigale, Balladen und Cacce; die
mehrstimmige Messe des 14. Jahrhunderts. Etwa 1300–​1430.’21
Ludwig now endorses Besseler’s 1926 coronation of Vitry as the Schöpfer (creator) of
‘the isorhythmic motet’, exalted by both men to an epochal plane of kanonische Geltung
(canonical status), which remained ‘fixed, unchanged into the first decades of the fif-
teenth century’:

As H. Besseler has plausibly suggested, they probably include several early works of
Philippe de Vitry, in which the young master, then about 25 years old, inaugurates
the epoch of the ‘isorhythmic motet’. The high pathos that once permeated the con-
ductus now lays hold of the motet, whose outward dimensions increase and whose
texts throughout the entire century often serve politics or personal participation in
contemporary events. . . .
Machaut’s motets [. . . stand] stylistically on the foundation of a completely new
motet style, of which the first traces are to be observed in the repertory of the sev-
enth and eighth fascicles of the Montpellier MS. This style had already received a new
instantiation in some works of Machaut’s somewhat older contemporary Philippe

20 ‘Von jetzt an sind alle Motetten des französischen 14. Jahrhunderts mit wenigen belanglosen Ausnahmen

isorhythmisch. Dieses Aufbauprinzip, das über ein Jahrhundert lang, bis in die Zeit Dunstables und Dufays in
“kanonischer Geltung” geblieben und ebenbürtig neben den beiden größten Formprägungen des Barock und
des Klassizismus, der Dacapo-​Arie und Sonate zu nennen ist, muß demnach kurz vor 1316, zwischen zwei so
nahe verwandten Werken wie Adesto und Quoniam zum erstenmal bewußt hingestellt und als vorbildliche
neue Motettenform beibehalten und aufgegriffen worden sein . . . daß Philippe von Vitry als Schöpfer der
isorhythmischen Ars nova-​Motette anzusehen ist.’ Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 194–​95. On Besseler, see most recently
Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler. Pages 30–​34 give a brief report on Besseler’s Habilitationsschrift.
21 Adler, Handbuch (1930), i. 265.
48 Compositional Techniques

de Vitry, but it prevails universally and almost without exception in Machaut’s entire
motet corpus, and has attained such perfection that it could be said to be endowed with
canonical status, unchanged into the first decades of the fifteenth century, providing
the formal scaffold for motet structure, which in other details as well was becoming
more and more overcharged, namely the ‘isorhythmic’ construction of the new motet,
wherein each tenor statement falls into two or more periods, which not only in the
tenor (and when present, the contratenor), but (disregarding the text structure of the
motetus and triplum) also in the upper voices are rhythmically completely analogous
or even completely identical rhythmically, sometimes corresponding down to the
smallest rhythmic detail, often of considerable length and frequently in more compli-
cated combinations of bars of different length—​Machaut, for example, wrote motets in
which the first tenor statement had 11, 17 or 19 longs, and the second [statement] the
same number of breves.22

Both men extended isorhythm to fourteenth-​century repertory, on the basis of

work on the motets of Machaut, Vitry and the Ivrea manuscript (first inventoried by
Besseler).23 Ludwig’s Machaut edition, which aligns the taleae to show correspondences,
was published in 1929.24 But instead of serving as an appropriate adjective to describe
rhythm-​only repetition, it now appears as an over-​arching prescriptive title for an
epoch-​making, canonical genre, crowning the French ars nova motet repertory between
the 1310s and the 1440s. It was from this point that ‘the isorhythmic motet’ attained a
hegemonic status that dominated the standard narrative of music history for the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, and underwent further escalation in the next decades.

Motet Classification

Besseler divided isorhythmic motets into einfach (without diminution) and zweiteilig
(bipartite, with some kind of diminution):

22 ‘unter ihnen, wie H. Besseler wahrscheinlich machte, mehrere Jugendwerke von Philipp de Vitry,

in denen der damals etwa 25 jährige junge Meister die Epoche der ‘isorhythmischen Motette’ (vgl. unten
S. 273) inauguriert. Das hohe Pathos, das einst namentlich die Conductus durchzog, ergreift jetzt die Motette,
die auch in ihrer äußeren Ausdehnung wächst und deren Texte durch das ganze Jahrhundert oft der Politik
oder persönlicher Anteilnahme am Zeitgeschehen dienen’. Ibid., 267.
‘Machauts Motetten [stehen . . .] stilistisch auf dem Boden eines völlig neuen Motettenstils, zu dem erste
Ansätze zwar wohl schon im Repertoire des siebenten und des achten Faszikels von Montpellier zu beobachten
sind, der dann bereits in einigen Werken von Machauts etwas älterem Zeitgenossen Philipp von Vitry seine
neue Ausprägung erfahren hatte (vgl. oben S. 267), der in Machauts Motettenschaffen nun aber in weitestem
Umfang, fast ausnahmslos, herrscht und jetzt so fertig dasteht, daß er, man möchte sagen: mit kanonischer
Geltung, unverändert bis in die ersten Jahrzehnte des 15. Jahrhunderts das Formgerüst für den ebenfalls im
einzelnen immer überladener werdenden Motettenbau abgeben konnte: das ist der “isorhythmische” Aufbau
der neuen Motette, bei dem jede Tenordurchführung in zwei oder mehr Perioden zerfällt, die nicht nur im
Tenor und gegebenenfalls im Kontratenor, sondern (ohne Rücksicht auf die Textgliederung des Motetus
und Triplum) auch in den Oberstimmen rhythmisch völlig analog gegliedert oder sogar völlig rhythmisch
gleich, gelegentlich bis in die kleinste rhythmische Einzelheit sich entsprechend, gebaut werden, oft von
beträchtlicher Ausdehnung sind und vielfach in komplizierteren Kombinationen von Takten verschiedener
Ausdehnung verlaufen (Machaut schrieb z.B. Motetten, in denen die erste Tenordurchführung 11, 17 oder 19
longe und die zweite die gleiche Zahl von breves mißt).’ Ibid., 272–​73.
23 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, at 249–​52.
24 Machaut, Musikalische Werke, ed. Ludwig, 4/​2 (Leipzig, 1929).
 What is Isorhythm? 49

As far as the isorhythmic structure is concerned, two main types emerge which are al-
ready found in the works of Vitry. Either a segment is repeated unchanged several times
isorhythmically . . . or the initial principal periods are followed by a second part, exactly
corresponding but shortened, in which normally each tenor note is diminished by half or
by a third.25

Günther translated einfach as unipartite and zweiteilig as bipartite. This translation is

misleading, because motets without diminution, such as Ciconia’s, are by any standards
bipartite when the second half rhythmically replicates the first half. Those two halves are
fully isorhythmic in the strict sense. Günther’s ‘simple’ category (perhaps a more suitable
rendering of einfach) has no diminution. In other cases, where both rhythm and melody
of the tenor are repeated entire, there is no need to distinguish the rhythmic repetition
from the melodic (category 1(a) above). Besseler and Günther treat simple repetition
as a less advanced, less prestigious kind of isorhythm than where diminution of some
kind is present. But equal proportion, 1:1, far from having lower status, was deemed the
foremost of the proportions, and was so recognised by Boethius in De arithmetica. Any
other proportion is not equal, and therefore not ‘iso’. So even in describing proportional
relationships, ‘iso’ cannot properly mean ‘the same internal relationships but faster’,
even if the transformation is derived from the same notated form. To resume the pre-
vious analogy with triangles: two triangles with the same internal angles, of which one
has sides twice as long as the other, are not equal to each other (congruent), but similar.
Where there is an unequal proportional relationship between two homographic tenor
statements, the result might be described as ‘the same (homorhythmic), but faster’, if the
internal relationships are preserved; or ‘similar (homoeorhythmic), but faster’, if there
are internal differences usually due to a mensural reinterpretation; but in neither case
‘equal’. A term unequivocally meaning ‘equal’ is problematic when the dimension for
which equality is claimed (in this case, rhythm) is subject to any kind of transforma-
tion. When the term ‘isorhythm’ was stretched from its original, localised, analytical
meaning into one which expressed a generic judgement about the large-​scale form of
the motet, there was an attendant irony: in order to fit the category, there could be very
little that was ‘iso’ about a particular motet, for its status as an ‘isorhythmic motet’ came
to depend on whether the composer had manipulated or altered its tenor from one
statement to the next, so as to create a varied (therefore unequal) but cohesive high-​level
structure. According to the rigorous standards devised for it by its twentieth-​century
creators, the ‘isorhythmic motet’ was a contradiction in terms.
The hurdles for the genre were raised by Günther to limit it to what Willi Apel called
panisorhythm: ‘If the upper voices also follow this scheme, the composition is an iso-
rhythmic motet.’26 An evolutionary progression emerged: first, motets with isorhythm
in the tenor only,27 then tenors with diminution, then motets with partial isorhythm

25 ‘Nach dem isorhythmischen Bauplan ergeben sich zunächst zwei Haupttypen, die beide schon bei Vitry

vorkommen. Entweder wird ein Abschnitt unverändert mehrmals isorhythmisch wiederholt . . . oder es
schließt sich an die ersten Hauptperioden ein genau entsprechender, verkürzter zweiter Teil an, bei dem in der
Regel jede Tenornote auf die Hälfte bzw. ein Drittel diminuiert.’ Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 219–​21.
26 Günther, ‘The 14th-​century Motet’, 29, and Apel, ‘Remarks’.
27 That is, no longer following Ludwig’s restriction to non-​tenor parts; unlike some later commentators,

Ludwig, at least at first, recognised when the tenor statements were full repetitions.
50 Compositional Techniques

in upper parts culminating in panisorhythm, motets with two or (later) three succes-
sively reducing tenor color statements, each usually containing two or three rhythmi-
cally identical—​isorhythmic—​taleae in which every note in the corresponding upper
parts was accounted for in at least one equal, ‘isorhythmic’ section over another talea of
the same color.28 This last type is very common for a relatively short period (Dunstaple’s
motets are representative) and is often chosen as the paradigmatic isorhythmic motet,
a template reused even more frequently than was previously recognised. Jon Michael
Allsen has catalogued more than a hundred examples from the early fifteenth cen-
tury: ‘The fifteenth-​century isorhythmic motet was not, as often suggested, an archaic
form practiced by few composers—​rather, it was a vital genre that continued to evolve
in the hands of the most skilled and musically ambitious late medieval composers.’29
In other words, works were arranged and even dated not by observing how they culti-
vated variety (as they did spectacularly in the fourteenth century), but rather according
to how closely they approached an ideal of identity (in the early fifteenth). This is just
the period when composers, according to the standard narrative, were supposed to be
waking up to humanism and becoming impatient with rigid forms. There is, of course,
some justification for the perception of predictable uniformity in relation to such a tight
construction, and it is dissonant with that narrative. But even here, the relationship be-
tween the color statements was either proportional, diminishing, or mensural, or some
combination of these (category 2(b) above), which precludes true isorhythm. Other
strategies may simply incur the negative label ‘not isorhythmic’. These include motets
on song-​form tenors, motets without pre-​existing tenor, tenor derivations by retrograde
or inversion, and more extreme cases of mensural manipulation. Interestingly, such va-
riety was celebrated in Ludwig’s magisterial 1902 survey of fourteenth-​century music
before isorhythm established its iron grip on historiography.30
Misplaced emphasis on identity has fostered a view of the isorhythmic motet as a
clever but restrictive rule-​bound monolith, a view which masks both the ingenuity
and continuing cultivation of a wide range of compositional strategies that are either
covered by or excluded from it. In stressing its intellectual rigour and difficulty, both
Ludwig and Besseler embraced a cerebral image of the isorhythmic motet which has
plagued it ever since, including its extension to Du Fay by De Van with which this essay
opened; this image plays a large role in the structuralist, monumentalist cathedralism
deplored by Christopher Page.31 Late twentieth-​century scholarship inherited an en-
trenched and largely unquestioned tool that was in some cases downright wrong, in
others too blunt and rigid for most of the manifestations to which it has been applied.
Rhythmic equality between tenor color statements can occur throughout a motet,
as opposed to within colores, only when there is no tenor diminution or other trans-
formation of the color (and then they are usually straightforward repeats). Over non-​
diminishing tenor taleae, there can (but may not) be full or partial upper-​part isorhythm
throughout. Full isorhythm in such a case is relatively rare, but occurs, for example,
in the anonymous motet Musicalis scientia/​Scientie laudabilis, in which all voices are
rhythmically identical in seven taleae disposed over a single color (see Ch. 17). In a

28 Apel, ‘Remarks’, 139 ff.; Sanders called this strophic identity (‘Isorhythm’, NG1, x. 351–​54).
29 Allsen, ‘Style and Intertextuality’, p. ii.
30 Ludwig, ‘Die mehrstimmige Musik’.
31 Page, Discarding Images.
 What is Isorhythm? 51

motet with tenor reduction, true isorhythm can occur only between the taleae within
each color statement, not between those statements. Any upper-​part correspondences,
likewise, can only be rhythmically ‘the same’ between the taleae within each color, not
between reducing colores, because the tenor segments become shorter; this occurs, for
example, in all the so-​called panisorhythmic motets by Dunstaple. Unless panisorhythm
is defined to mean that every note in a motet is accounted for by a rhythmic repeti-
tion, at least within if not between sections, these can at least be called ‘motets with
isorhythm’, if not, overall, ‘isorhythmic motets’. ‘Periodic motets’ might be a more accu-
rate and serviceable term, just because it is less precise and may therefore cover a wider
range of procedures. If the tenor melody and rhythm repeat completely and exactly,
without diminution, such repetition has no reason to be called isorhythmic, nor is the
overall form of the motet determined by isorhythm; it is just a straightforward repeti-
tion, requiring neither melody nor rhythm to be singled out (category 1(a) above). An
example is B. de Cluni’s motet Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​In omnem terram
(Ch. 16), which has three identical tenor color statements, each divided into two iso-
rhythmic taleae. The only isorhythm in this motet is confined to the tenor taleae within
each color; the three tenor color statements are identical in rhythm and melody, and
there is no upper-​part isorhythm.
Color and talea often overlap, with non-​coincident repetitions of both (category
1(b) above). In the tenor of Machaut’s Motet 9, Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris feritas/​
Fera pessima, for example, each pair of color statements spans three taleae (Ch. 9). The
terms color and talea (in their current understanding) serve well to describe the sepa-
rate constituents, especially where the overlapping is less regular. If isorhythm denotes
the application of the same rhythm to a different melody, then the corresponding term
for a repeated melody differently rhythmicised is isomely (isomelic). ‘Isorhythm’ is here
redundant or misleading without reference also to isomelism (or isomely), though the
upper-​part repetitions around the hockets linking the taleae in this case can usefully be
described as isorhythmic. In other motets by Machaut and others, significant 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 signalled, to the end of
charting a qualitative crescendo towards tidy and mechanical rhythmic identity. The re-
sult is that subtler kinds of variation are neglected.

Vitry

One can understand Besseler’s satisfaction in 1926 at being able to list, over three
pages, the then known isorhythmic motets, mostly from the Fauvel, Machaut and Ivrea
manuscripts.32 To his credit, he took the important first steps in identifying the motet
output of Philippe de Vitry. However, three out of the very small corpus of ‘isorhythmic’
motets attributable to Vitry have second color statements which are not diminutions
or even rhythmic transformations of the first, but are newly rhythmicised and re-
quire renotation (category 2(a) above). These motets are Firmissime fidem teneamus/​

32 Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 222–​24. The list also includes motets with simple tenor repetition (for example,

Apollinis eclipsatur).
52 Compositional Techniques

Adesto, sancta trinitas/​Alleluya; Douce playsence/​Garison selon nature/​Neuma quinti

toni; and Vos quid admiramini/​Gratissima virginis species/​Gaude gloriosa (Ch. 8); the
latter two are among the most securely attributed. Each tenor color statement is inter-
nally divided into short isorhythmic taleae, with some sporadic isorhythmic repeti-
tion in the upper parts of these motets, but the entire rhythmic scheme for the second
tenor color in each case is quite independent of the first. At most, it is within but not
between sections of such motets that isorhythm occurs, as tenor talea repetitions within
a color, and as portions of isorhythm appear in the upper parts (notably in hockets).
These three Vitry motets, central to Besseler’s genre-​defining group, cannot therefore
be considered to be structured isorhythmically overall; the second color statement is
neither homoeorhythmic (similar in rhythm) nor homographic (notated the same).33
The one thing that is repeated exactly over the entire span of a tenor motet with new
or transformed rhythm, including diminution, is not the rhythm but the melody; that
is, it is not isorhythmic but isomelic (equal melody). This rarely used term, first used by
Besseler, has often been confined to relatively minor or approximate similarities in cor-
responding places in the upper parts.34 Its lowly status is still evident in NG2:

Isomelism was once regarded as highly significant, but its importance has since been
disputed. Scholars at first interpreted it as a product of conscious compositional proce-
dure: either as a means of ‘symbolizing’ isorhythmic structures . . . or simply as a device
which could be inserted to mark off isorhythmic sections. At the other extreme, Sanders
regarded it as a mere byproduct of motet composition.35

This presentation of isomelism reveals the extent to which isorhythm has been allowed
to dominate. But isomelism deserves to be redefined and restored alongside isorhythm
as an equal and useful descriptive partner. Where color and talea repetitions overlap,
there is no reason to choose a single overall term that privileges the rhythmic repetition
to the exclusion of the melodic.

Homographic Tenors and ‘Unequal’ Results

I now turn to cases—​the majority—​where mensurally transformed versions are derived

from the same notated tenor. In contrast to the new rhythmicisations used by Vitry,
which require renotation, this covers all cases that can be derived by mensural trans-
formation or diminution from a single notated (homographic) form. This does not pre-
clude the rewriting or respelling of such derivations, which is often the case if they are
complex, or if in a two-​opening copy they lie across a page turn. The fourteenth-​century
theorists Muris and Boen (already cited with respect to color and talea) both use a

33 Other motets attributable to Vitry have a single color divided into isorhythmic taleae. These include

Garrit gallus/​In nova fert.

34 It appears only as a footnote in Reese, Music in the Renaissance, 92. Of Le Rouge’s mass on Frye’s balade,

So ys emprentid, Reese writes: ‘The isorhythmic technique is here provided with a counterpart; whereas in the
former the rhythmic pattern remains the same but the melodic content may vary, in the latter the melodic ma-
terial remains the same but the rhythmic pattern varies. This technique has been called isomelic.’ For another
application, see S. E. Brown, ‘New Evidence’.
35 Laurenz Lütteken, ‘Isomelism’, NG2 xii. 617–​18.
 What is Isorhythm? 53

common notational touchstone of rhythmic comparability, figure or corpora, and not

the criterion of similarity in realised results that underlie most diagnoses of ‘isorhythm’.
The same applies to motet tenors that are to be realised in canon, by retrograde or in-
version; they are strictly derived from the same notational basis (homographic), but
the spelt-​out results may look or sound very different, and could by no means be called
‘the same’.
Confusion has long existed between diminution, proportion, and mensural trans-
formation. Old definitions of coloration, as removing a third of the value of a note, are
largely to blame for failure to make important distinctions of principle. Problems arise
where the point of reference is the modern transcription, where only a reader with a
good grasp of the original notation can discern deceptively similar results arising from
different notational procedures, or different results deriving from the same original no-
tation. I have long proposed distinguishing between different uses of coloration, most
notably whether for mensural or for proportional change. On the one hand, its use for
imperfection corresponds to a mensural shift, usually from perfect to imperfect time,
fixing coloured notes at their imperfect and unaltered values. This is not proportional.
Sesquialtera coloration, on the other hand, is proportional; it reduces everything by a
third, or, rather, occasions a precise acceleration of tempo in which three minims take
the time of two, but where imperfection and alteration still apply as required by the gov-
erning mensuration.36 In special cases colours, signs or numerals can be used to code
v
proportions other than 3:2 (for example, for 4:3). Such usages are truly proportional.
The same distinctions between proportional and mensural manipulation apply beyond
coloration, as in tenor derivations required by the phrases per medium, per semi, ad
tertiam, and dupla proportione when the relevant mensurations permit proportional di-
vision by two or three. Instances of mensural reinterpretation of the same tenor include
Inter densas (Ch. 1), Alma polis regia (Ch. 19) and Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20).
Another clear case of mensural transformation without diminution is Machaut’s
Motet 6, S’il estoit/​S’amours/​Et gaudebit (see Ch. 13 and Machaut, Motets, ed. Boogaart).
The first tenor statement is in perfect modus, with alteration of the first breve; the
second, neither renotated, nor rewritten, nor specified, is still in perfect modus, but dis-
placed by a long rest so that a different breve is altered. Even the modern reader un-
schooled in ars nova notation would see difference, but have no way of knowing that
this tenor was homographic, while those of the three Vitry motets cited above are not.
I have been using the word ‘diminution’ in its commonly understood sense of some
kind of acceleration or reduction of values, usually expressed as a proportion (1:2, 2:3).
A thorough investigation of fourteenth-​century understandings of diminution is be-
yond the scope of this essay.37 A few cases do indeed specify diminution proportion-
ally.38 But this is not how diminution is explained by theorists, for whom it is a shift of
notes to the next level down: a notated long is read as a breve, a breve as a semibreve.
In most cases, lacking telltale note-​values, the results will not be distinguishable from

36 See, for example, ‘Notation, III, 3 (vii)’, NG1 and NG2, and EECM 22, p. xiii.
37 For 14th-​c. definitions of diminution see Bent, ‘The Myth’.
38 For example, in the motet Alma polis/​Axe poli (music and text respectively attributed within the text to

Egidius de Aurolia and J. de Porta), Chantilly, ff. 67v–​68r, where the newly identified tenor is labelled cum
diminucione eiusdem per semi. See Ch. 19 and Ex. 19.1. Edited in Harrison (PMFC 5, no. 28) and Günther
(CMM 39, no. 10).
54 Compositional Techniques

proportional reduction, but if the shift of note-​levels also involves an asymmetrical shift
of modus, tempus and prolation relationships, different duple and triple combinations
at any of those levels may result, rather than proportioned internal relationships that
could be described as ‘the same but faster’. Similarity of results may simply be due to a
limited range of original note-​values that did not exploit the range of permutations of
twos and threes required by the various levels of mensuration, and thus did not expose
difference, as in Sub Arturo plebs. The great majority of reducing tenors appears to be
proportional and can be so expressed, that is, the internal relationships are the same in
successive statements in shorter values; but their derivation may nevertheless be, and
sometimes is demonstrably, by shift of note values.
The tenor of Dunstaple’s St John the Baptist motet, Dies dignus decorari/​Demon
dolens/​Iste confessor, is notated not in the values of the first statement, but of its third
and final statement, in imperfect modus and perfect tempus with altered semibreves
(see also Ch. 25).39 Instead of the second and third statements being diminutions of
the first, the first two are derived by augmentation of the third in relation to the upper
parts, up a note level from the written values, as is the case in all those Dunstaple motets
which result in sections proportioned 6:4:3. The semibreve pairs in the third state-
ment (the single notated statement) require alteration; but when read up a note-​level
as breve pairs in the first and second statements, the modus is in both cases imperfect,
so there is no alteration. Those breves (written semibreves) are counted out with ref-
erence to the upper parts by perfect tempus in the first color and imperfect modus in
the second. Strict isorhythm, again, occurs in all parts, but only within each color, not
between colores. This is a case of mensural reinterpretation, though with much slighter
consequences than in Inter densas and Sub Arturo plebs.
Mensural transformation and diminution may be combined, as in the Credo Omni
tempore (Ch. 23), where six different forms are derived from one notated statement.
Each tenor color is read first in perfect and then in imperfect modus (mensural trans-
formation, with and without alteration of the breve); each successive pair of statements
is then read in diminution, at the next note level down. Only within each color are there
rhythmically identical taleae (in this case three).40
The various fault lines concerning definitions of identity were to bedevil not merely
the definition of isorhythmic motets, but also motet definitions and hierarchies
throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, privileging the ‘isorhythmic’ kind
and widening the gulf that separated it from other, implicitly inferior motet forms. The
question of motet definitions and classifications, and how editorial policies have shaped
the way motets are studied, demands separate investigation. Students and performers
who browse the slim volumes containing those flagship pieces which were able to jump
all the hurdles will be circularly misled into thinking that most motets worthy of the
name were isorhythmic. Misfits lurk in other volumes, pieces which counted as motets
for their composers and contemporaries. ‘Isorhythmicmotet’ soon became cotermi-
nous with a restrictive definition of the high-​status, late-​medieval motet, an inseparable
term like ‘functionalharmony’.

39 MB 8, no. 26; and Bent, ‘The Measurement’, ex. 2.

40 See Ch. 23 on the Yoxford Credo, and Bent, ‘The Measurement’, ex. 3.
 What is Isorhythm? 55

Truly Isorhythmic Motets?

Having questioned the appropriateness of an isorhythmic classification for many of

the motets commonly so designated, are there any truly isorhythmic motets? The only
pieces whose entire form could be said to be governed by isorhythm are those rela-
tively rare motets with a single tenor color divided into rhythmically identical taleae
(like Vitry’s Petre Clemens/​Lugentium siccentur); such motets may—​or may not—​have
complete or partial isorhythm in the upper parts. Complete isorhythm is found in
motets where the entire second half rhythmically replicates the first, but with different
pitches, notably the three truly isorhythmic motets of Ciconia (which have no pre-​
existent tenors).41 I repent the presentation of Doctorum principem among the iso-
rhythmic motets in the Ciconia edition; it is now abundantly clear that it should not
have been included under that heading. It is a motet based on three different mensural
readings of a homographic tenor; these lie midway on a spectrum whose extremes are
marked by Inter densas and Dunstaple’s Dies dignus. The other three Ciconia motets
presented there, Albane misse celitus/​Albane doctor maxime, Ut te per omnes/​Ingens
alumnus Padue and Petrum Marcello/O Petre antistes (in addition to two fragmentary
opera dubia: see Ch. 28) belong to the very small category of motets that can be called
wholly isorhythmic. In each case, the second half exactly replicates the rhythm of
the first. In addition, Petrum Marcello venetum/O Petre antistes inclite has rhythmic
diminution of the color within each of these halves. Isorhythm applies between the
two sections but not within them. Similar patterns are found in other post-​Ciconian
motets from the 1420s, including the Du Fay motets Vasilissa ergo gaude/​Concupivit
and Rite maiorem/​Artibus summis/​Ora pro nobis, although these have pre-​existent
tenors and a single tenor color. However, the Ciconia motets are not always considered
fully-​fledged, high-​status isorhythmic motets, for which not only a pre-​existent tenor
but, paradoxically, non-​identical diminishing repetition came to be an ideal if not
indeed a qualifying feature.42
Besseler’s list included (implicitly as ‘isorhythmic’, but wrongly so):

• motets with repeating colores that are differently rhythmicised and need separate
notation;
• motets whose tenor repetitions are not rhythmically identical, although derived
from the same notated form (homographic);
• motets whose tenor repetitions had to be renotated because the rhythmic and me-
lodic patterns are overlapped and staggered; and

41 The claim that Petrum Marcello venetum/​O Petre antistes inclite may use a cantus prius factus (S. E. Brown,

‘A Possible Cantus Firmus’) is not generally accepted.

42 Finscher and Laubenthal, ‘ “Cantiones quae vulgo motectae vocantur” ’, reiterate an escalating view.

While they do not refer to PMFC 24 they nonetheless report its new datings and the tally of four isorhythmic
motets. However, contrary to my view expressed here, that one of those is not isorhythmic, but the other
three are, in the most literal sense, they dismiss Ciconia’s isorhythm in the following terms: ‘ist vom ganzen
isorhythmischen System nur die rhythmische Identität der beiden Teile (in allen vier Stimmen) geblieben’
(p. 295). Having subscribed to a crescendo of complexity, setting the hurdles increasingly high, they find ‘only’
rhythmic replication remaining in Ciconia’s ‘simplified’ system—​but this is the one feature that I now argue
merits the term isorhythm.
56 Compositional Techniques

• motets with simple tenor repetition of rhythm and melody, not requiring termi-
nological separation of the rhythmic repetition.

None of the above can properly be called isorhythmic. Conversely, Besseler also desig-
nated as ‘nicht isorhythmisch’ some motets with irregular tenor repetition patterns,
including at least one motet that contains true isorhythm, Machaut’s Motet 20, Trop
plus est bele/​Biaute paree/​Je ne sui mie, which did not fit his mould because the tenor
repetitions are determined by the tenor’s rondeau form. But within its total duration
of forty-​eight perfect breves plus final long, this motet, in fact, has three irregularly
placed blocks of complete isorhythm in the upper parts, over differing tenor pitches,
at bars 8–​11, 42–​45, and 25–​27 (with differing tenor rhythm, and a slight motetus var-
iant in bar 28) in Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart. Thus, it makes more use of true
isorhythm than some motets that have been unquestioningly so described, and it links
with the thirteenth-​century repertory which first gave rise to the term.43 Isorhythm
remains a useful descriptive term for such blocks of upper-​part repetition, whether
or not coordinated with tenor repetitions, as it does also for tenor taleae within a color
statement.

Fifteenth-​Century Decline

Many historians have subscribed to the outworn, cerebral, bloodless image that the iso-
rhythmic motet had accumulated by the second half of the twentieth century, voicing
its need to give way to the currents of humanism, and to the human feeling and ex-
pressiveness that seems to characterise music from the late fifteenth century on. David
Fallows wrote:

By the middle of the century the isorhythmic motet had fallen from favour. It is as though
musicians and their patrons now realized that it was an empty form based on aesthetic
criteria of an age long gone, principles scarcely relevant to the age of humanism, of sen-
suality in the arts, of the individual. The two main features of the motet were entirely
contrary to those modern beliefs. Normally the motet had at least two different texts
sounding simultaneously; and while the texts were usually related in some way, perhaps
even sharing rhyme-​words, their simultaneous singing inevitably resulted in a richness
born partly of aural confusion which may have pleased the Gothic mind but must have
seemed hopelessly unrealistic in fifteenth-​century Italy. And the isorhythmic structure—​a
form based on the idea that at least one voice should contain a rhythmic pattern which
was repeated with different pitches—​was a neat and ingenious scheme that appealed to
the thirteenth-​century desire for numerical system and entelechy but had relatively little
to say to the contemporaries of Donatello and Brunelleschi who felt that their art should
actually be perceived as perfect. [. . . Dufay] was continually adapting the form to his own
purposes, finding ways of reconciling the motet with fifteenth-​century cultural values.
Dufay’s motets contain an unsurpassed range of techniques, expanding some features of

43 Sanders, ‘Isorhythm’, gives as ex. 2 the extensive parallel isorhythmic passages in Se je chante/​Bien doi

amer/​Et sperabit, Mo, ff. 357v–​359v, no. 294 in RISM, no. 311 in Rokseth, Tischler.
 What is Isorhythm? 57

the old style, rejecting others, experimenting and re-​experimenting with various musical
figures, constantly reconsidering the form. . . . works of classical purity combined with
personal vision. For composers of the early fifteenth century the position of the motet
was in many ways similar to that of the fugue for nineteenth-​century composers. It was a
style based on aesthetic criteria that had obtained nearly two hundred years earlier but had
little to do with the ideas that were now current; and it was increasingly a style associated
with seriousness of tone and scholasticism, a style used to suggest formality, to be used for
auspicious occasions. Yet another feature shared by the motet and the fugue in the later
stages of their history was that while their difficulties and formality often drove a lesser
composer to produce his most pompous and turgid efforts, they equally spurred a certain
kind of resourceful mind to sublime heights of musical invention. The evidence suggests
that Dufay’s was such a mind.44

Life after isorhythm was also articulated by Sanders who, despite being fastidious about
use of the word, subscribed to the general view of its demise:

In the end, there appeared mensuration motets without isorhythm. Three compositions
by Dufay represent this final structural type of the medieval motet, which is related to the
Burgundian cantus-​firmus mass. . . . As in the case of the symphony of the early 20th cen-
tury, the huge proportions to which the isorhythmic motet of English, Burgundian and
Franco-​Flemish composers of the early 15th century had grown were indications of its
imminent demise as a species.45

Compared by Besseler to the da capo aria and sonata form, by Sanders to the late-​
romantic symphony, and by Fallows to fugue, we are presented with the image of a mas-
sive construction that, dinosaur-​like, had risen, overreached itself, and needed to fall.
Yet these ‘overblown’ motets take about two to a maximum of five minutes to perform.
They are supposed to have given way in their last gasp to the—​paradoxically—​much
longer constructions of the unified mass cycle, where each related movement may take
five minutes, resulting in a half-​hour work, maintaining unity over an even longer time-​
span when performed in a liturgical context. These parallels variously imply extended
duration (the Romantic symphony), taut construction (fugue), or offer status in the
musical mainstream (aria and sonata). In all cases, the comparison seeks to legitimate
strange and distant music, bringing it closer to home.
Examples of recognisably similar techniques from the later fifteenth century are seen
as vestigial throwbacks after a break with the tradition:

The legacy of the isorhythmic motet can be heard in fainter and fainter echoes throughout
the second half of the fifteenth century. As the genre waned near the end of the first half
of the century, it was succeeded by motets and masses employing a cantus firmus in the
tenor but, with a few significant exceptions, eschewing most techniques explicitly asso-
ciated with isorhythm. . . . The use of strict diminution of a cantus firmus, laying out the
temporal plan of a piece according to strict numerical ratios, the use of perfect modus, and

44 Fallows, Dufay, 103–​4, 123.

45 Sanders, ‘Medieval Motet’, 567–​68, and similarly in his ‘Isorhythm’.
58 Compositional Techniques

a compositional technique that will be referred to as modus disposition all can be under-
stood as vestiges of the isorhythmic tradition.46

However, to unpick some of the unfounded assumptions about isorhythm and its
accumulated mythology would permit these to be seen, rather, as processes of natural
growth and continuation. I fell into the trap myself, and would no longer write ‘It is
perhaps paradoxical that the waning principle of isorhythm, seen at its most classical
and polished in Dunstaple’s isorhythmic motets, should for a short period have acted
as a vital catalyst in begetting the unity of the cyclic Mass, the area of activity which was
clearly a crucible of new creative vigour during at least the 1420s.’47
Many have noted the affinity and indeed the historical connection between the iso-
rhythmic motet and the tenor mass, while subscribing to the demise of the former.
The continuity is in fact greater than often recognised, but has been masked by mis-​
description of motets. The underlying and unifying processes of these cycles are not
new, but were already in place from the early fourteenth century, most notably:

(1) Identical tenors between movements that do not require separate consideration
of rhythm and melody, such as the Caput masses; and
(2) isomelic tenors differently rhythmicised in each movement of a mass, or
for each tenor statement within a motet or mass movement where there is
a double cursus (again, as in the Caput masses). This is what happens in the
re-​rhythmicised second colores of some Vitry motets (now disqualified from
isorhythm).

These, of course, correspond to the types 1 and 2 set out at the beginning of this essay.
Impostors in the isorhythmic canon require reconsideration both of what the tenor
mass does, and what the isorhythmic motet does not do. The confining shackles of
the chilly medieval motet, from which warm-​blooded Renaissance composers were
eager to escape, have been positively reformulated for the ‘new’ tenor mass. A historio-
graphical agenda which sought to sharpen the medieval–​Renaissance contrast was not
well served by emphasising unbroken continuity, and hence that continuity has been
underplayed. This is understandable, given that some of the relevant characteristics
have lurked unrecognised under the umbrella of isorhythm.
Manfred Bukofzer famously linked the ‘end’ of the isorhythmic motet tradition to
mass cycles such as Caput: ‘The idea of writing a Mass setting on a tenor not borrowed
from plainsongs of the Ordinary was prompted by a medieval form, the isorhythmic
motet. The fountainhead of the development is the transfer of the isorhythmic tech-
nique to the Mass.’48 Techniques were indeed transferred, but not quite in the way he
describes. He called several mass cycles ‘isorhythmic’, foremost among them the anony-
mous English Caput cycle formerly thought to be by Du Fay, which presents two melodic
statements of the tenor in each movement (a ‘double cursus’), differently rhythmicised

46 Brothers, ‘Vestiges of the Isorhythmic Tradition’; see also Dammann, ‘Spätformen der isorhythmischen

Motette’.
47 Bent, Dunstaple, 78.
48 Bukofzer, Studies, 221–​23.
 What is Isorhythm? 59

in triple and duple time, requiring separate notation.49 The second part of each move-
ment is therefore an isomelic, not an isorhythmic variant in imperfect time of the first
perfect-​time statement. But this entire double-​cursus tenor appears identically, melody
and rhythm—​therefore not isorhythmic—​in all movements of the mass. What is more,
the two later Caput masses by Ockeghem and Obrecht use exactly the same tenor, in
the same rhythmicisation. So much for the claim that late fifteenth-​century composers
turned their backs on such constructions. Large-​scale motets of around the year 1500
share many features with their antecedents. Obrecht’s Sub tuum praesidium mass is an-
other example of the continuing tradition of structural and mensural transformation
between movements of a mass cycle, as are many of the L’homme armé masses.
Caput, therefore, is not an isorhythmic mass. Dunstaple’s Da gaudiorum premia and
Power’s Alma redemptoris masses likewise have complete tenor identity between, but
not within, movements, with a single color in each movement which changes from per-
fect to imperfect time; pace Bukofzer, they too are not isorhythmic. Dunstaple’s mass
movements on Jesu Christe Fili Dei are likewise related not by isorhythm, but by tenor
identity. But within each movement, the tenor is stated twice (a double cursus). Its (po-
tentially single) notated form is in the values not of the first, but of the last statement,50
the first being derived from it by augmentation, to be read up a note value. Each of the
statements is notated entirely in breves, including a change from (unnotated) perfect
c
to notated imperfect tempus ( ), allowing no scope for perceptible mensural change
within the different signatures. Where the tenor statements are identical between
movements, melodically and rhythmically, as in Caput and other English masses, it
is inappropriate to single out rhythmic identity (isorhythm), as also for the identical
statements in Apollinis eclipsatur and several other fourteenth-​century motets.
The Rex seculorum mass by Dunstaple or Power presents a differently rhythmicised
version of the same chant in each movement, freely varied and therefore not strictly
isomelic, but it retains the same chant divisions between perfect and imperfect time
sections. Re-​rhythmicisation requiring renotation within each movement (as in the
two isomelic colores of each Caput movement), or between movements (as in Rex
seculorum), is what happens between the color statements of the re-​rhythmicised Vitry
motet tenors a century earlier.51
These mass techniques constitute neither a rejection nor a throwback, but rather a
continuing development of precisely the same resources for motet composition that had
been in place since the early fourteenth century. To have defined the original control

49 Ibid., 256–​71, and the example on p. 260, which sets out the Caput tenor; pitches and rhythms are the

same in each movement of all three masses. Each movement presents the tenor melody first in triple, then in
duple time, renotated, therefore isomelically.
50 In fact, it is written out twice in the only source because the movements occupy more than one opening.

For Bukofzer’s isorhythmic mass classifications see MB 8.

51 Sanders, ‘Isorhythm’, rightly observes that there is no isorhythm in the English masses mentioned

here, because the color is not divided into taleae, and ‘identity arises not from their rhythms, but from the
pitch content of the tenor’. However, he does not invoke the criterion of simple identity. He states that in Rex
seculorum ‘even this [rhythmic] connection with the isorhythmic tradition is severed’. In other words, de-
spite these important cautions and qualifications, he does not challenge the credentials of the isorhythmic
motet as commonly understood, or the suitability of the term. Rex seculorum differs from the Vitry motets
in that the restatements are not completely isomelic. A great variety of patterns is found in the English mass
compositions of OH. See, for example, the Gloria Ad Thome, no. 24 (anonymous, but perhaps by Power),
where the irregularly overlapping color and talea result in the second color (with slight melodic variants) being
differently rhythmicised from the first.
60 Compositional Techniques

group of Vitry motets as ‘isorhythmic’, without recognising that the second colores are
newly rhythmicised, has led to a misconstruction of exactly the same technique in the
‘freely rhythmicised’ (and sometimes isomelic) tenors of fifteenth-​century mass cycles.
Far from breaking free of the shackles of isorhythm, they are simply mapping out the
century-​old technique of newly rhythmicised forms of tenor melodies onto a larger
canvas for the melodic unification of tenor masses. This distinction has gone largely
unremarked. If it was legitimate (but wrong) to extend the term isorhythm to such new
rhythmicisation in the early fourteenth century, it becomes illogical to disqualify later
tenor mass cycles and other large-​scale structures which do likewise. Conversely, if
isorhythm is not the right term for the late fifteenth century, as generally agreed, then
neither is it right for much of the earlier repertory to which it is now unquestioningly
applied. What disqualifies the tenor mass as isorhythmic also disqualifies Vitry as the
creator of isorhythm. Isorhythm was redefined by Ludwig and Besseler to reflect mu-
sical developments between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, even if the term
had become unsuitable, but it was not similarly stretched or adapted for the transition
from the fourteenth to the fifteenth. The term ossified but the musical development
moved on. A gradual but insidious historiographical shift crept in that affected not just
the changing definition of isorhythm, but even the criteria for accepting a work as a
motet. All along, there were motet constructions that were not by any definition iso-
rhythmic. The later they are, the more likely are such compositions to be disqualified
from a narrowed definition of the most uniform and prestigious kind of motets, espe-
cially following an arbitrary mid-​fifteenth-​century cut-​off point in the stretching of the
term isorhythm.

Alternative Terms?

We have seen mathematical rigidity caricatured to an absurd extreme, a preposterous

monster doomed to die, in order to give way to new humane, humanistic musical
standards (De Van, Fallows). The historiographical shift is clear through the twentieth
century, during the first half of which we saw the term coined and stretched to the point
where it no longer accurately described the processes. It then became encumbered with
the negative discourse of cerebral, medieval, number-​bound sterility which the second
half of the twentieth century sought to shed on behalf of Renaissance humanists, men
of feeling. Restraint in use of the umbrella term ‘isorhythmic motet’ removes one of the
key planks of this historiography.
The question always asked at this stage is ‘what can we call it instead?’ But to ask this
raises the question ‘what is IT?’ I have tried here to draw attention to the variety rather
than the sameness of strategies of motet composition in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, showing that they can even less be accommodated within a single model than
can sonata forms. ‘It’ (isorhythm) has been loosely applied to a congeries of techniques,
including:

• simple isorhythmic replication either over a whole motet or within sections

(intra-​color);
 What is Isorhythm? 61

• diminution or augmentation of successive tenor statements, not in the common

current sense of proportional reduction, but reading them at the next note-​level
down or up, perhaps resulting in different mensural combinations;
• proportional reduction of successive tenor statements, for example, 2:1;
• mensural rereading of successive homographic tenor statements, resulting in
great or slight differences (Inter densas, Doctorum principem, Sub Arturo plebs,
Dunstaple’s 6:4:3 motets);
• exact tenor repetition of both rhythm and melody, not requiring ‘rhythm’ to be
singled out, as in the Caput masses;
• repetition of melody to a different rhythm (isomelic, but not isorhythmic), as in
the tenors of Vos/​Gratissima and other Vitry motets; and, finally,
• other forms of structuring such as canon, retrograde, etc.

Most motets are in some way ‘structured’; but then so, if to a lesser extent, are pieces
that use no tenor manipulation. Most but not all are ‘tenor’ motets, a term used for
some late fifteenth-​century forms that could well be applied much earlier, and which
serves to signal a real continuity with the tenor mass.52 But not all tenor motets are
isorhythmic and not all motets with isorhythm have pre-​existent tenors. ‘Periodic
motet’, or ‘structured motet’ may be the only terms that meet all cases. I look forward
to a period of experimental terminology, more open to recognising a variety of com-
positional techniques, and to clearing the way for an appreciation of the wide range
of motet structuring that anticipates and nourishes the growth of the cyclic mass and
late fifteenth-​century motet.53 Far from repudiating motet techniques, or artificially
reviving them, later forms adapt and extend them in an unbroken evolution.
I have rejected ‘isorhythm’ for overall description of many of the pieces to which it
has been applied, and applied it, locally, to some pieces from which it has been withheld.
The term remains useful and valid, however, to describe occurrences of true isorhythm,
even in motets that have previously been excluded from isorhythmic definition, such
as the song-​tenor motets of Machaut, or down-​played, as with some motets of Ciconia.
But I do suggest that we draw back from grandiose and normative use as an overall
genre label, and confine it to procedures for which it provides an accurate description,
not necessarily to whole motets, very few of which are wholly isorhythmic, and take
care to put other strategies on a level playing field with the particular kinds of motets
that have been disproportionately privileged (even if misnamed) as isorhythmic. I hope
that a wider palette of descriptive terms—​more use of color–​talea permutations, and
distinctions between diminutional, proportional and mensural transformations—​will
increase awareness of the great variety of motet strategies. But by all means we can talk
about motets ‘with isorhythm’.

52 Finscher and Laubenthal, ‘ “Cantiones quae vulgo motectae vocantur” ’, 306.

53 A good start on such classifications has been made in Cumming, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay. She
writes (p. 82): ‘ “Isorhythm” is a modern term with a variety of possible meanings; different scholars use it in
different ways. Excessive emphasis on the distinction between “isorhythmic” and “non-​isorhythmic” limits
our understanding of different kinds of rhythmic structures, and the relationships among “isorhythmic” and
other works.’
62 Compositional Techniques

Summary and Conclusions

1. Since Ludwig coined the term isorhythm, its application has escalated from an
accurate description of local procedures to a prescriptive definition of a genre.
Isorhythm remains a useful description of talea repetitions within each tenor
color, or for upper-​part isorhythm, whether periodic or partial (even in motets
described by Besseler as ‘not isorhythmic’), but is problematic as a determinant of
the motet genre.
2. The second statement of a tenor color is not ‘iso’ if differently rhythmicised
(requiring different notation), whether within a Vitry motet, for the second half of
a fifteenth-​century tenor mass (for example, Caput), or between movements of a
mass cycle on the same tenor melody where it is melody, not rhythm that remains
constant.
3. The same notation may yield different results: a tenor is homographic rather than
isorhythmic if restatements apply mensural change or diminution, whether or not
those changes result in large, small or no differences of relative internal rhythms
(process versus results).
4. Rhythm has been overstressed. ‘Isorhythm’ is inappropriate when there is
total repetition of melody and rhythm (because falsely isolating rhythm), or
just melodic repetition; in both cases, rhythmic and melodic permutations, in-
cluding overlapping color and talea, can be classified using those terms. It is the
tenor melody, and not its rhythm, that retains identity between diminishing or
transformed sections.
5. Modern use of the term ‘isorhythm’ refers to results; apparent similarity in current
notation may conceal differences of process. Products of mensural transformation
of a homographic basis may thus have been classified according to whether they
yield ‘isorhythmic’ results, either with the same internal relationships (Alanus’s
Sub Arturo, Ch. 20) or similar relationships (Dunstaple’s Dies dignus and Ciconia’s
Doctorem principem, with and without alteration), or strikingly different as in a
‘mensuration’ motet (Inter densas). These differences may arise from accidents of
note-​value selection or mensural combination.
6. Only equal proportion (1:1) truly qualifies as ‘iso’; the term ‘isorhythm’ is not
a good choice for diminution or mensural transformation, which are by no
standards ‘equal’. These can be called ‘the same rhythm’ only by a modern un-
derstanding of ‘rhythm’ (which has no medieval equivalent), and then only by
denying identity (‘the same but faster’). Besseler’s classification of motets without
diminution as einfach and with diminution as zweiteilig does not address this
problem, but privileges motets with some kind of diminution, even if that diminu-
tion disqualifies a strictly isorhythmic classification.
7. Only motets with single-​color or non-​diminishing tenors, or those (not neces-
sarily tenor-​based) with a second half (as in Ciconia) or subsequent taleae (as in
Musicalis scientia) rhythmically replicating the first in all voices can be judged
wholly (rather than intra-​sectionally) isorhythmic.
8. Careless naming has led to historiographical distortion for both the fourteenth and
the fifteenth centuries. The promotion of rhythmic identity and predetermined
 What is Isorhythm? 63

conformity as primary generic features of more than a century of motet develop-

ment has:
(a) impeded recognition of the great variety of strategies in motet composition
from the early ars nova throughout the fourteenth century;
(b) narrowed the definition of motet to exclude some interestingly varied
works;
(c) short-​changed simple repetition, melodic repetition, and complex repetition
patterns (including song tenors and non-​coincident talea–​color patterns);
(d) imposed ill-​fitting French criteria on English and Italian motet traditions;
(e) historiographically distorted an evolving fourteenth-​century genre, demo­
nising artificially restrictive criteria as cerebral ‘gothic’ shackles;
(f) historiographically distorted the fifteenth-​century evolution of the same
underlying processes in the cyclic mass and structured motets by—​
wrongly—​stressing their rejection of earlier processes, which now come to
be redefined positively in terms of new humanistic expression.

Afterword

Some have responded coyly to my plea for a more thoughtful use of the term isorhythm,
using it as before, but apologetically or in scare quotes. It should be clear from the
foregoing that I do not outlaw ‘isorhythm’, but advocate restricting it to appropriate
applications. ‘Isorhythmic’ serves perfectly well for exact rhythmic iterations, where
rhythm but not pitch is repeated. If there is diminution, call it diminution; if there is
mensural redefinition or some other kind of reduction, call it that; if the same tenor no-
tation is manipulated mensurally, call it homographic—​a term that several colleagues
have found useful. And if there is repetition of rhythm and pitch, call it repetition,
without isolating rhythm. Reduced sections, however achieved, can be called reduced
or accelerated; they do not always correspond to a stricter definition of diminution.
Diminution is not a general term for acceleration in fourteenth-​century theory; in
classic definitions by Johannes de Muris, it specifically required the notation to be
reinterpreted at the next lower level of note values.54 If the relevant adjacent note-​levels
correspond, with respect to duple or triple quality, the result may be the same as halving,
or duple proportion, a descriptive short-​cut often taken then as now. But diminution is
not appropriate if the process is mensural, as in Sub Arturo or Doctorum principem; and
indeed in the extreme case of Inter densas the mensural manipulations do not achieve
successive reductions. If the tenor is notated at the level not of the first but of the final
statement (as in the Dunstaple motets mentioned above), its first statement may be in
augmentation, which problematises the term integer valor. Motets ‘with isorhythm’
may serve where ‘isorhythmic motet’ claims too much. For a minority of motets be-
fore 1400 with reducing sections, and a majority in the early fifteenth century, com-
plete isorhythm in all parts may be observed between the statements within each color
but not between colores. ‘Pan-​isorhythm’ may be a suitable term for motets in which

54 Bent, ‘The Myth’.

64 Compositional Techniques

every note is rhythmically accounted for in one or more exact repetitions, as long as it is
understood that the identity applies within and not between each successive reducing
section.55 ‘Isoperiodic’ will serve where sections of equal length are not isorhythmic,
but it will not do for reduced or mensurally changed periods, where the periods are of
different lengths. ‘Proportioned’ may serve to describe the consequences of diminu-
tion or mensural manipulation, but so to describe just the overall result may obscure
the process by which that result was reached (as has been the case with the two dif-
ferent processes used by Dunstaple; see Ch. 25). By seeking greater refinement of clas-
sification and terminology to meet the challenge of this variety, we can hope to release
motets without rhythmic reduction from the stigma of being more primitive, when they
may explore varietas in other ways. To forgo the monolithic generic concept of ‘the iso-
rhythmic motet’ may fruitfully complicate the writing of synthetic music history; but
to interrogate and refine use of the term may open up the wide varieties of text–​music
constructions that characterise the surviving corpus of fourteenth-​century motets in all
their individuality.

55 Earp calls Machaut’s Motet 4 ‘highly “panisorhythmic” ’; although there is a notable amount of rhythmic

alignment between taleae, there is also sufficient deviation from exact replication to discourage the use of the
term here.
 PART II
THE MA R IGN Y MOT ET S , BEYOND
FAU VEL, A ND V I T RY
66 Fauvel and Vitry

Part II reflects a long-​term interest in the interpolated version of the early fourteenth-​
century Roman de Fauvel in Paris146, whose components (music, poetic texts, narra-
tive, history and art) had often been studied separately without reference to the others.
A series of interdisciplinary seminars in Oxford and a conference in Paris culminated
in the publication of Bent and Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies (1998). Chapter 3 is lightly
revised from my contribution to that volume, a new view of the three motets on the
historical figure of Enguerrand de Marigny and their double function in the Fauvel nar-
rative. Chapters 4 and 5 deal at length with those motets; Chapter 6 deals with a motet
that may have originally been intended for inclusion but was partially cannibalised for
the Fauvellian agenda. Chapter 7 addresses related motets and manuscripts and their
relation to Philippe de Vitry, whose motet Vos/​Gratissima is the subject of Chapter 8.
 3
Fauvel and Marigny: Which Came First?

The extended version of the Roman de Fauvel in Paris, BnF fr. 146 (Paris146) is famous
for its many interpolations of music, text and images.1 Three motets have been much
discussed on account of their coded references to political events associated with the
reign of Philip IV (the Fair) and the rise and fall of his opportunistic and treacherous
counsellor Enguerrand de Marigny, allegorised in the incongruous rise of the bestial
hybrid Fauvel and his deserved downfall. The three motets are all preserved anony-
mously and occur in this order in the Fauvel narrative:2

Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me, tristis est anima mea (f. 30r, F 25, p.mus. 71): Ex. 5.1

Tribum/​Quoniam/​Merito hec patimur (ff. 41v–​42r, F 27, p.mus. 120): Ex. 4.1

Garrit gallus/​In nova fert/​Neuma (f. 44v, F 30, p.mus. 129): Ex. 4.53

The texts are multivalent; obfuscation and veiled references do not always make it
easy to distinguish primary from secondary meanings. Here the distinction matters,
not least because of the arguments that have been offered with respect to the purpose,
dating and authorship of these motets. Several other motets relate to historical events

1 This chapter is revised from the version published as ‘Fauvel and Marigny: Which Came First?’ in

Bent and Andrew Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, MS français 146 (Oxford, 1998), 35–​52. It meets OUP’s conditions for reuse without
obtaining formal permission.
‘Fauvel’ in this chapter has two meanings: Fauvel is the interpolated Roman de Fauvel in Paris146 (Paris,
BnF fr. 146) and Fauvel is the character therein. Verse numbers are given in the editions of Långfors, Le Roman
de Fauvel (L), whose text is used; S gives references in a more recent edition: Strubel, Le Roman de Fauvel;
‘p.mus.’ numbers refer to the texts of musical pieces as numbered in Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel, taken over by
Strubel, and given in parentheses in Leo Schrade’s edition after Schrade’s sequential numbering of motets in
PMFC 1 (‘F’). L is also used for Long; context makes clear which is meant.
Paris146 can be viewed on Gallica at https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv1b8​4546​75g/​f1.image.r=​
roman%20de%20fau​vel (accessed 9.7.2020). The verbal text of the roman is edited in Långfors, Le Roman de
Fauvel, that of the musical additions in Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel. The complete text of the expanded roman
in Paris146, together with the texts of the musical interpolations, is published with a modern French trans-
lation by Strubel, Le Roman de Fauvel. The numerations of these three editions are cited here as Långfors,
Dahnk, and Strubel. For full accounts of the short and long versions of Fauvel and of the other contents of
Paris146, see the introduction to the facsimile of the complete manuscript in Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner
et al., and also Bent and Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies. More recent studies of Fauvel include Dillon, Medieval
Music-​Making, and Marinescu, ‘The Politics of Deception’, q.v. for other recent bibliography.
2 The coded political meanings were first identified by Becker, ‘Fauvel’, 36–​42, and were brought to the

attention of musicologists in Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’. Modern editions of the music of the motets are
published in PMFC 1, and here as noted above. The motets (except Garrit gallus) were recorded by the
Orlando Consort on ‘Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova’, CD-​SAR 49, with accompanying translations by
David Howlett. A rhythmically flexible performance of Aman novi was recorded by Sequentia on Deutsche
Harmonia Mundi/​BMG Classics (RD 77095).
3 Transcriptions of Garrit gallus and Tribum are on the website ( Exx. 4.1 and 4.5), of Aman in the
book as Ex. 5.1, all designed to be used in conjunction with the commentaries in the relevant chapters. Aman
and Tribum are numbered in longs, Garrit gallus in breves.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0004
68 Fauvel and Vitry

of the 1310s: the Templar crisis, the death of the emperor Henry VII in 1313, and the
reigns of the French kings Louis X (1314–​16) and Philip V (1316–​22), sons of Philip the
Fair (d. 1314):

Scariotis geniture/​Jure quod/​Superne On the death of Emperor Henry VII, 24

matris, f. 2r (F 5, p.mus. 5) August 1313
Nulla pestis est gravior/​Plange, nostra Sense of crisis towards the end of the reign of
regia/​Vergente, f. 3r (F 8, p.mus. 9) Philip IV (d. 1314)
Detractor est nequissima/​Qui This has been conjectured to be in support
secuntur castra/Verbum iniquum, of the Templars following their arrest on 14
f. 4r (F 9, p.mus. 12)4 September 1307. In his harsh review of Dahnk
in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 37 (1936),
58–​65, Långfors proposed an identification
of Picquigny with the vidames of Amiens.
Roesner et al., in Le Roman de Fauvel, 21
suggest that it might rather refer to the period
after the death of Philip and to Messire Ferri
de Piquegny who, according to the Chronique
métrique in Paris146, led the purge of
Marigny: see below
Desolata mater/​Que nutritos/​Filios Against the Templars, referring to the
enutrivi, f. 8v (F 13, p.mus. 27) campaign of 1312–​14 and the Bulls of April
and May 1312
Se cuers ioans/​Rex beatus/​Ave, f. 10v For Louis X, crowned 3 August 1315
(F 15, p.mus. 32)
Servant regem/​O Philippe/​Rex regum, ff. For Philip V, and therefore not before mid-​
10v–​11r (F 16, p.mus. 33) November 1316, following the death of Jehan,
short-​lived posthumous baby son of Louis
X. Philip’s coronation was in January 1317.5

An impetus to the publication of Fauvel Studies was that the many elements of
Paris146 had been edited and studied on separate tracks with little regard for their
context.6 Musicologists had tended to consider the motets as self-​ contained
compositions, treating Paris146 as just one of several sources transmitting them, and
not seeing the project of the enlarged and interpolated roman as the primary reason for

4 Detractor est nequissima vulpis/​Qui secuntur castra: Dahnk identified the allusion to Lucan in the first line

of the motetus. These words are also echoed in the last line of the triplum text of Colla iugo/​Bona condit: ‘Nulla
fides pietasque viris qui castra secuntur’ (There is no faith or piety in men who follow camps). The texts of
Colla/​Bona are preserved separately in a number of literary manuscripts, including the text of a non-​extant
contratenor: Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, 123 and 138. The vituperative nature of these texts, and the cross-​
references between them, suggest Vitry’s authorship.
5 The version of Paris571 replacing Philip with ‘Ludowice’ is a later adaptation for St Louis, not for Louis X,

and is therefore not the original version: ‘Wathey, ‘The Marriage of Edward III’, 17–​19.
6 Bent and Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies, Introduction, especially 19, 22. Mühlethaler, Fauvel au pouvoir,

279. An excellent account of many aspects of the manuscript is given in Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al.
 Fauvel and Marigny 69

their existence.7 It had usually been assumed that their real-​life documentary function
came first, that they were imported into or adapted for that manuscript, having been
written outside it, and hence that their compositional order must be that of the histor-
ical narrative to which they refer. Concentration on their ‘documentary’ content has
led to neglect of the fact that the three ‘Marigny’ motets also chart the forwards narra-
tive of Fauvel, left to right through the manuscript of the roman, most explicitly in Heu
Fortuna, the motetus which is placed in Fauvel’s mouth following Fortuna’s rejection of
his marriage suit. But they also chart the backwards narrative of biting contemporary
historical satire, which runs back to front, right to left, from the end of the roman.8
The motet texts point up the satirical allegory of current events and emphasise the
unnatural reversals that are a constant theme of Fauvel.9 The major source for the de-
tail of these events is the Chronique métrique attributed to Geffroy de Paris, which ends
Paris146 (ff. 63r–​88r). It provides much of the specific historical information relating
to Marigny which underlies and complements the narrative in Fauvel.10 Insofar as the
other contents can be seen as part of the same project, the Chronique may not be an en-
tirely impartial witness. The right order for that historical narrative is the wrong order
for the topsy-​turvy progress of Fauvel the hybrid horse–​man; a fusion between these
apparently colliding worlds is produced when the motets are seen in context. The text
of the roman itself strongly invites this reading: Fauvel fait tout par bestourne (Långfors
1119, Strubel 1125), Meine tout per antifrasin | C’est a dire par le contraire (L 1184–​85,
S 1190–​91). The wheel of Fortuna turns incessantly, changing high to low, far to near,
back to front, signalling chronological paradoxes at many levels; it reverses Fauvel’s
fortunes. A striking example is the black baptism of the famous Fountain of Youth illus-
tration that accompanies the motet Tribum/​Quoniam, by both counts the central motet
of the three (ff. 41v–​42); by bathing (being baptised) in ordure, old men (Fauvel’s vain-
glorious progeny) are rejuvenated, another trick of reversed chronology. A further
subtlety is that they move (old to young) from right to left, a reversal within the order
of the left-​to-​right Fauvel narrative. These reversals correspond to the description in
Fauvel of Fortuna’s wheels which move in contrary motion (see below), thus signalling
the bi-​directional narrative that is underscored by many markers in the texts as well as
by musical and visual symbolism.11 Fortuna also controls the elements: fire, earth, air
(wind) and water are all present in the triplum of Aman novi.

7 Some of the more modern Fauvel motets with ars nova characteristics (duple time, with up to five

semibreves to the breve) are also found in later sources with updated notation. None of these copies pre-​dates
Fauvel; nor are any of the surviving manuscripts of the uninterpolated Fauvel earlier than Paris146.
8 Roesner (Le Roman de Fauvel, 20) downplays the historical import and the relevance of Marigny: in

Aman/​Heu ‘Haman, Phaeton, and Icarus are often used as exempla of pride ready to suffer a fall’. And despite a
clear unfolding of the historical events, the authors say that ‘the main point of their inclusion was to illustrate
the moral fable of Fauvel, who was to be understood as himself, not merely a stand-​in for Marigny’.
9 Many aspects of reversal in Fauvel have been pointed out, for example in the analysis of Je voi/​Fauvel

nous a fait/​Autant in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 46–​52. Lawrence Earp alerted me to a remarkable
publication by Riemann, ‘Noch zwei verkannte Kanons’, in which he interprets the text of p.mus.29, Fauvel
nous a fait present (Fauvel: autant m’est si poise arriere comme avant and car tout ce fait par contraire) as an in-
struction to perform the piece in retrograde. Without cadences, the result is not very satisfactory.
10 The chronicle is edited by Diverrès, La Chronique métrique. See also Dunbabin, ‘The Metrical Chronicle’,

and especially Regalado, ‘The Chronique métrique’.

11 Illustrated by textual citations in Bent, ‘Marigny’, 40–​43; the wheel, surprisingly, is not illustrated in

Paris146. An excellent essay on this central character, Hunt, ‘The Christianization of Fortune’, was not ready
in time to be included in Bent and Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies.
70 Fauvel and Vitry

The motets self-​ consciously emphasise this historical order with verb tenses
suggesting not only self-​evident termini post quos for their composition, but also termini
ante quos. In Garrit gallus/​In nova, Philip IV, the ‘blind lion’, is still alive (monarchisat,
present tense), and the motet, it has been argued, must therefore have been com-
posed before his death on 29 November 1314.12 In Tribum/​Quoniam the past tense
(regnaverat) indicates that Philip is no longer reigning and that the motet must date
from after his death (true) but, goes the argument, before Marigny’s execution on 30
April 1315. In Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna the body of Marigny has been washed by the
rain on the gallows of Montfaucon; therefore it may date from up to two years after his
execution, the period during which his body was left there as an example before it was
finally released for burial in 1317.13 Indeed the motet must be at least that late. But that
is not the same as asserting that it must have been the last of the three motets to be com-
posed, a claim that may not stand up to scrutiny.
The role and position of these topical motets in the interpolated Fauvel itself had
hardly been addressed. Even the valuable study by Ernest Sanders considered only the
external historical events and not any relevance they might have to the Fauvel narrative,
neglecting to observe that the motetus Heu Fortuna is primarily Fauvel’s first-​person la-
ment on his rejection by Fortuna.14 Heu Fortuna also invokes Haman’s execution: ‘velud
Aman morior’, says Fauvel in his love-​death response to that rejection. The simultaneous
triplum Aman novi further emphasises in its first word the image of Haman applied
post mortem to Marigny, recapitulated and brought home in the same text as noster
Aman (line 18, first person plural). ‘In monte falconis’ indicates Montfaucon, the gal-
lows of Paris, on which Marigny had already been hanged. The Haman–​Marigny link
in the triplum makes sense of velut Aman morior in the motetus and connects Marigny,
Haman and Fauvel, as will be recounted in Chapter 5. Marigny’s death, like Haman’s, is
a real one on the gallows, but real death is not yet part of Fauvel’s narrative. Downfall
is predicted but withheld. Fauvel’s words do double duty as Marigny’s ante mortem la-
ment, invoking Haman, at his execution, spoken by, or as if by, one not yet dead. The
tenor is fashioned, exceptionally, from two chants: one from the Office of the Dead (Heu
me) and the other from the Maundy Thursday chant Tristis est anima mea, expressing
Christ’s agony in Gethsemane.15 Both, again, affirm the first person singular.
Liturgically the latter chant indicates the eve of Christ’s crucifixion. In histor-
ical time the motetus signals the eve of Ascension, when Marigny was hanged (that
is, Wednesday, 30 April 1315), with much play in the motet texts and the Chronique
métrique on height, ascent, and fall. The triplum refers to that hanging after the fact. In

12 Thus Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 36: ‘probably October–​November 1314, certainly

no later, since it reflects the state of affairs before Philippe’s death’; Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 338; and Leech-​
Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars nova’, 307: ‘before 29.xi.14’. Roesner et al., in Le Roman de Fauvel (24b) are
prepared to stretch this to ‘cannot be later than the beginning of 1315’.
13 Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 52. See Chs. 4 and 5.
14 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’. Besseler and Schrade had also made the same

assumption.
15 Aman is a clearer case than in others that have been suggested; see Rankin, ‘The Divine Truth of Scripture’.

One such, in a motet securely attributed to Vitry by internal signature and in the Quatuor principalia, is Cum
statua/​Hugo, ingeniously argued in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 113–​18, where she engages with
Clark, ‘New Tenor Sources’, 121–​24. And it has been suggested that Machaut’s Motet 5, Aucune gent/​Qui
plus aimme/​Fiat voluntas tua is either a conflation of two chants or an extensively manipulated chant. See
Boogaart, Guillaume de Machaut . . . Motets, 198–​99.
 Fauvel and Marigny 71

Fauvel’s time, his lament is on the eve of Pentecost; the following day will mark his mar-
riage to Vaine Gloire. Similar counterpoints and conflicts between liturgical time and
the narrative time of Fauvel are worked out on a large scale.16
The three Marigny motets are presented in Paris146 in reverse chronological order
from that in which the historical events to which they refer took place and which their
verb tenses underscore. This fact is known, but has usually been mentioned without
comment, or even been taken to imply support for the view that the motets were im-
perfectly adapted to their new context, having originally been intended for a different
one. It is my goal here to show that this order might have been purposeful, and hence
to propose that they were designed from the beginning for Fauvel. In the Fauvel narra-
tive, Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna precedes Tribum/​Quoniam, which precedes Garrit gallus/​
In nova. Fauvel’s lament in the motetus Heu Fortuna, at least, is in the correct order in
relation to Fauvel. The other two motets have more oblique and generalised references
to Fauvel, which has led to their function in Fauvel being considered secondary, as
has the apparently wrong order of their reference to historical events. But many plan­
ning details of Paris146 show increasingly that nothing about its contents or order
was casual. If the motets are made to act their parts in the narrative, as are the masked
characters of the charivari, they may not be literally documentary. The tenses of their
ostensible order tell us not about their order of composition, as has been assumed, but
rather about the fiction of their reversal and double use. Garrit gallus/​In nova presents
events that are current and about to happen; if, as I suggest, it is merely feigning the pre-
sent tense, its actual composition is no more confined to the time while Philip IV was
still alive than the post factum prophecies in the Divine Comedy are bound to the time
before those events occurred.17 Not only were all these motets of current interest; they
were planned as exempla for this grand admonitio to the royal house, and are its raison
d’être. The Roman de Fauvel is not, after all, a newspaper to be discarded when topical
interest is lost. It has already made recent or even current events into art of timeless and
lasting value. As Ezra Pound put it, ‘Literature is news that stays news’.
The chronology that has resulted from a documentary reading of the political texts
apart from their context in Fauvel has led to arguments about the stylistic development
of their composer(s). Schrade had dated the Marigny motets by historical event and
proposed that all three were by Philippe de Vitry. Sanders used those datings in con-
junction with his analyses to argue a chronological progression from less to more tightly
ordered pieces, applying that hypothesis, in turn, to cast doubt upon Philippe de Vitry’s
authorship of the less ‘tidy’ pieces.18 Like Schrade before him, he was concerned to refine
the Vitry canon. Schrade had built it up; Sanders added and subtracted pieces, partly on
grounds of style, on a rather rigid formal criterion of ‘modular numbers’, and of associ-
ation with other compositions. Edward Roesner further trimmed Vitry’s oeuvre—​and
indeed his role in the creation of Fauvel—​to a cautious minimum, arguing that only five

16 See Dillon, ‘The Profile of Philip V’.

17 Dante’s Purgatorio dates from about 1310, but refers prophetically to 1300 and 1306, the kidnap of
Boniface VIII, and the transfer of the papacy to Avignon.
18 Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’; Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 36: ‘Apart from the fact,

however, that these two works would be the only motets by Vitry to be preserved as unica in f.fr. 146, their
attribution to him would force us to postulate a curious inconsistency in the composer’s development: both
motets, written after as advanced a piece as Garrit gallus, lack a coherent phrase structure and generally ex-
hibit a conservative facture.’
72 Fauvel and Vitry

or at most seven motets (all or most outside Fauvel) are likely to be his, one of which (the
late Phi millies ad te/​O creator) survived only as text without music. Most of the triplum
has since been recovered.19
First, it may be responded that more criteria for compositional ingenuity can be
proposed than the particular one demonstrated by Sanders. Neither isorhythm nor
upper-​part periodicity is the only criterion of craft. Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna is a su-
perbly well-​made piece, if not conventionally so with respect to isorhythm and upper-​
voice periodicity. Broader criteria should restrain the judgement as to whether a piece
is by the same or a different composer until a wider range of techniques has been estab-
lished and until there is a clearer consensus about features that are likely or not to be
imitable. The quest for a single line of development along which compositions can be
neatly arranged chronologically fails to allow for outliers, the cultivation of deliberate
effects, innovative originality or deliberate archaising, all of which are arguably present
in Fauvel. It also fails to recognise that many early ars nova motets are unique essays
that neither conform to nor create a template. To rescue Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna and
Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores from charges of untidiness may undo Sanders’s reasons for
taking them away from Vitry, but that does not yet prove that they or any other motets
are by Vitry.20
Sanders accepts Vitry’s authorship for Garrit gallus/​In nova on grounds of its shared
cantus firmus with the ascribed (non-​Fauvel) motet Douce plaisance/​Garison and
supports Vitry’s authorship of Floret/​Florens on the same grounds (discussed in Ch. 6).
Sanders argues that the same cantus firmus makes it likely that those pieces are by the
same composer, without consideration of the ease with which this could be a copied fea-
ture or a homage, and without observing that shared tenors occur in motets by different
composers (Machaut and Vitry, Damett and Sturgeon, and many more).21 He removes
Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna, even though it is on Marigny, as being too untidy to have been
written after the ‘tidier’ Garrit gallus/​In nova. As will be shown below, this is incon-
sistent with his bid to add the ‘untidy’ Floret/​Florens to the Vitry canon, but to remove it
from the Fauvel project on grounds that it was already obsolete.22 This argument cannot
be invoked without raising the question why this consideration did not prevent the in-
clusion in Fauvel of the other motets that deal with the same series of events and would
be similarly obsolete.
Second, even if style chronology could be demonstrated, we still need not assume
that the piece referring to the latest events was composed last. And even if the composer
is the same, a few months is probably too narrow a time frame for such a finely tuned
range of stylistic nuance to be established as the basis for a compositional chronology.

19 Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 39–​ 42. For the triplum see Lüdtke, ‘Kleinüberlieferung’;
Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices’; Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art.
20 Orbis/​Vos can now be added to the list of motets surviving outside Fauvel (in Koblenz701). See Kügle,

‘The Aesthetics of Fragments’. Most of the Fauvel motets also found in later copies have at some point been
tentatively attributed to Vitry. Whether his authorship played any part in their continued transmission, or
should play any part in our attributions, remains to be investigated.
21 See Leech-​ Wilkinson, ‘Related Motets’, for relationships between motets by, for example, Vitry and
Machaut. In OH nos. 112, 113, Damett and Sturgeon divide a chant between them as the cantus firmus of
those two motets; Machaut’s Motet 17 uses part of the same tenor as Vitry, Vos quid admiramini: Gaude virgo
gloriosa, super omnes speciosa (see Ch. 8); Motet 13 has the unidentified tenor Ruina, also used in Super/​
Presidentes in Paris146.
22 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 35–​36, and Clark, ‘The Flowering’, 178 n. 12.
 Fauvel and Marigny 73

A complex Ovidian textual-​musical quotation, to be explored below, seemed to sug-

gest that Garrit gallus/​In nova and Tribum/​Quoniam were indeed composed in the
order implied by their ostensible historical narrative sequence. I would now argue that
the motets could equally well have been worked out concurrently so that the material
seems to refer to itself, without necessarily confining the compositional dates to the ap-
parent historical sequence. With respect to chronological assumptions, one might ask,
further: why should the master of the Fauvel miniatures have painted more conven-
tionally in his later work, after painting with such originality, verve, and imagination
in Paris146?23
Third, we cannot assume that Vitry, simply because, apart from Machaut, he is the
only known composer of the time by whom we knowingly have any motets, must
be the author of all competent motets or only of the most competent ones. The issue
of personal stylistic development becomes moot, even if Vitry’s authorship of these
pieces can be argued on other grounds. Roesner has objected that the three motets
are unlikely to be by the same composer because this would show an undue obses-
sion with Marigny.24 But there is no shortage of obsession in Fauvel, whether it be
manifested in the historical events in which Marigny was the villain, in the collective
obsession of the compilers, or in the fauvelisation of pre-​existent pieces. Daniel Leech-​
Wilkinson narrowed the composition dates and the compositional progression of the
Fauvel motets.25 He distinguished two composers for the advanced motets. One may
be Vitry; the other he called ‘the Master of the Royal Motets’. He assumed the evident
termini post quos that refer to events that have happened—​the king has died, Marigny
has been hanged. This is obviously true. But like Sanders and Roesner, he went on to
impose termini ante quos, assuming that a piece would not have been written after a
later event that overtakes it. All these writers have assumed or implied that the com-
piler assembled his material, both old material for refurbishing and modern pieces,
from older and current repertory external to the Fauvel project itself. This is very prob-
ably true of the imported older material, some of which was purposefully customised
for Fauvel. But the issue here is rather: were the most modern motets, up-​to-​date in
style and topical content, written for some other purpose independent of the Fauvel
project, or were they purpose-​made for it?26
As Roesner pointed out in private correspondence, a consequence of assuming that
all three motets were written for Fauvel is to place them at the very centre of the early
ars nova and at the apex of the transmission of this repertory. There is clearly a problem
with this assumption with respect to their transmission, for the copies in Paris146
have errors of text and music that disqualify them from being the source for other
surviving or ideally correct copies. But is it not possible that the problem here lies in
the Paris146 copies themselves? The material collected for the compilation must have
existed in some more temporary form before being copied into the manuscript, and
those working materials could themselves have formed the stemmatic apex of the often
inaccurate copies. Other interpolated Fauvel manuscripts with music are known to have

23 Listed by Avril in Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 46.

24 Ibid. 42b.
25 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars nova’.
26 The consensus seems to have moved since the first publication of this chapter towards recognising that

the newest Fauvel motets were indeed newly composed for the Paris146 compilation.
74 Fauvel and Vitry

existed. Some of the material included in or rejected from this compilation may have
been used in those other versions. Paris146 may not have been the only or even the best
repository of compositions designed for a larger Fauvel enterprise.
But if these motets were from the start conceived as admonitory exempla, serving the
dual purposes of Fauvel narrative and of historical narrative, their actual order of compo-
sition remains undetermined and perhaps irrelevant, undermining attempts to establish
composer chronology based on the historical dates. They take their place in Fauvel as re-
flective ‘arias’ glossing the main text and, in the pivotal case of the motetus Heu Fortuna,
as direct speech by Fauvel after Fortuna’s rejection. Book II has more direct speech by the
protagonists, in line with greatly increased interpolation. Fortuna, in the guise of a woman,
has two aspects, a counterpart to the hybrid presentation of Fauvel. The Fauvel story itself
is her deceptively pleasant side, while the dark and melancholic underside is that of the his-
torical exemplum. To each of Fortuna’s two wheels is fixed another smaller wheel within
the larger that turns in the opposite direction. It is through these that Fortuna controls time,
and it is their motions that constantly cause the world’s affairs to change. Fortuna’s wheels,
her control of time, and her contrary nature may be illustrated as follows:

Fortuna’s two wheels and their Fortuna’s doubleness and control of

contrary subwheels time
La seignorie temporel, Mes diversement mi transporte,
Que deust estre basse Iune, Et ma maniere si est double
Est par la roe de Fortune As uns sui belle, as autres trouble.
Souveraine de sainte Eglise. Je sui fille du roy des rois.
(L 2179–​83; S 2215–​19)
Sainte Yglise est au dessous mise Le pouoir m’est commis en temps
Si qu’el donne poi de lumiere; Par quoy tout mouvement terminent;
Ainsi va ce devant derriere: Par moi commencent et definent,
Les membres sont dessus le chief. Et temps n’est fors que la mesure
(L 472–​9; S 470–​77) De tous mouvemens de nature.
Deux roez ot devant Fortune .......
Qui tous jours tournient, mes l’une Le temps ay, par quoy je mesure
Va tost et l’autre lentement, Du monde tout l’ambleure.
Et en chascune vraiement Onques si tost n’amble ne point
A une mendre roe mise Que du temps n’y mete le point,
Tout par dedens et a, tel guise Par le quel je tantost compasse,
Que mouvement contraire tient Le present ainsi com il passe,
Contre la roe ou el se tient Tout soit le present si menuz
Ices roez sans sejourner Qu’il ne puisse estre retenuz.
Font l’estat du monde tourner. Mez ma dite commission
(L 1931–​40; S 1966–​75)
Aussi dois des roes entendre Faudra quant faudra motion,
Dont chascune en a une mendre, Car le monde adonc finera
Et ont contraires mouvemens Tantost que mouvoir cessera.
 Fauvel and Marigny 75

Et par divers entendemens. (L2218–​22, 2229–​40; S 2254–​58,

(L 2689–​92; S 2721–​24) 2265–​76)
Ainsi cil qui est haut montez, Fortune si n’est autre chose
Soit plain de mal ou de bontez, Que la providence divine,
Mainte chose le contrarie Qui dispose, mesure et termine
Par verite ou par envie Par compas de droite reson.
(L 2254–​57; S 2290–​93)
Ou par grant tristece ou par cure,
Par maladie ou aventure.
Et ce dit la roe petite
Qui contre la grant tous jours lite;
Car il n’est nul, sachiez sans doute,
A qui Fortune se doint toute.
(L 2711–​20; S 2743–​52)

Fortune’s two wheels illustrate contrary motion, back-​to-​front and up-​and-​down

reversals. The large wheel finds a parallel in the daily east–​west motion of the primum
mobile—​the heaven of the fixed stars—​and the contrary small wheel in the proper, peri-
odic movements of the seven planetary heavens, which move south-​west to north-​east
on an inclined plane. It is surprising that Fortuna’s all-​important wheels are not illus-
trated in Paris146, and that depictions of her and her attributes are here less interesting
and varied than those of the hybrid Fauvel himself. By contrast, another copy of the
uninterpolated roman is prefaced by a striking image of Fortuna.27 The most conspic-
uous wheels in Paris146 are the four on the chariot of Hellequin. Was the manuscript
perhaps at one stage intended to have four Marigny motets, or four royal motets? There
is some evidence for both suggestions.
The emphasis on Fortuna’s wheels in the text suggests why Fauvel presents us with
different chronological tracks. The roman is unfolded in a main wheel, while the little
wheel, the contemporary political narrative, goes against it in the opposite direction.
This notion is echoed in musical and verbal palindromes, in superimposed motet texts,
in strong hints of reversal in all three Marigny motet texts, and in the arrangement of
the roman itself. The last line of the triplum Aman novi is ‘Non eodem cursu respondent
ultima primis’—​not by the same revolution do the last respond to the first. ‘Sic nec
est reversus’ (line 10) likewise suggests the cursus of Fortuna’s wheels within wheels
described in the motetus text Heu Fortuna. Soon after Fortuna has described her wheels
the effect is manifested: Fauvel feels the reversal of his own fortunes. The motets are
placed in the ‘correct’ historical order until the effect of Fortuna’s wheels is felt at Aman
novi/​Heu Fortuna, a turning point of the Fauvel narrative. The motetus Heu Fortuna is
central to the Fauvel narrative as well as being historically the most explicit of the three

27 Paris2195, f. 156v. See https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv1b6​0003​385/​f320.item (last accessed

18.7.2020); reproduced in black and white in Bent and Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies, 42. See also MachautC,
f. 30, reproduced in Zayaruznaya, ‘She has a Wheel’, 197 and in Earp and Hartt (eds.), Poetry, Art, and Music,
Fig. 4.18.
76 Fauvel and Vitry

motets. It must have been written for Fauvel, but at the same time with very precise
historical resonances, and is announced in the lines preceding the motetus as Fauvel’s
lament in his own voice, as will be set out in Chapter 5.
These motets are not pre-​existent compositions or hasty adaptations; they must
have been written expressly for Fauvel with deliberately double meaning, their po-
litical message tailored to their place in Fauvel. If we turn the focus to their primary
role in Paris146, a view largely absent from discussions of the motets, factors other
than external historical narrative must determine that role, their dating, and their
order in the manuscript. The habit of making texts do double duty was embedded in
the motet tradition from the start, when sacred and profane love were boldly pitted
against each other in the juxtaposition of liturgical and secular texts and tunes. The
opportunity to exercise and develop new notational possibilities in the early four-
teenth century must also have been stimulated by the Fauvel project, another sense
in which Fauvel may have prompted the compositions rather than being prompted
by them.
Among many hybrid aspects of Paris146 are the fauvelised musical compositions
in which older chants or motets are changed or patched up with Fauvel material, or
placed in contexts wildly different from their original ones, with purposeful perversity.
But some of the newer compositions are unlikely to have had a previous existence and
are more likely to have been composed for Fauvel. Some of the texts mix French and
Latin, biblical and classical quotations, rhythmic and metrical lines. Juxtapositions
in the same motet, as will be shown for Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna, may perhaps be
considered a further enhancement of the hybrid theme.28 The Renard tradition un-
naturally substitutes animals for humans, as also happens in Tribum/​Quoniam and
Garrit gallus/​In nova. Roesner et al. write (Le Roman de Fauvel, 20b): ‘The fox who
rules in place of the blind lion, who gorges on chickens, and who sucks the blood of
the sheep while the cock crows weeping is meant to be understood as Fauvel him-
self, and not merely as a stand-​in for Marigny’. Surely it can be both. The blind lion
is Philip IV, so identified (there as debonair) at the end of Book I, as well as in the
dits in Paris146. Fauvel is the primary narrative, but Fortuna’s reverse wheel carries
the Marigny story, backwards, as counter-​plot, and in that counter-​plot Marigny is
primary.
The climax of the transformational symbolism comes in the final two Marigny
motets that are linked to each other and to Fauvel by building on different lines from
Ovid—​final in their present manuscript order, Tribum and Garrit gallus. The final
column of the body of Fauvel is headed by the first line of the Metamorphoses, ‘In
nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas’, that most famous of first lines, and most
famous signal of animal transformation. Fauvel does everything in reverse, by its op-
posite; how better to depict that than to start from the end with a famous beginning,
signalling the reverse counter-​narrative. Garrit gallus/​In nova presents the lamenting
Frenchman in the voice of the lamenting author (maybe Vitry), for Ovidian purposes
a cock, lamenting the fox. The fox is not only Marigny but also the antecedent of
Fauvel and the Renard of earlier romans, in which the lion-​king Noble is deceived

28 Assuming only the historical meaning, Sanders (‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 32) states that

Haman is Marigny, here and in Floret/​Florens. But Fauvel is also Haman and Fauvel is also Marigny.
 Fauvel and Marigny 77

by Renard the wily fox, a clear model for King Philip as the blind lion and Marigny
as the fox.29 This reading of the motets is supported from the text: Fauvel’s palace
was painted with the story of Renard (L 1357–​58, S 1393–​94), implying that the
fox of earlier romans is metamorphosed here into the horse Fauvel, or at least is his
role model. The Ovidian motets gloss the bestial transformations of Fauvel, to show
how humans become animals, or by currying Fauvel (as in ‘currying favour’) reduce
themselves to the status of animals.30 The extra twist here is that Fauvel the horse,
led by Fortuna upstairs from the stable on the first folio as the first stage of his hybrid
metamorphosis, becomes Fauvel the half-​human hybrid who flouts nature. Marigny
the human, through his Renard-​like fox identity, the vulpis of Garrit gallus/​In nova,
becomes Fauvel the hybrid. Marigny’s transformation is ‘first’ recounted, as reverse
narrative, in Garrit gallus at the end of Fauvel, ‘starting’ at the end, at the top of the last
column, with In nova [sic] fert at its ‘beginning’, and balancing Fauvel’s fully equine
appearance at the beginning of the manuscript.
Apart from a short envoi on f. 45 (the final drinking song), starting from the end,
Garrit gallus ends the body of the roman, whose final folio (f. 44v, the ‘backside’ of the
last full folio, and its right-​hand column, which is the beginning of the backwards se-
quence) records the grim consequences of this transformation with a famous introduc-
tory line that not only serves both narratives, but also puts the beginning at the end,
underscored throughout by musical and textual puns on ideas of metamorphosis and
reversal. Indeed, it almost amounts to a palindrome for the bi-​directional narrative, also
reflected in the musically palindromic tenor of Garrit gallus, to be discussed below.
Ovid’s famous opening line not only signals a beginning, starting from the end, but
also parallels the first recto folio of the ‘forwards’ narrative of Fauvel, with its striking
illustrations, generically hybrid musical transformations, and ostentatiously innovative
musical notation: there are three oblique minim upstems at the end of staff 3 of Quare
fremuerunt on f. 1r, probably the earliest instance of stemmed minims. Fauvel started
there as fully horse, but by the end of the narrative, in the Fountain of Youth scene,
his progeny (begotten with his human hind quarters on Vain Glory, as shown in the
nuptial miniature on f. 34) appear fully human. Already old men, they are transformed
(backwards) into youths, albeit by black baptism in ordure and sins, making the solemn
Christian ritual of rebirth into a mere trick with time. They move from right to left, in
the direction of the ‘backwards’ narrative. This scene is accompanied by the second-​
from-​the-​end, second in narrative order Marigny motet, Tribum/​Quoniam, a piece
strongly marked with respect to reversal.

29 The fox is also the subject of the motetus of another Fauvel motet, Detractor est nequissimus vulpis/​Qui

secuntur castra, which is also in Paris571. Both upper voices in both sources have a pair of little strokes at
the beginning, as does the motetus of Servant/​Ludowice, implying some level of duple mensuration. In both
motets the modus is perfect and tempus imperfect; major prolation would be expected from the Fauvel no-
tation, but Paris571 is more ambiguous and inconsistent. While some groups clearly specify major prolation
by stemming, up and down, there are some groups of four, all with minim stems, that might suggest minor
prolation. (The triplum of both motets is not in the left-​but in the right-​hand column.)
30 L 335–​37, S 333–​35: Mes or est du tout berstorne | Ce que Diex avoit atourne | Que hommes sont devenus

bestes. And L 416–​18, S 414–​16: Mes Fauvel, qui trestout desvoie, | A tant fait que cest luminare | Est tout
berstornei [Paris146: bestourne] au contraire’. With respect to the substitution of a horse for a fox, Jean-​Claude
Mühlethaler (Fauvel au pouvoir, pt. I, ch. 2) has pointed out that the horse has associations with luxuria (a
particular vice of the Fauvel programme) and the Apocalypse, also strongly evoked here.
78 Fauvel and Vitry

That motet could have been planned to start at the top of f. 42r but in fact begins two lines
earlier at the end of f. 41v. The layout is so contrived that the words Fortuna cito vertere, set
to a melodic palindrome, appear at the top of the page, another strong hint of reversal. The
tenor is redundantly notated twice to fill the space gained by starting the triplum early. In
this context we are surely to understand the ‘tribe’ as referring to Fauvel’s progeny too. As
the central of the three Marigny motets, Tribum/​Quoniam is the pivot for their reverse his-
torical order. Marigny is most clearly Fauvel when the two voices of Marigny and Fauvel
are united in Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna, the third of the Marigny motets (Ch. 5) and the
third from the end of Fauvel (other motets and musical items intervene—​the sequence
of Marigny motets is not uninterrupted). Here, too, there is a contrary direction, animal
to hybrid, hybrid to man, and man to hybrid in the lament that serves them both.31 In
addition, the use of animals to represent human forces at the most pointed part of the
admonitio is an essential part of the apocalyptic strand of the roman.
All three Marigny motets, and several other Fauvel motets as well, are saturated with
themes and structures of reversal and inversion in music and text.32 The wrong order for
the historical narrative is the correct order for the topsy-​turvy world of Fauvel, and it is
that world we deal with when the motets are seen in context. Fauvel operates in reverse,
as shown above. Fortuna has raised up Fauvel against reason, contraire a raison (L, S 23);
and fortune va sans reson | et si regne en toute seson (L 297–​98; S 295–​96). She is unstable;
her wheel turns incessantly, changing high to low and far to near, back to front: Que
Fortune qui n’est pas ferme, | Et qui de torneir ne se terme, | Le plus avant retornera, | De
haut bas, de loing pres fera (L, S 79–​82). Above all, Fortuna controls time, the beginning
and end of time (L 2218–​36; S 2254–​72), and this is contrived in the art of time, measured
music. We need hardly look further than Fortuna’s bidirectional wheels to corroborate
the bold execution of chronological paradoxes at so many levels in Fauvel, a narrative
that is already contre raison, a grand double negative, a vivid manifestation of Fortuna.
Let us return briefly to the junction of Books I and II, ff. 10–​11.33 Fortuna’s control of
time by means of liturgical reference starts precisely here, immediately before the three
royal references that are placed between the date of book I, 1310, on f. 10 (c) and its explicit
on f. 11. The first of these royal references is one of the few insertions of new verse lines
into book I of the roman; most of those insertions are on this page, and the remainder are
in book II. Philip IV, the young debonair lion, grandson of St Louis, reigned jadis and is
now dead. The addition recording his death—​in 1314, a striking juxtaposition of dates
after the just-​advertised 1310—​also offers a deliberate emphasis on verb tenses:34

Regnaut li lyons debonaires

De qui fu plus douz li afaires

31 The Trinity motet Firmissime/​Adesto stands between the two Ovidian motets, its accompanying

miniatures displaying the figure of Christ crucified that alludes to the tenor of Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna. But
Fauvel as a transformed Renard is equally present in Tribum/​Quoniam and Garrit gallus/​In nova.
32 See Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 41b for discussion of change and reversal.
33 Discussed also in Brown, ‘Rex ioians’ and Dillon, ‘The Profile of Philip V’.
34 Philip the Fair died on 29 November 1314. This is not the first mention of Philip IV (who succeeded

his father in 1285); the ‘neveu St Louis’ is mentioned as having dealt with the Templars (L 1005, S 1011). The
date 6 December 1314 given in some manuscripts (but not this one) for the completion of Book II is exactly
one week after the death of Philip IV. Both days were Fridays, respectively preceding and following the first
Sunday of Advent, which may tie them to the liturgical calendar played out in Fauvel and provide the occasion
for some of its portrayals of a double narrative.
 Fauvel and Marigny 79

Que il n’eust besoing este;

Ce li fist la grant honeste
Qui en li tout ades regna.
Certes ie croi qu’il le regne a
Du roiaume de paradis.
Cilz fu Phelippes, fius iadis
Du tres bon roi hardi Phelippes
Qui en Arragon lessa les pippes;
Ci si fu filz de saint Loys.
Du tout ci mons dit assoys
[f. 10v] Recitant de lui un motet.
Ha, sire diex! comme il flotet
Par mer du cueur et marchoit terre
Pour le saint sepucre conquerre!
Se li autre a li garde preissent,
D’amer Fauvel ne s’entremeissent:
Car loiaute et verite
Retornassent, Fauvel gite.
(f. 10r–​v; Dahnk, vv. 15–​34, Strubel 1241–​60)

We are led at this moment to expect a motet for Philip IV, but instead there follows
one for his son and successor, Louis X (Se cuers ioians/​Rex beatus/​Ave: F 15, p.mus.
32), and then the motet for his younger son Philip V qui regne ores (Servant regem/​
O Philippe/​Rex regum, ff. 10v–​11r (F 16, p.mus. 33).35 The added verses emphasising
Philip IV’s descent from St Louis, and the motets for the two brother kings, are placed
in historically correct order at the very end of Book I (ff. 10v–​11r), unlike the histor-
ical Marigny motets distributed in deliberately reverse order towards the end of book
II. Were there once intended to be three motets here, for the three adult kings who
have come blasphemously to curry Fauvel, anticipating the Antichrist of book II?36
Fauvel is depicted on the facing page (f. 11), mocking them in royal majesty while
usurping (sitting on) their throne.
And the current pair of royal motets is preceded by the first wholly French-​texted
motet in the collection, Je voi douleur/​Fauvel nous a fait/​Autant (F 14, p.mus. 29), a
motet that emphasises Fauvel both in the motetus and in the tenor, which is put into
Fauvel’s mouth in the first person and signals reversal: autant m’est si poise arriere
comme avant.37 French was previously used in a Fauvel motet only for alternating
lines in the ‘hybrid’ triplum of Detractor est/​Qui secuntur/​Verbum iniquum (F 9,

35 Capital F here denotes Fauvel numbers, not folios.

36 The author tells of a dream of four kings. The fourth king, the infant John (known as the bean king), is
also mentioned in Un songe, cited in Morin, ‘Jehannot de Lescurel’. See also Brown, ‘Rex ioians’ and Dillon,
‘The Profile of Philip V’. The three kings could also be a blasphemous allusion to the three kings who came to
worship the infant Christ.
37 The triplum is framed (palindromically) by the couplet Je voi doulour avenir | car tout ce fait par con-

traire reflecting the tenor’s ‘weighing the same at the beginning and the end’, another instance of reversal.
Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 46 presents this motet as ‘the superimposition of a body on a piece of
music’, also discussed in Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, 90–​91. The upper-​part texts reinforce and augment the lessons of
the tenor, as they do in Aman.
 Book I Book II
ff. 10v−11r f. 30r ff. 30v−32r f. 41r f. 42r f. 44v
Fauvel’s suit
to Fortuna,
descriptions of
Fortuna’s wheels
Paris/Babylon
Fountain of [Fauvel] not named,
Youth progency of but F-F
Fauvel, human (for Fortuna−Fauvel)
Vana Gloria,
FAUVEL as horse: Heu fortuna Fortune parle: baptism Vices
becomes hybrid Pax vobis (transforms)
old to young
exile exile exile
Haman Jacob Pharoah/Jacob Haman, Mordecai
Antichrist
Philip IV still
alive in Book I
to 1310 insertion, regnaverat PHILIP IV, during Philip IV’s
now dead (jadis); blind lion; life
Lion monarchisat
Trahunt f. 6v motets for:
[Philip IV, absent]
Louis X
Philip V Fauvel in majesty
Aman Tribum Garris gallus/ Floret
about to hang, and In nova fert
long ago hanged MARIGNY, fox
Crucifixion tenor Lenten tenor Neuma (neutral) = Neuma (neutral)
Office of Dead

Fig. 3.1 A much-​simplified diagram of part of the Fauvel narrative, left to right, and historical narrative, right to left
 Fauvel and Marigny 81

p.mus. 12) in book I, which perhaps has a vaguer reference to Marigny dating from
the time of Philip the Fair, but it is not discussed here as a Marigny motet. The use
of French in a motet is thus set up in immediate anticipation of the very next motet,
for Louis X, Se cuers ioians/​Rex beatus/​Ave, whose French triplum creates an irrev-
erent hybrid with the royal Latin motetus: the French-​speaking Fauvel has inserted
himself most unsuitably into a royal context, just before the invocation of the Holy
Spirit at the anointing (into which in turn is inserted with calculated incongru-
ence the rondeau Porchier miex, p.mus. 30): ‘I’d rather be a swineherd than curry
Fauvel’, as he will in the miniature following the royal motets defile the royal throne
of France.38
The trio of kings at the junction of books I and II points forward to the trio of motets
at the end of the Fauvel narrative, where the contrary motion of the motet sequence
begins.39 The young debonair lion at the end of book I, Philip the Fair, is the blind lion
of the two Marigny motets placed at the end of book II. Are we also meant to read Garrit
gallus/​In nova, where Philip is alive, as balancing a missing motet for him at the end of
book I which marks his death, with a similar emphasis on tenses in both places? The
three royal statements are in correct, or ‘forward’, chronological order, which already
suggests that the project may have been fashioned retrospectively after the death of
at least one of them. Some of these forwards and backwards directions are shown in
simplified form in Fig. 3.1. If the double function of these motets in Fauvel is primary,
their actual order of composition becomes moot. Relationships between the motets do
not prevent them from being written at roughly the same time, after all the events to
which they refer had happened. This places them after 1317, probably by c. 1320, but
in any case before the death of Philip V in 1322. In any case, they are too close together
in time to encourage any secure stylistic separation. The Marigny motets, at least, must
have been planned together, whether or not they are the work of the same composer,
and whatever was the precise order of their composition, both words and music. Such
planning may be partially extended to other motets, some of them less clearly or not at
all topical, by means of cross-​references, reversals, palindromes and other structural
features. These considerations blur questions of individual authorship and also increase
the likelihood that some of the non-​topical motets, too, were purpose-​made for Fauvel.
Not only do they offer a caution against over-​literal dating according to the topical
references, but beyond that they mark a rich new strand of contrivance in this remark-
able Gesamtkunstwerk.

38 The accompanying miniature shows the Holy Spirit descending as a dove to a clerk in prayer. The text

greets this as He unccion espirital, which I read as the ‘unction’ of a royal anointing; Strubel (line 1211) renders
it as He, unicorn espirital.
39 Fauvel is rich in trios. The three modern Marigny motets at the end also mirror the three old but adapted

pieces on f. 1. Trios of words are also conspicuous; see the discussion of ‘three words’ and puns on three in
Tribum, Ch. 4.
 4
Tribum que non abhorruit/​Quoniam
secta latronum/​Merito hec patimur and its
‘Quotations’, and Garrit gallus/​In nova

In the preceding chapter I argued for the conceptual unity of the three Marigny motets as
a group and their double function in the forwards narrative of Fauvel and the backwards
narrative relating to Marigny and recent political events. It anticipates some of what
will be expanded here about the motets and their relationship to each other.1 These two
motets, Tribum and Garrit, together with the Trinity motet on f. 43r, Firmissime/​Adesto,
are frequently cited as the most advanced motets in Fauvel and as candidates for the au-
thorship of Philippe de Vitry. Much has been written about them, embodying as they
do major musical and notational innovations of the early ars nova, including duple (im-
perfect) tempus; a wide range of note values within one piece, from maximodus to what
would later be called prolation, with minims, laying the foundations for much longer
compositions than motets of the thirteenth century; changes of modus and tempus (in
the case of Garrit gallus, coded by the earliest known use of red notation for this pur-
pose); and mostly unstemmed semibreve groups divided by dots to be evaluated ac-
cording to default rhythms set out in a group of contemporary treatises in which Garrit
and Firmissime are also cited.2
However, they are very far from being the only compositions in Fauvel to display
some of these features. Aman/​Heu has usually been left out of this ‘advanced’ group,
presumably because it lacks the element of tenor repetition and regular periodicity pre-
sent in Garrit and Tribum. In Chapter 5 it will be shown to have considerable ingenuity
of a different kind while being closely tied to those motets. Leo Schrade treated the three
Marigny motets as inseparable; I hope to show that the nature of their interconnections
and coordination makes it highly probable that the three motets, different and unique as
they are, indeed stem from a single mind. At least a dozen of the other Fauvel motets use
imperfect tempus and major prolation avant la lettre. Some of the monophonic pieces,
too, lend themselves to the same rhythmic interpretation of semibreve groups as the
motets, even though such a reading is not corroborated by being locked into a contra-
puntal structure. Christopher Page’s rhythmic rendition of the monophonic ballade Ay

1 This chapter includes and extends material revised from the chapter published as ‘Polyphony of Texts

and Music in the Fourteenth-​Century Motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/​Quoniam secta latronum/​Merito hec
patimur and its “Quotations” ’, in Pesce (ed.), Hearing the Motet, 82–​103. It meets OUP’s conditions for reuse
without obtaining formal permission.
2 Besseler gave remarkably prescient analyses of these motets. However, I think he was wrong to call this

notation Petronian: none of these motets uses more than four S to the B (five only in Quare fremuerunt), and
they are all in duple tempus, which was unknown to Petrus and abhorrent to Jacobus. Besseler, ‘Studien II’.
See Bent, Jacobus, ch. 2, on this terminology. Leech-​Wilkinson considers Tribum and Firmissime more closely
related to each other than to Garrit gallus.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0005
84 Fauvel and Vitry

amours (ff. 16v–​17) is brilliantly vindicated by its use as a motet tenor with those expli­
citly notated rhythms in Paris934.3 And as noted, Quare fremuerunt on the opening
‘display’ page of Paris146 boasts three minim upstems, angled to the right as in the
slightly later Paris571. I will start in the middle, with the pivotal motet of the three,
Tribum, pivotal because of its central role in both the forward (Fauvel) and backward
(historical) narrative.
Tribum/​Quoniam ( Ex. 4.1) survives in three main sources, the interpolated Fauvel
in Paris146, Stras and the rotulus Br19606, six of whose nine motets are in Paris146 or
in some way related to its repertory.4 Three later adaptations will not be considered here,
though they attest to a long reception history.5 As with Garrit gallus ( Ex. 4.5, and see
below), the transcription conflates the largely unstemmed semibreves of Paris146 with
the clarifying minim stems of later sources. The few downstems (indicating a long note
on the first of a group of three) are only in Paris146. In Fauvel it shares a page (f. 42r)
with the famous Fountain of Youth miniature, around whose triangulated top music
and text are arranged. The remaining text and music on the page are closely coordinated
with the image, which presents a black baptism in which the progeny of Fauvel, shown
as old men, are rejuvenated in filth and vice, moving from right to left (i.e. backwards);
the motet can be read as a further gloss on the same theme.
Chapter 3 demonstrated the relationship of the texts of Tribum to a given political
situation involving the fall from power of a corrupt minister in early fourteenth-​century
France and his subsequent execution. Each of the texts for the upper voices ends with
a ‘quotation’ (actually a foundational element) in the form of a couplet of quantitative
verse commenting proverbially on the ‘tragic fall’. The tenor is drawn from the opening
of a chant melody for a passage in Genesis relating to the story of Joseph, which makes a
not-​too-​oblique comment on the contemporary political situation. I will show (1) that
the freely composed remaining texts for the upper voices in the motet (in rhymed syl-
labic verse) are built up from certain key words and sound patterns in their final met-
rical ‘quotations’; (2) that the two apparently independent texts are ingeniously related
by the fact that three of the same words or their roots are placed in a chained pattern that
connects the triplum, motetus and tenor; (3) that the melodies of the upper voices both
use elements of the tenor chant melody (the tenor being limited, significantly, to the
first three words of that chant); and (4) that they are so composed that the motetus and
triplum reflect and enhance the patterns found in the texts considered independently

3 Page, ‘Tradition and Innovation’, 355; Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars nova Motets.
4 The motet was previously edited in PMFC 1, 54–​56 and is in Paris146, ff. 41v–​42. A musical omission in
the motetus in Paris146 renders it unperformable without emendation from the other sources. The Appendix
to this chapter gives the manuscript variants. My transcription differs from Schrade’s in several places. The
identities are better seen if the plicas are left unrealised in the transcriptions, as they are in the later sources.
Bent, ‘Tribum’ neglected to take the Stras source into account, here rectified.
5 One of these is an ornamented keyboard adaptation of (mainly) triplum and motetus in Robertsbridge,

strikingly transposed up a tone (ed. Apel, Keyboard Music, 6–​8). Images of Robertsbridge are on DIAMM, and
a facsimile is in Wooldridge, Early English Harmony, plates 42–​45. These motet intabulations, especially that
of Flos vernalis (ed. Apel, Keyboard Music, 9) of which the original vocal model has now been identified, are
the subject of Alís Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’. Second is a small single leaf in Mu29775, preserving a
curiously notated and textually corrupt version of the triplum alone, transposed down a seventh (to the g an oc-
tave below the keyboard version), and with a page turn. Upstemmed, flagged, and downstemmed minims are
used, with no obvious relationship to the rhythms of the motet. Staehelin, ‘Münchner Fragmente’, 176–​77 and
pl. 5 (facsimile) dates it early 15th c., but the downstemmed minims might suggest an even later date, despite
their appearance in some early German organ tablatures, which this is not. Third, Rostock has what can only
be described as an approximation of the motetus of Tribum/​Quoniam on f. 43 with a triplum texted Dixit, dixit
iracundus homo which breaks the tenor into repeated notes to accommodate text. Both German sources appear
to be attempting minor prolation, which may indicate that they were copying from unstemmed semibreves.
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 85

and contrive ‘consonances’ between related words and sounds in the texts. After
identifying some significant features of its musical construction and the status of its
pre-​existent material, I will demonstrate textual-​musical references between the motets
Tribum/​Quoniam/​Merito and Garrit gallus/​In nova fert, and offer further discussion of
Garrit gallus.
It has long been recognised that Tribum is one of a group of motets alluding to events
and people prominent in the crises that afflicted the French royal house and the series
of accessions to the monarchy in the second decade of the fourteenth century. Philip
IV (the Fair) died on 29 November 1314, and his discredited counsellor Enguerrand
de Marigny was hanged on 30 March 1315. Philip was succeeded in turn by his sons
Louis X and Philip V, both of whose coronations are celebrated in motets at the junc-
tion of books I and II (as noted above), but the three Marigny motets at the end of book
II (Garrit gallus/​In nova fert, Tribum/​Quoniam, Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna) refer only
to Philip IV, as a blind lion whose reign is first present, in Garrit gallus, then past, in
Tribum, and to Marigny’s fall and execution in Aman.6
The last two lines of the motetus of Tribum/​Quoniam ‘quote’ an elegiac couplet from
one of the letters Ovid wrote in exile, Epistulae ex Ponto IV. 3, lines 35–​36, a work that
arises out of Ovid’s own fall and banishment. The tenor is the beginning (on the first
three words) of the Matins responsory for the third Sunday in Lent, Merito hec patimur
quia peccavimus in fratrem nostrum, Ꝟ Dixit Ruben fratribus suis (Justly we suffer these
things because we sinned against our brother. Reuben said to his brothers . . .). Its
biblical source is Genesis 42:21, which concerns Joseph’s incognito meeting with his
brothers in Egypt. Both Ovid and Genesis deal with exile; both provide significant con-
text for the newly written motet texts, underscoring the immediate and contemporary
message and the calamitous events to which they refer. Ovid’s letter was written from
exile to an unnamed (and unidentified) faithless friend. The subject and unstated con-
text of the tenor text from Genesis is the remorse of Joseph’s brothers after deceiving
their father Jacob about their abuse of Joseph, which led to his exile in Egypt. The Ovid
couplet is introduced by the words que dolum acuunt. The author ‘sharpens the deceit’
(or evil) by counterpointing Ovid’s exile to the exile of the Israelites in Egypt reported
in Genesis as well as drawing both into service to lament the woes of France in a motet
written for this amplified and politically pointed version of Fauvel.7
We have seen the central role played by Fortuna and her turning wheel in the
interpolated version of Fauvel for which the motet was written, and in whose triplum
Fortuna is likewise central. She also figures importantly in Ovid’s letter. Lines 7 and 29 of

6 Wathey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 84 and 95–​97, reported that the final hexameter couplet of the triplum

Tribum que non abhorruit is not an independent proverb but derives from Joseph of Exeter’s De bello troiano,
VI. 804–​5, in the context of the reversal of King Priam’s fortunes and his murder, a significant referent in the
historical context of Fauvel. In turn, the sentiment, but not the wording, derives from Lucretius, De rerum
natura. Even more strikingly, Vitry used this same couplet to annotate a passage in his own copy of the
Chronicon of Guillaume de Nangis, which recounts Parthian defeat (38 bc) and subsequent tragedies, in moral
and historical conditions parallel to those of the motet, where, too, it was better to have nothing than to suffer
a calamitous loss. This discovery offers further support for Vitry’s authorship of the motet, as well as for his di-
rect involvement in the Fauvel project. For a quotation from De bello trojano in Garrit gallus, see below n. 35.
7 Exile and eclipse are central themes of Paris146, particularly in the dits of Geffroy de Paris. One of his

French poems uses an eclipse of the sun and the moon to stand for the vacant papacy in 1314–​16 and also for
the uncertainties of the French royal succession and the eclipse of its dignity at the same period (De la Comète
et de l’Eclipse de la Lune et du Soulail); another deals with the exile of the papacy from Rome to Avignon (La
Desputoison de l’Eglise de Romme et de l’Eglise de France pour le Siège du Pape). See Six Historical Poems. The
Latin poem Natus ego also treats of this topic, but applies the theme of Babylonian captivity more generally
(and traditionally) to the sins and sufferings of the Church. See Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Dits’.
86 Fauvel and Vitry

the letter name Fortuna, who is described in the lines preceding those used in the motet
(italics mine):

7 nunc, quia contraxit vultum Fortuna recedis

...
quid facis, a! demens? Cur, si Fortuna recedat
30 naufragio lacrimas eripis ipse tuo?
Haec dea non stabili, quam sit levis, orbe fatetur,
quae summum dubio sub pede semper habet.
quolibet est folio, quavis incertior aura:
par illi levitas, improbe, sola tua est.
35 Omnia sunt hominum tenui pendentia filo
et subito casu quae valuere, ruunt.

Now that Fortune has frowned, you draw back . . . Ah, what are you doing, madman? Why,
if Fortune draws back, do you yourself thus refuse your shipwreck its tears? This goddess
declares by her unsteady wheel that she is fickle; she always has its top under her faltering
foot. She is more uncertain than any leaf, than any breeze; the only thing that matches her
inconstancy, reprobate, is yours. All human affairs hang by a slender thread, and things
that were strong collapse in a sudden fall.8

Here are the texts, lightly adapted from the versions as edited and translated by David
Howlett:

Triplum Disyllabic rhymes:

octosyllables
Tribum que non abhorruit a
indecenter ascendere b
furibunda non metuit a
Fortuna cito vertere, b
5 dum duci prefate tribus c
in sempiternum speculum d
parare palam omnibus c
non pepercit patibulum. d
Populus ergo venturus e
10 si trans metam | ascenderit, f
quidam forsitan casurus, e
cum tanta tribus ruerit, f

8 This passage is a vivid choice to evoke the theme of Marigny, whose hanging is more literally presented

in Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna. The text is here quoted and the translation adapted from Ovid, Ex ponto,
IV. 3. 35. This reference to the fragility of life also recalls Disticha Catonis, I. 19 (Cum dubia et fragilis sit
nobis vita tributa), providing a link to the direct quotation of the immediately preceding Disticha I. 18 in
Aman novi (Ch. 5).
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 87

sciat eciam quis fructus g

delabi sit in profundum. h
15 Post zephyros plus ledit hyems, post gaudia luctus; g (hexameter couplet)
unde nichil melius, quam nil habuisse secundum. h

Motetus Disyllabic rhymes: octosyllables,

lines 1–​9
Quoniam secta latronum a
spelunca vispilionum a
vulpes que Gallos roderat b
tempore quo regnaverat b
5 leo cecatus subito c
suo ruere merito c
in mortem privatam bonis: d
concinat Gallus Nasonis d
dicta que dolum acuunt: e
10 omnia sunt hominum tenui pendencia filo elegiac couplet, lines 10–​11
et subito casu que valuere ruunt. e

Tenor: Merito hec patimur

Triplum: Furious Fortune has not feared to bring down swiftly the tribe which did
not shrink from ascending indecently, while for the leader of the foresaid tribe she
has not refrained from preparing the gallows as an eternal mirror in the sight of
everyone. Therefore if the people to come should ascend across the limit, let a cer-
tain man who might, perhaps, fall, since such a tribe has collapsed, know also what
an outcome it would be to fall into the depth. Winter harms more after gentle west
winds, grief after joys; and so nothing is better than to have had no good fortune
[i.e., ‘there is nothing better than not to have enjoyed any good fortune’, because
to have enjoyed good fortune makes the less good fortune (that follows it) feel so
much the worse].9
Motetus: Since the gang of thieves from a cave of reprobates (and) the fox which had
gnawed the cocks in the time in which the blinded lion had ruled have fallen suddenly
by their own deserts into a death deprived of good things, let the cock shout Ovid’s

9 See n. 6 above for the derivation from Joseph of Exeter. David Howlett translated the last couplet as

‘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 [that is, better to have nothing at all than to have enjoyed good
fortune in the past]). Zoltán Rihmer, on the other hand, offered for the last phrase: [that is, better to have
nothing at all than not to have enjoyed good fortune in the past]. I am indebted to Jonathan Katz for the
version offered here: ‘unde nichil melius <est> quam nil habuisse secundum’, this last word also meaning
‘successful’ or ‘fortunate’. He also treats luctus (grief) as singular, understood to govern the same verb as
‘hyems’.
88 Fauvel and Vitry

words which intensify the deceit: ‘All human affairs are hanging by a slender thread,
and with a sudden fall things which were strong crash.’
Tenor: Justly we suffer these things.

Tribum/​Quoniam: Texts

A network of verbal repetitions (distinguished in boldface above) underpins and gives

structure to the two texts. In accusative (tribum) or nominative form (tribus), the word
‘tribe’ occurs three times in the triplum, thus punning on tribus (three) to reinforce a
central feature of the motet. The third tribus directly precedes ruerit, which (as ruunt)
is the last word of the motetus and hence of the Ovid couplet. This verb (as ruunt and
ruere) occurs twice in the motetus, with ruere directly preceding merito, which in turn
is the first of the three tenor words. The first word of the triplum and the last word of the
motetus are thus linked in a pattern that is structurally fundamental to the motet and
exists independently of verbal sense, although it is used to reinforce that sense. The lat-
tice is further reinforced by—​though by no means dependent upon—​the proportioned
positions of the words within their own texts.10 The motetus casu in the final Ovid line
is picked up in the triplum’s casurus. Note how many of these words are adjacent to each
other or in rhyme positions; that subito, casu and ruunt in the pre-​existent Ovid couplet
link the motetus to the triplum, and that the tenor’s pre-​existent Merito links it to the
motetus.
The triplum’s fourteen octosyllabic lines are followed by a hexameter couplet, a self-​
contained proverb without literary context.11 The couplet, despite its own innocence of
rhyme and its longer lines, is integrated into the overall rhyme scheme, abab cdcd efef
ghgh. Thus, of the triplum’s eight disyllabic rhymes, the last two are made to rhyme with
these pre-​existent hexameters. The motetus has nine octosyllabic lines rhymed in pairs,
followed by an elegiac couplet. The last (odd, uncoupled) line of its syllabic verse (dicta
que dolum acuunt) is made to rhyme (-​uunt) with the pre-​existent pentameter; it also
shares -​u -​u assonance (vowel rhyme) with the triplum fructus, tying together the eight
double -​u -​u vowel rhymes of the triplum with the rhymed pair in the motetus, acuunt
introducing the Ovid couplet and ruunt ending it. This insistence on the same vowel is
all the more striking because both the final rhymes are disyllabic (paroxytone: fructus,
luctus; profundum, secundum), that is, showing identity from the stressed syllable to
the end; the musical setting, however, suggests French end-​stressing. (The first six
pairs would be considered ‘imperfect’ in vernacular verse of this period, because the
identity is limited to the two unstressed syllables.) There is confirmation that this in-
sistence on the one vowel is deliberate: the final two vowels of the last word in the last
line of the motetus, ruunt, which rhymes with acuunt in the antepenultimate (and last
rhythmic) line, also have the repeated u u vowels, something that can take on an audible
dimension in musical performance. On the assumption that both texts are constructed

10 David Howlett points out that Tribus/​m recurs at words 16 and 38, that is, at or immediately adjacent to

the major and minor parts of the golden section (extreme and mean ratio—​a +​b is to a as a is to b) of its text by
word count (62), and that Ruunt to ruere span the major part of the same ratio, counting words from the end
of the motetus: ruere merito are the 25th and 24th words from the end of a total of 41 words.
11 Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque, no. 22073 (Carminum proverbialium, loci communes . . .).
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 89

backwards from the Ovidian quotation at the end of the motetus, this insistence on
u-​u may be a way of reinforcing the idea of ‘collapse’ or ‘downfall’ in the verb ruunt.
The intentions of this densely crafted writing are confirmed and underscored by their
musical setting. Fructus closes a line (triplum 13) in which triplum and motetus coin-
cide musically in identical rhythm, at (longs) L51–​L55; this immediately follows the
triplum’s crucial tribus ruerit, suitably set to a striking descending scale in semibreves in
L50–​L51.12 The Ovid couplet is integrated into both texts. The single-​rhymed triplum
words profundum and motetus hominum arrive together on L61 (see Ex. 4.1): the
internal -​um of the motetus hexameter is thus brought into rhyming and musical align-
ment with the triplum word that is in turn arranged to rhyme with the last word of its
pre-​existent hexameter couplet. Although not used as rhyme words or line ends in their
respective couplets, triplum gaudia and motetus pendencia arrive together on L67, and
thus similarly connect the separate texts by ‘imperfect’ rhyme. The vowels and two of
the consonants of the first motetus word Quoniam are those of the first word of the Ovid
couplet, omnia (and the vowels o-​i-​a are reversed at the end of the same line, -​a filo). In
addition the motet concludes with musically aligned vowel rhyme between the ends of
both borrowed couplets:

Tr   meli -​us quam nil ha-​buis-​se se-​cun-​dum

Mo   ca-​  su que   va - ​lu-​ e-​re ru- ​unt (u q a u e e u u).

Such vowel rhyme was contrived to be a conspicuous feature of these texts. The treat-
ment of individual syllables, and their adjacent and simultaneous combination, mark
them as words carefully calculated for musical treatment. Many are easily audible from
outside, though some would remain privy to participating performers. To someone
already familiar with the motet, the triplum’s abhorruit can then be heard (in a solo
opening, uncomplicated by other voices) as relating to ruit, further underscored by
the palindrome of the opening vowels i–​u, u–​i: tribum–​horruit. The 62 words of the
triplum divide in half between metam and ascenderit (31 +​31). The words trans metam
ascende-​|rit take us ‘over the boundary’ to the second color, set to a melodic palindrome
that hinges around the structural centre of the motet ( Ex. 4.1, third system, a g f e f e
f g a). The two -​tam syllables in triplum and motetus coincide: trans metam and mortem
privatam (the middle word of the motetus, 21st of 41), hooking the parts firmly together
at the color join, to words that mean ‘across the limit’. Puns with words of measure are
quite common in fourteenth-​century motets at such positions of structural or propor-
tional importance in text or music (other instances are noted in Chapters 8 and 18).
Words denoting ‘fall’ abound in both texts (vertere, delabi, profundum, casurus),
ending with the fundamental ruunt. Ovid alludes in the letter to the fall of his
exile: ‘insultare iacenti te mihi’ (you insult me in my fall), lines 27–​28. Casu and ruunt in
the pentameter of the Ovid motetus couplet are echoed by casurus–​ruerit in the triplum.
Both color statements are introduced with the rising word ascendere or ascenderit at
verse line ends, and with the same notes a g f e f. Their descending reversals, vertere,

12 Musical references are given by longs (L) as numbered in Ex. 4.1, or the values referred to as breves
(B), semibreves (S). The golden section of the structured music (that is, discounting the introductory 6L) falls
halfway through L51 on ru|-​ erit (triplum) and dicta (motetus).
90 Fauvel and Vitry

profundum, patibulum, also occur at line ends, as do the three recapitulated words, two
of which mean ‘fall’: subito, casurus, ruunt. Patibulum and patimur also create a pun as
well as a vowel rhyme.
Ovid wrote ‘sum tamen haec passus’ (I however have suffered this [line 55 of the
letter]; first person singular). The motet tenor’s three words, Merito hec patimur, use the
same deponent verb in the first person plural. Only the three words Merito hec patimur
are provided, and only their music from the chant is used. This leads us to another very
significant connection (in lines 25–​26 of the letter):

si mihi rebus opem nullam factisque ferebas, venisset verbis charta notata tribus

(Even if you brought me no aid in facts, in deeds, you might have sent me three words
on a sheet of paper.)

Puns on three are central to the motet, starting with the triplum’s tribum/​tribus. Tribum
of course means tribe, not three, but as the opening word of the triplum, it is unques-
tionably used with punning intent; the word tribum or tribus occurs three times in the
triplum text. We have seen that three words from Ovid’s pentameter line, subito, casu,
ruunt, are all worked into the new motet texts, emphasised by repetition, and given sig-
nificant positions, both as proportioned, and by adjacent words. Subito in the motetus
follows leo cecatus and ends the line immediately preceding ruere merito. Casurus ends
the triplum line immediately preceding tribus ruerit. Ruere/​ruunt have already been
singled out as fundamental and specially placed. But even more telling is the choice of
tenor, just the three words, Merito hec patimur, linked in various ways to the texts of the
motet and determining its musical form and substance. The portion of chant selected
corresponds to those three words and no more.
Cumulatively, the evidence which has just been presented makes it certain that
the newly written rhythmical parts of the two texts were composed very carefully,
on the foundations of the quotations, in conjunction with each other, and in con-
junction with the intended musical setting and the chosen tenor words.13 Verbal
recapitulations, and the distance between them, are calculated in the same way that
musical elements are recapitulated, spaced and proportioned. The Ovid couplet has
yielded the sense and the verbal units that govern the composition of both texts; it is
as fundamental to the verbal composition as is the choice of plainsong for the musical
construction, a choice strongly governed in turn by the words. Indeed, these words
underpin the verbal structure in the same way that the notes of a derived tenor un-
derpin the musical structure. It appears that the chant tenor was chosen to fit Ovid
rather than Ovid to fit the tenor. A common assumption has been that the notes of
the chant tenor were the first compositional constraint to be adopted once the general
subject of the texts (the materia) had been decided. I think it can here be proposed
instead that the texts had been planned precisely and in detail; that the Ovid couplet

13 Patrick Boyde alerted me to an interesting case of strategic quotation (probably before 1340) in the

Petrarch canzone, Lasso me, ch’i’ non so in qual parte pieghi (no. 70 in the Canzoniere). It has five stanzas of ten
lines each. The last line of each stanza is the first line of an existing canzone by a noted poet, respectively by
Arnaut Daniel (so Petrarch believed), Cavalcanti, Dante, Cino, and finally Petrarch’s own Nel dolce tempo de
la prima etade (no. 23, his first canzone, on the theme of metamorphosis). In each case the penultimate line of
the stanza forms a rhyming couplet with the final imported line.
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 91

was primary to those texts, and must have been chosen at least as early as, or before,
the Genesis source of the motet tenor. These twin pillars of text and music are inti-
mately linked and provide a striking marriage of pagan and Christian elements.14 The
status of ‘pre-​compositional’ material must therefore be accorded in equal measure
to the Ovid couplet and to the choice of tenor. The one is no more a quotation than
the other; both are starting points and building material for the texts and music. The
treatise De modo componendi tenores motettorum (usually attributed to Egidius, but
see Chapters 1 and 16) already implied that the words might exist before a tenor was
chosen to go with them: first choose your materia.15 The close interdependence of
text and music in this and some other motets suggests that this materia was more
precisely worked out than simply a general indication of the intended subject matter.
Here we have internal evidence that they must have done so, but in conjunction with
the music; this gives a twin central role in the creation of this motet to the composi-
tion and disposition of the words as well as the music.

Tribum/​Quoniam: Music

We turn now to an analysis of the music (see Ex. 4.1), having already noted some
features of the texts that were so planned in relation to the music that they would be
heard simultaneously.
The particular preoccupation with the word(s) Tribus/​m seems to have affected
all the main proportions of the motet, textual and musical. The motet is 78 imperfect
longs in duration, arranged in perfect maximodus (with longs grouped in threes). The
triplum enters alone, for three longs, followed by the motetus, for three longs, then the
tenor. Each of the two equal color statements occupies 12 × 3 longs:

3 +​3 +​(color 1) 12 × 3 +​(color 2) 12 × 3 =​78L

Without the 6L (12B) introduction, the motet is 72L (=​144 breves) in length; several
fourteenth-​century motets work with this number, 122, notably in the musician motets
group (see Part IV). For purposes of these calculations, the final long is considered to
extend to its official full length of three longs (a perfect maxima), corresponding to the
rests that complete color 1.
As already noted, the tenor is the beginning of the Matins responsory for the third
Sunday in Lent, Merito hec patimur quia peccavimus in fratrem nostrum. The chant
is transposed up a fifth from f to c. AS 174 had presented the hitherto closest avail-
able version of the melody, differing in only one note from the motet tenor, but Anne
Walters Robertson has now found a perfect match in a Parisian source from St-​Maur,

14 It is tempting to see in this some support for Vitry’s authorship. It would not be surprising that Vitry, a

friend and respected associate of Petrarch, should pioneer such boldly clerical-​humanistic juxtapositions.
This is entirely in line with the further pointers to Vitry’s humanist identity that result from Andrew Wathey’s
discovery of some of his motet texts in humanist poetry manuscripts. See Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’ and
‘The Motet Texts of Philippe de Vitry’.
15 For this treatise see Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, i. 18–​24; and now the appendix of

Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, offers text and translation of this, together with other theoretical texts
relating to color and talea.
92 Fauvel and Vitry

Paris12044, f. 80.16 This removes any need to assume that the chant was even slightly
manipulated by the composer in order to achieve a tidy structure of 6 × 3 short talea
groups which then yield three identical three-​note groups (a g g transposed, for the
motet, to e d d) within each of the two colores.17 The composer contrived that the re-
curring pattern e–​rest–​d ( s ås
) from this group should provide six equidistant and
identical bases on which two alternating sets of three blocks of music, identical in all
parts, are erected (A B A B A B): see Ex. 4.2. In Ex. 4.1 the A blocks are shaded light,
the B blocks darker. The commentary to this transcription is in the Appendix to this
chapter. To ensure this equidistancing required the tenor to be rhythmicised before the
blocks were superimposed on it, contrary to suggestions that the blocks could have been
planned before the rhythmicisation of the tenor.18 Ex. 4.2 brackets the palindromic
elements of the tenor: the first three notes, c d e, are inverted at the end. They are used
in the motetus in each of the A blocks at the chant pitch, f g a. The three disjunct notes
e g d (notes 12–​14, interrupting the palindrome) are transposed to the chant pitch, a c
g, in the motetus in each of the B blocks. The rest of the motetus is saturated with me-
lodic cells derived from the chant: f g a, f g a bb a g, bb a g a, a g a bb, g a g f and more,
including transpositions. Some of them are, appropriately, retrogrades or inversions of
each other (cf. Machaut M8, Ch. 14, for a comparable instance of tight motivic relation-
ship between the tenor and the texted parts).

Ex. 4.2 Tenor and chant of Merito hec patimur

Figure 4.1 shows the musical plan schematically. While the tenor has the same
rhythmic pattern in both color statements, the patterns of sound and silence in the
upper parts differ slightly, corresponding to the alternating cadential patterns (x and y)
that link the blocks to ‘non-​block’ music and give a special place to the phrase marked at
‘z’, whose significance will become clear later.

16 Robertson, ‘Local Chant Readings’, 518–​19.

17 There is an extra minim in the triplum at the end of L12. The other corrections in the present edition that
bring out this identity are based on alternative manuscript readings and supported by musical sense (parallel
readings, and avoidance of unsupported simultaneous fourths).
18 I claim that both musical and textual pre-​existing material (materia) together formed twin pillars for this

motet’s construction, but not that the rhythmic structuring of the upper parts preceded that of the tenor, as
implied in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, p. 8, and see below, n. 19.
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 93

1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40
Triplum x y x
Motetus x y x
Tenor
C1 (first color)
43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76
Triplum z x y x
Motetus y x y
Tenor
C2 (second color)
Silence x y z: rhythms of cadence figures
Sound x:
A blocks y:
B blocks z: part of quotation at mid-point

Fig. 4.1 Schematic diagram of Tribum/​Quoniam/​Merito

Each trio of 4L blocks (three of A, three of B) is identical not only in pitch but also
in rhythm in all parts. With thrice two blocks of music arranged over twice three iden-
tical places in the tenor, the composition becomes a grand hemiola of threefold form
arranged over a twice-​stated tenor color. An analysis committed to isorhythmic pri-
macy, and particularly to demonstrating the primacy of the lower parts, will give only
subsidiary attention to the amazing interlocked tripartite structure, with its own in-
ternal identities, that is counterpointed against the two identical tenor color statements,
and to the ternary pattern set up by the three pairs of A +​B that cut across those two
statements. While the tenor can at the most basic level be described as isorhythmic,
with six short taleae or ordines in each color, the upper parts might be said to superim-
pose an overlapping, tight, but counter-​isorhythmic structure upon it.19
A few previous analysts have noted the outlines of this structure, though their sig-
nificance and extent has largely been passed over.20 It has not previously been proposed
that Schrade’s transcription be emended to match these observations; the blocks can
easily be made fully identical, as in Ex. 4.1, on the authority of the other two sources.
Our understanding of musical language at this period is still so fragile that we timidly
fail to recognise as nonsense some manuscript readings that demand to be corrected in

19 I loosened the received notion of tenor priority by claiming in this case that it was shared with pre-​

existent textual material. Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, further eroded tenor priority by placing upper-​
voice musical structures ahead of tenor structuring, which is for me a step too far. She kindly acknowledges
the new proposals of my 1997 analysis, but objects (n. 10) that ‘even there, the presence of three longer periods
in the upper voices is described as a “counter-​isorhythmic structure” superimposed on the “isorhythmic”
tenor, and framed as an exceptional aspect of Tribum/​Quoniam closely tied to its meaning, rather than a com-
positional tool in use in the broader repertory’. My diagram and the layout of my edition are said to privilege
the two tenor colores over the three periods of the upper parts, though I think it is clear that I see these as twin
structural components. But the tenor in this case had to be planned and rhythmicised before the upper parts,
in order to ensure that the three instances of e d in each color fall equidistantly to accommodate the alternating
A and B blocks (Ex. 4.2 above). Zayaruznaya would rather see the tenor as fitting into those blocks. One can
line up the tenor colores, as I did, or the identical blocks as in Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, 95. Both layouts are valid. My
analysis was indeed focused on this one motet as an individual and original composition of text and music,
laden with specific meaning, and without attempting to generalise. If such patterning did become a general
tool, Tribum was one of the earliest motets to implement it, and thus a pioneering work.
20 They seem to have been published only in Fuller, European Musical Heritage, 99–​103, albeit noted in

less detail. The translation is improved by Howlett’s reading, Schrade’s musical transcription (reproduced by
Fuller) by the present version. Sanders partly makes this observation (‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’,
27) when he says that the taleae could be treated as 3 × 4 instead of 2 × 6, reflecting isomelic correspondences,
and notes with approval the periodicity of the upper parts.
94 Fauvel and Vitry

accordance with musical sense, though of course there are also equally valid variants.
Analysis can provide a text-​critical tool to refine the edition where deviations from a
pattern of identity or parallelism are apparently casual. In this case, the new readings are
corroborated by an analysis that treats the motet as an equal and interrelated partner-
ship of text and music.
Is isorhythm or any other kind of recurrent pattern a conscious background model
from which purposeful deviation is intended to be recognised as such, or is it simply
a means of filling in neutral space between primary formal events? Can it be both?
I think it can, and the balance differs in different pieces. Textual and musical events
often cut across or dislocate hitherto accepted measurements of the tidiness or ma-
turity of a motet. When analysis upholds the purposefulness of such ‘deviations’ they
cannot be dismissed as manifestations of untidiness or early date. Such analysis may
demonstrate that more than one formal pattern is at work in the music, just as there
may be deliberate ambiguity in the text when a biblical and a secular sense, or two dif-
ferent narratives, are superimposed.
A common weakness of judgements about orderliness of structure, or of analytical
bases for determining chronology, occurs when only a single criterion, or criteria that
are too limited, are taken into account. Sanders demonstrated the extent and impor-
tance of regular periodicity of phrases between rests in the upper parts of motets,
even where there is no regular isorhythm between those phrases.21 Ursula Günther’s
study of the fourteenth-​century motet invoked the amount and extent of isorhythm
as a measure of chronology.22 Neither of them takes closely into account either the
text–​music relationship of individual parts or networks of relationships between texts
and musical lines, within and between pieces, which are just one aspect of the com-
positional possibilities.23 In short, each motet is different, unique, and can only in the
most limited and approximate senses be measured by conventional standards of peri-
odicity. Several of the motets on Heinrich Besseler’s list of isorhythmic motets are not
in a strict or primary sense isorhythmic. Vos quid/​Gratissima, Firmissime/​Adesto and
Douce/​Garison are among motets (all deemed early) that use a newly rhythmicised
second color rather than diminution or mensural derivation from a homographic
notation; others may balance a variety of constructional resources much more com-
plex than simple tenor replication, as in the Marigny group.24 Any isorhythm in these
motets is between taleae within each color, not between colores.
The portion of melody used (and transposed) for the Tribum tenor has several palin­
dromic features (see Ex. 4.2 above): the beginning and end, cded–​dedc (ut re mi re–​re
mi re ut), resemble the Neuma quinti toni of Garrit gallus, which starts and ends with
fga–​agf (ut re mi–​mi re ut). A conjunct palindrome from notes 5 to 11 of the tenor, d d e f
e d d, abuts the only melodically disjunct group e g d (notes 12–​14), and at the same time
contributes to a melodic sequence with the opening four notes. Discounting repeated

21 Sanders, ‘The Medieval Motet’.

22 Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’.
23 Examined by scholars including Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’.
24 Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 222–​24. See Ch. 2 above. Sanders rightly rejects diminution as the appropriate term

for the new rhythmicisations of the tenors of Douce/​Garison and Firmissime/​Adesto; ‘The Early Motets of
Philippe de Vitry’, 28.
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 95

notes, the whole melody can be seen as a conjunct palindrome into which the disjunct
group is inserted; this is the way the composer must have treated it in fashioning the
upper parts (see Ex. 4.4 below).
Each of the six blocks (ABABAB in Fig. 4.1, Ex. 4.1) starts on an octave a in
triplum and motetus flanking the tenor e, and each is always preceded by triplum
rests and followed by motetus rests. Each block begins a new triplum text line and
contains only that line (lines 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 16); the longer last hexameter line, 16,
extends beyond the block to the final cadence. The identity is sometimes extended
into adjacent groups. The middle A block and the second and third B blocks are
introduced by motetus semibreves bb d c bb, and the central A and B blocks followed
by triplum semibreves d d c bb. Each block presents three prominent notes of the
chant in its motetus (see Ex. 4.3). Block A has c d e, the opening of the chant. In
the central A block indeed these notes coincide with the motetus word merito,
underscoring, both in its musical placing and in its notes, the significance of the first
word of the tenor (Merito) in the verbal lattice of the upper parts.25 The only disjunct
group of notes in the tenor, e g d, makes a prominent appearance at its original chant
pitch, a c g, in the motetus of each of the B blocks, for the words—​all significant—​
regnaverat, Nasonis, subito casu. Example 4.4 shows how the first triplum phrase of
Tribum freely paraphrases the entire chant segment on f, except for the three-​note
disjunct cell a c g. The omission of these three notes at this stage leaves a perfectly
palindromic phrase; the final four notes of the chant are repeated in parentheses.
The triplum then proceeds to paraphrase the disjunct cell a c g in its next phrase. In
Ex. 4.1 this is at L10, avoiding any further f cadences until the new color at L43
and the final cadence. This paraphrase of the disjunct cell forms the triplum of the
A block and combines with the motetus presentation of the first three notes of the
chant (at tenor pitch, c d e).

Ex. 4.3 Three notes of the chant as used in the motetus of each block of Tribum,
respectively c d e and a c g (transposed from f g a and e g d)

25 The other two occurrences of this musical phrase fall on vispilionum and hominum, thus drawing at-

tention to the first ‘rhyme’ of the motetus (latronum–​vispilionum) with the caesural hominum of the Ovid
hexameter.
96 Fauvel and Vitry

Ex. 4.4 Triplum of Tribum showing chant paraphrase of tenor Merito

The triplum presents three text lines, nine words, 3 × 3, before the critical word
Fortuna, which in Paris146 is made to stand at the top of the recto page; the thrice three
words preceding it are at the foot of the preceding verso.26 Fortuna is central to Ovid’s
letter, to Fauvel and to the observations on the career of Marigny, developed covertly
here but more overtly in Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna. The three voices of the motet enter
in succession, at intervals of three longs, triplum, motetus, tenor, that is, first one, then
two, then all three parts sound. The verbal repetition pattern involves three triplum
words, two motetus words and one tenor word. As noted, the beginning and end of the
tenor melody are on scale degrees 1, 2 and 3; 3, 2, 1 (ut re mi . . . mi re ut). There are twice
three blocks of identical material in all three parts. The tenor has two color statements,
each of six three-​note ordines separated by rests. The maximodus is perfect, three longs
to the maxima. The total number of lines (27) is 3 cubed.27
This motet is one of a significant minority in which the tenor is not the lowest in
range but the middle voice of the texture.28 It mostly sounds fifths between the triplum–​
motetus octaves. The motetus is the contrapuntal foundation, and is always a fifth below
the tenor on downbeats of the large modus groups, except at L67, where exceptionally
an octave is used, for an exceptional position (accommodating a triplum–​motetus imi­
tation that links the two borrowed texts). The motetus here twice makes its own insist-
ence on the distinctive disjunct a c g motive, at L64–​L67, and then in the final B block
from L70, independently of its adhesion to the tenor. The motetus deceptively usurps
the tenor’s role as the true foundation of the piece—​perhaps a further mirror of a series
of deceptions in the Genesis story (recalled by the tenor), since Jacob had previously
cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright before himself being deceived by his own
sons about the fate of Joseph. Deception and usurpation are central themes of Fauvel.
Whether or not they thought it was by Vitry, Tribum has been accepted as an ‘ad-
vanced’ composition by most scholars including Sanders, Edward Roesner and
Lawrence Earp.29 Karen Desmond, on the other hand, argues that it is a conservative

26 It was not necessary to space the piece in this way. It could have been accommodated on the recto,

starting at the top of the page, without displacing any other material, by the simple expedient of writing a
single statement of the tenor. The tenor is notated once only in Br19606, twice (redundantly) in Paris146.
27 There are 27 words in the motetus of the neighbouring Adesto/​Firmissime, a strongly trinitarian piece

studied in Robertson, ‘Local Chant Readings’.

28 It may be one of the earliest in which this is consistently true, though a few motets in Mo have the tenor

in the middle for some of the time. Here the placing of the tenor as the middle voice emphasises its role as the
palindromic middle of the trio of motets. See Ch. 1 for middle-​voice tenors, including Apollinis, and now the
early Flos vernalis: Alís Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’.
29 Leech-​Wilkinson ‘The Emergence of Ars nova’, 298–​99 stresses the close similarity of the musical lan-

guage of Tribum/​Quoniam and Firmissime/​Adesto and assigns them to the same composer. Earp indeed noted
(‘Isorhythm’, 97–​98) ‘that the parallel perfect intervals in Tribum/​Quoniam help to convey a message, and
must not be considered as evidence of inept composition’.
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 97

piece, seen by a later writer as relatively crude in comparison with the ‘subtler’ Apta
caro. This hangs on her misapplying the theorist’s grosso modo as a judgement of
Tribum as ‘simple, plain or even crude and unrefined’.30 This is perhaps to understate
the status of Tribum in its own time and the many subtleties that have been pointed
out since. Its wide dissemination, well into the fifteenth century, would certainly sug-
gest that it was valued long after its original composition.31 Tribum is set up in such a
way as to encourage parallel part-​writing, especially if viewed in the long term rather
than in a contrapuntally local way. Parallel octaves and fifths occur between triplum
and motetus, parallels with the tenor only at L20, L44, and L55. Considering the extent
of tenor paraphrase in the triplum, it is surprising that there is not even more paral-
lelism. Rather than regarding such parallels as archaic, or even crude, they could well
be part of the self-​conscious playing with time that is a constant feature of the Fauvel
project, stylistic (and notational) evolutionary time, both archaising and ultramodern,
forwards and backwards. Innovation and novelty are relative. Tribum was highly ori­
ginal in many such ways, including for its departure from the ars antiqua in using per-
fect (rather than imperfect) maximodus, imperfect (rather than perfect) modus and
tempus, and what would later become trochaic major prolation, as well as for its role in
the Marigny trio.

Garrit gallus/​In nova: Texts

Before setting out further links between Tribum and Garrit gallus, we will consider
Garrit gallus/​In nova, which is preserved in two sources, Paris146, f. 44v and Pic, 67r,
and transcribed as Ex. 4.5.32
Texts and translations by David Howlett, lightly adapted:

Triplum Disyllabic rhymes

Garrit Gallus flendo dolorose, a
luget quippe Gallorum concio, b
que satrape traditur dolose, a
excubitus sedens officio, b

30 Schreur, Tractatus Figurarum, 66–​69, who unconvincingly translates grosso modo as ‘grand’. Desmond,

Music and the moderni, 2: ‘But perhaps the intended meaning here is closer to “simple” or “plain”, or even as
a synonym for “crassus”—​that is, crude and unrefined’. Grantley McDonald and Leofranc Holford-​Strevens
confirmed (personal communications) that grosso modo is a generalised comment rather than a judgement
of the piece, certainly not implying that it was crude. The correct sense was already recognised in Stone, ‘Che
cosa c’è’, and see now Bent, ‘Artes novae’. Desmond transcribes the opening (L1–​L36) on p. 54, and the parallel
fifths and octaves at L50–​L62 on p. 63, offering her own analysis, building partly on that in Bent, ‘Tribum’, but
missing the demonstration of text–​music relationships that could have qualified it for a higher subtlety rating.
The parallel fifths and octaves create a deliberate effect of rawness, perhaps self-​consciously atavistic. Earp,
‘Isorhythm’, 94–​96, offers an insightful tonal analysis of this motet; he sees the archaising parallel intervals as a
deliberately desolate gesture and the placing of the tenor in the middle as an expression of the ‘slender thread’
of the text. On Hartt, ‘The Problem of the Vitry Motet Corpus’, see Ch. 7 and n. 38.
31 One late manuscript of the treatise, Faenza, incomprehensibly groups Rex Karole (dated in the late

1370s) together with the ‘unsubtle’ Tribum of the late 1310s, whereas the ‘subtler’ Apta caro is probably from
the 1350s or earlier. Rex Karole therefore must be considered a late addition to the Faenza text. It is also a late
addition to Boen, Ars (Musicae), as Boen died in 1367. See Ch. 15 n. 15.
32 Ch. 17 discusses the notation of Musicalis on the Pic rotulus, which, exceptionally, spatially aligns iso-

rhythmic periods within each of the two upper parts, inapplicable to Garrit gallus. For the Pic version of
Garrit gallus see Fig. 4.3.
98 Fauvel and Vitry

5 atque vulpes, tamquam vispilio b

in Belial vigens astucia, c
de leonis consensu proprio b
monarchisat, artat angaria. c
Rursus, ecce, Jacob familia c
10 Pharaone altero fugatur; d
non ut olim Jude vestigia c
subintrare potens, lacrimatur; d
in deserto fame flagellatur, d
adiutoris carens armatura. e
15 Quamquam clamat, tamen spoliatur, d
continuo forsan moritura; e
miserorum exulum vox dura! e
O Gallorum garritus doloris, f
cum leonis cecitas obscura e
20 fraudi paret vulpis proditoris. f
Eius fastus sustinens erroris f
insurgito: alias labitur g
et labetur quod habes honoris, f
quod mox in facinus tardis ultoribus itur. g

The cock gabbles, weeping grievously; indeed the whole flock of cocks performing the
duty of the watch mourns; it is betrayed deceitfully to the satrap. And the fox, as the lowest
sort of reprobate, flourishing with the cunning of Belial, behaves like a monarch with the
lion’s own consent; he imposes compulsory duties. Again, behold, the family of Jacob is
put to flight by another pharaoh; not, as formerly, able to follow the tracks of Judah, it
wails; it is scourged by famine in the desert, lacking the armament of a helper. Although
it cries out, nonetheless it is robbed, perhaps about to die on the spot. The harsh voice
of wretched exiles. O the gabble of the grief of the cocks, since the dark blindness of the
lion lies subject to the fraud of the traitor fox. Bearing the arrogance of his error, rise up!
Otherwise what you have of honour falls, and it will fall, because when avengers are slow
people soon turn to crime.

Motetus Disyllabic rhymes

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.
Draco nequam quem olim penitus b
mirabili crucis potencia c
debellavit Michaël inclitus, b
5 mox Absalon munitus gracia, c
mox Ulixis gaudens facundia, c
mox lupinis dentibus armatus, d
sub Tersitis miles milicia c
rursus vivit in vulpem mutatus; d
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 99

10 fraudi cuius lumine privatus d

leo, vulpe imperante, paret. e
Oves suggit pullis saciatus. d
Heu! Suggere non cessat et aret; e
ad nupcias carnibus non caret. e
15 Ve pullis! Mox ve ceco leoni! f
Coram Christo tandem ve draconi! f

Tenor: Neuma

My mind brings [me] to speak of forms changed into new [bodies]. The evil dragon which
long ago the renowned Michael utterly vanquished by the wondrous power of the Cross,
now fortified with the good looks of Absalom, now rejoicing in the eloquence of Ulysses,
now a soldier in the army of Thersites, armed with wolfish teeth, lives again changed into
a fox. With the fox commanding, the lion, deprived of sight, lies subject to his fraud. Sated
with chicks he sucks the sheep. Alas! he does not cease to suck, and he is (still) thirsty. He
does not lack meats for the wedding feast. Woe to the chicks! Soon, woe to the blind lion!
At the last, before Christ, woe to the dragon!

The motetus opens with one of the most famous of classical opening lines (Ovid,
Metamorphoses I.1) about animal transformations, the hexameter ‘In nova fert animus
mutatas dicere formas [corpora]’; (My mind brings [me] to speak of forms changed
into new bodies—​the quotation stops short of Ovid’s corpora). This is the literary work,
widely known and quoted then as now, which above all others deals with and stands
for metamorphoses between gods, humans, and animals. The protagonist of Fauvel is
a horse unnaturally transformed to human estate and kingly status. In nova fert on the
last full folio of the roman (f. 44v) thus comes full circle from the first folio in which
Fortuna raised (transformed) Fauvel from stable to palace. Both motet texts are beast
fables, the triplum about a flock of cocks, a blind lion, and a fox, the motetus about a
dragon, which, changed into an insatiable fox, at a wedding feast first consumes the
chicks, then sucks the blood of sheep, and yet remains thirsty. We have already noted
how its status as a famous opening marks the beginning of the backwards historical
narrative.
Gallus is the opening gambit of Garrit gallus, perhaps authorial, surely multivalent.
Gallus is both a cockerel (rooster) who gives a warning cry and a Frenchman (and
in the plural form gallorum, Frenchmen). Gallus was Petrarch’s sobriquet for Vitry,
whose identity as the Gallus of the fourth eclogue of Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen has
been cautiously reaffirmed.33 Gallus was the name of an earlier Latin poet regarded as
one of Ovid’s important models and predecessors, but of whose work almost nothing

33 Mann, ‘In margine’. Vitry remains one of several candidates for identification as the ‘Gallus’ of Petrarch’s

fourth eclogue. Despite a number of early testimonies, he is rejected in Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen, ed. François
and Bachmann, and cautiously left in play by Mann. However, none of these authors adduces these earlier and
100 Fauvel and Vitry

survives. ‘Gallus’ may gain further significance from the ‘cock’ king, as Philip V is
represented, particularly in Un songe, one of the French dits in Paris146.34
The last line of the triplum of Garrit gallus is a hexameter from a medieval Latin
epic about the ruin of a nation: Joseph of Exeter, De bello trojano (I. 386), the same
work that provided the last couplet of the triplum of Tribum, another link between
the two motets.35 Here, likewise, it is worked into the chained scheme of disyllabic
rhymes, with only the Ovidian first motetus line standing outside the rhyme scheme.
The 24 triplum lines relate 3:2 to the 16 lines of the motetus; all the lines are decasyl-
labic except for the two hexameters.
The techniques of verbal construction are similar to those of Tribum: mutatas
and mox from the hexameter lines are worked foundationally into the new rhythmic
text. The fox, cockerel and chickens (as vulpes, gallus and pullis), and the blind lion
are among the verbal links between the two texts. Significant words are sometimes
adjacent, and Howlett has found many to be significantly spaced by word count. The
biblical allusions are strong. In the triplum, the cocks (Frenchmen) are compared
with the Israelites, the family of Jacob pursued by an unnamed pharaoh into the
desert and starved; in the motetus they are eaten. Old Testament figures Jacob
and Judah are named in the triplum, as is the ‘bad’ character Belial, forming a trio
(threes are also a conspicuous theme of Tribum). Absalom is named in the motetus
together with the New Testament figures, the Apocalyptic archangel Michael and
Christ, forming another trio. The motetus presents Absalom in another, overlapping
trio together with two classical characters in the triple anaphora of lines beginning
with mox: a traitor with deceptive good looks like Absalom (2 Kings 14: 25),36 a liar
of eloquent cunning like Ulysses (Aeneid II. 164, IX. 602), and a forceful brute like
Thersites (Iliad II), is the fox Enguerrand de Marigny, financial counsellor to the blind
lion Philippe IV.

Garrit gallus: Music and Notation

Tribum ( Ex. 4.1 above) and Aman (Ex. 5.1 below) are barred and numbered in
longs, Garrit ( Ex. 4.5) in breves, the better to mark the alternation between perfect

apparently Vitriacan self-​presentations as a gallus, which could add weight to his candidacy. On the other hand,
Zoltán Rihmer (email correspondence of Nov. 2015) is of the opinion that the content would be so insulting
to Vitry as to make his candidacy highly unlikely. Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, 120, adds (with sources) other
testimonies, including that of Francesco Piendibeni da Montepulciano, chancellor of Perugia, who, in a com-
mentary on the Bucolicum carmen completed in 1394, makes clear not only that Vitry’s reputation had survived
into the first generation of Petrarch scholarship but also that it was rapidly established in the exegesis of the
poet’s works. Identifying Vitry with the ‘Gallus’ of the Fourth Eclogue—​‘Gallus hic fuit Phylippus de Victriaco,
clarissimus musicus et philosophus et Petrarce summe notus’—​Piendibeni comments that ‘Gallus erat unus
famulus francigena musicus qui Petrarcham infestabat assidue ut poesym et rhetoricam edoceret’ (‘this Gallus
was Philippe de Vitry, most famous musician and philosopher, and well known to Petrarch’, and ‘Gallus was a
servant, born in France, a musician who pestered Petrarch to teach him poesy and rhetoric’).

34 Six Historical Poems, ed. Storer and Rochedieu.

35 First pointed out by David Howlett in a seminar in Oxford in Feb. 1992. This is reported, together with
many valuable insights on classical allusions in Fauvel motets, in Holford-​Strevens, ‘Fauvel Goes to School’,
64. See n. 6 above for the citation in Tribum.
36 Or could the good-​looking Absalom represent Philip the Fair?
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 101

and imperfect modus.37 The commentary to this transcription is in the Appendix to

this chapter.
The novelty and strangeness of the events portrayed are signalled not only by Ovid’s
words but also by the earliest surviving use of red notation in the tenor of Garrit gallus
to signify mensural, indeed temporal, metamorphosis of perfect to imperfect modus,
possibly punning on Marigny’s red hair as well as on mutation (black and red to change
modus, standing for human and animal metamorphoses).38 This motet is cited along
with others in the early ars nova treatises for a range of different usages of red notes to
change modus or tempus or both, in either direction. For Garrit gallus this is defined
negatively: red notes can be placed to prevent a long before a long having three breves,
and to prevent alteration of the second of two breves preceding a long.39 But the forms
of the black tenor notes are transformed into new red bodies, which literally embody
many of the themes of the motet. The mutation of colour causes temporal change. At
B79, mutatus is marked by a strong dissonant appoggiatura in the motetus. Paris146
marks a bb against f s, perhaps punning on mutation in a hexachordal sense; Pic delays
the s until B80. This comes just after the fox Thersites is punningly given a ternary long.
The tenor has two color statements, each consisting of three taleae. The black notes
of the tenor are in perfect modus, the red in imperfect (in Fig. 4.2 grey, with coloration
brackets). It is rhythmically a ‘nominal’ palindrome, formed by the status of the notes
(as longs or breves) rather than of their counted values, which include altered and un-
d
altered breves: see Fig. 4.2.40 The third note, the second black , followed by a dot, is
d d
altered before the following red , and the penultimate note ( ) is altered before the
s
final . By later standards, alteration can take place only before a note of the next higher
value, a dot alone being insufficient, though several early theorists, all in similar lan-
guage, know a punctum alterationis, of which this may be an example.41 Not only each

37 Desmond, Music and the moderni, discusses this motet with respect to ‘destabilisation of modus’, 215–​

19, drawing attention to the triplum dot at B137 (near the end), which cuts across the imperfect modus of the
other parts. She rightly observes that, despite the upper-​part rests that articulate the tenor’s modal changes,
the upper parts do not follow them in lockstep, but have their directed arrivals on perfect sonorities which do
not always coincide with the tenor’s modal changes.
38 Red notation is also used in the tenor of Thalamus/​Quomodo, Paris146, f. 32, but apparently with no

mensural function. Sanders suggests it might correspond to a distinction between plainsong and non-​chant,
one of the meanings possibly implied in the ars nova treatises. More significantly, and less well known, is that
red notation is used in an English source that cannot be much later, Lwa12185, probably from the 1320s, as
it includes (other, non-​red) notations described in Handlo’s treatise of 1326. In Beatus vir, red notation turns
the long and breve from perfect to imperfect, while in Nos orphanos, red coloration turns the long from per-
fect to imperfect but does not change the character of the breve. These fragmentary motets are transcribed in
Lefferts, ‘Motet in England’, 713, 719. This raises intriguing questions of influence and direction, as the men-
sural use of red notation is unlikely to have been devised independently. Red notation is not mentioned by any
English theorist at this period, notably Handlo, whose knowledge of French motets may not have extended
beyond Petrus de Cruce, for whose authorship of motets he and Jacobus’s Speculum musice VII are the major
and earliest authorities. Additions by a later scribe to Lo62132A use red notation for middle chant-​bearing
parts in score; see Bent, The Fountains Fragments. See now Bradley, ‘Fragments from a Medieval Motet Book’
for the only known use of the theoretically prescribed use of coloration for octave transposition.
39 ‘Aliquociens uero ponuntur ut longa ante longam non ualeat tria tempora uel ut secunda duarum

breuium inter longas positarum non alteretur ut in tenore In noua fert animus.’ Anonymous version of the
Compendium in Paris14741 (TML), fuller than that in CSM.
40 ‘Nominal’: term suggested by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens.
41 Wolf, ‘Ein anonymer Musiktraktat’; De musica mensurabili (Pseudo-​Theodonus) and De semibrevibus

caudatis, both in CSM 13. Quatuor Principalia IV, ch. 26 (CS iv. 266, now in Aluas, Quatuor principalia) rejects
the use of a dot for alteration as absurd: ‘licet quidam posuerunt punctum duabus aliis de causis, et male, vide-
licet causa imperfectionis et alterationis, quod absurdum est dicere’, so by 1351 this usage seems to have fallen
from favour.
102 Fauvel and Vitry

LBB BBL — L BB BBL

312 112 2 2 11 123

Fig. 4.2 Palindromic rhythm of the (first) tenor talea of Garrit gallus in Paris, Bibliothèque
nationale de France, fr. 146, f. 44v. © BnF. Red notes are labelled in italics, with note
values numerically below. Bold numbers signal where the nominal palindrome is not also
numerical

talea, but the entire tenor is a nominal rhythmic palindrome, with no rest at the begin-
ning or end.
The upper parts are in imperfect time throughout, its semibreves in what would later
be called major prolation, as confirmed by later sources with minim stems. The tenor’s
red notation has no effect on them at the prolation level, which remains major; later
in the century, red notation usually fixed notes at their imperfect values at all levels.
Whether the upper parts are in perfect or imperfect modus is moot: two successive
longs at motetus B45 and B47 seem to confirm imperfect modus (if in perfect modus,
the first would have to be perfect), as does the fact that all longs in the upper parts in
both sources that need to be perfect have dots, except in Paris146 at B101. The final
s
tenor is perfect, so if the final notes are equal, the upper parts may also be deemed per-
fect. But the twenty-​five breves of each of the six taleae divide neither by two nor three,
so some irregularity (or mutation) is inevitable. As a convenient compromise, the upper
parts are here barred following the perfections and imperfections of the tenor, but some
independence and ambiguity are possible.
For demonstration purposes, the accompanying transcription ( Ex. 4.5) is a hybrid
between the two sources. The downstems are present only in Paris146, and are some-
times so small or tentative as to be almost absent, but they are not, as Apel thought, later
additions. Garrit has no upstemmed minims in Paris146; those in the transcription
are from Pic, Fig. 4.3. That Pic was copying from an unstemmed exemplar is apparent
from its redundant retention of most dots between groups of S whose values are now
made explicit by minim stems, including one passage (over o miserum) where the scribe
was confused and allowed dots to stand after each of a succession of five semibreves.
The few plicas are present only in Paris146. Works attributed to Vitry (including late
and recently reconstructed works like Phi millies and Beatius/​Cum humanum) never
ç
imperfect the breve in by a minim, except by using a plica.42 This usage could be a
negative authorial marker for Vitry, or at least a reason for doubting his authorship of

42 The triplum of Phi millies is transcribed and reconstructed in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, ap-

pendix 3, who proposes a dating of 1356–​57 in ‘Evidence of Reworkings’, 174 n. 41. She suggests Beatius may
be by Vitry in Zayaruznaya, ‘Quotation, Perfection’, and in ‘Evidence of Reworkings’, 165–​66, she argues that
the central hocket section might have been added later. In The Monstrous New Art, 206–​15 she reveals a pas-
sage of triplum text and music quoted directly from Firmissime/​Adesto.
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 103

Fig. 4.3 Garrit gallus in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection de Picardie 67,
f. 67r. © BnF

motets with breves imperfected by minims. The plicas in Fauvel are never spelt out as
minims in the later more precisely notated sources of the unstemmed motets. Paris146
also places some semibreves almost adjacent to unison breves, never with a new syl-
lable, suggesting tied notes, here shown with dotted ties, at tr B18, B20, B34, B45, B59,
B88, mo B27, B43, B59, B77, B102.43 In Paris146, Garrit and Aman are fairly consistent

43 Semibreves actually touching each other, or ‘one-​note ligatures’, are more decisively notated in Italian

sources. In pure Italian notation, the breve is not imperfected. Successive unisons judged here to be of this
type are shown by dotted ties.
104 Fauvel and Vitry

in marking a downstem on the first of a group of three semibreves; most but not all in
Tribum are so marked. A downstem does not necessarily make the note longer than it
would be if unstemmed, or a different length from an unstemmed note, but it never
marks a short value.44
Pic cannot be precisely dated, but as it was evidently copied from an unstemmed
version, and as I suggest (in Ch. 17) that Musicalis on its verso need not be much later
than 1330, I see no reason not to date Pic in the 1330s. Both these motet tenors use void
notation for what was originally red (certainly in one case, probably in the other), de-
spite the fact that red ink was available for the staff lines. This may make Pic by some
decades the earliest surviving use of void notation.45 However, it was not unusual to
outline notes to be coloured later when red ink was available, which may be how void
notation started. Informal use could be even earlier, as in the tenor of Vos/​Gratissima
written in the margin of Esc10 c. 1330; see Chapter 8.
There is no isorhythm in the upper parts, but the aligned transcription ( Ex. 4.5
invites comparison of corresponding places in most if not all of the upper-​voice taleae,
most strikingly at breves 32, 57, 82, 107, 132; and at breves 15, 40, 65, 90, 115, and in
some cases a few surrounding notes also correspond. These places, with B +​B rest ( ), d∂
demarcate Ernest Sanders’s regular isoperiodic structures which he expresses as mod-
ular numbers, defined as the periodic number of breves between rests, though he does
not make clear that these fall at corresponding places in the tenor talea. He finds a mod-
ular number of the talea length of 25B (17 +​8); as is often the case, these are offset in
the upper parts from the talea and from each other.46 Figure 4.4 shows this diagram-
matically. Numbering is in breves. The tenor is the bottom row. Black notation is black,
red notation is grey, and the long tenor rests are blank. In the upper parts, the breve
distances are bounded by (and include) breve rests, shown for each voice by a heavy
vertical line.

Interplay between Garrit gallus and Tribum

We have seen how the last couplet of the motetus of Tribum que non abhorruit/​
Quoniam secta latronum/​Merito hec patimur, an elegiac couplet from one of the letters
written by Ovid in exile, is fundamental to the newly written texts built on it. We have
also seen that Garrit gallus/​In nova fert is placed at the culmination of the expanded
and interpolated version of Fauvel. It is a grand admonitio which is also a motet about

44 In four of the Lescurel songs in Paris146, there is often a downstem on the first of a group of four or three

S; groups of S separated by dots are mostly melismatic, but some are syllabic, for example on ff. 59v–​60, 61, 62,
when perfect time seems to prevail.
45 Musical commentary in Appendix to this chapter. A clear case is in the motet Ferre solet in Douai74,

where the red notes were filled in from void outlines. The canon specifies them as red, but the word vacue is
added above. They must have been first outlined in void, the canon copied from a source with red notation
specifying red, the canon here corrected to correspond to the void notation, and then red notation supplied.
The motet is discussed in Louviot, ‘Uncovering the Douai Fragment’.
46 This happens also in Musicorum, Apollinis, and elsewhere. Sanders’s numbers for Garrit gallus (total

147B) are shown diagrammatically in Fig. 4.4 above.

tr 16B +​(17 +​8 +​17 +​8 +​17 +​8 +​17 +​8 +​17B) +​14B
mo 15B +​(17 +​8 +​17 +​8 +​17 +​8 +​17 +​8 +​17B) +​15B
Tenor 6B +​(10 +​15 +​10 +​15 +​10 +​15 +​10 +​15 +​10 +​15 +​10B) +​6B (coloration italicised).
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 105

Talea 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Talea 2

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Talea 3

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Talea 4

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Talea 5

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

Talea 6

126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

Fig. 4.4 Periodic structure of Garrit gallus

bestial transformation, Fauvel as a horse metamorphosed into a horse-​human hybrid,

embodying a range of animals that stand in for human subjects. It is therefore par-
ticularly appropriate that the first line of its motetus ‘quotes’, or rather, presents, the
first line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As in the case of Tribum, it can likewise be argued
for Garrit gallus that its Ovidian line is not so much a quotation as a foundational
building block.
The middle system of Ex. 4.6 shows the beginning of Garrit gallus. Above it on the
first system is the free musical recapitulation at talea V to coincide with the verbal re-
capitulation of the opening words as Gallorum garritus. Gallus opens the triplum and
then comes twice more as Gallorum, the second with this musical recapitulation, but
both times in distress from the fox. Below it on the lowest system of Ex. 4.6 is the begin-
ning of the second half of Tribum/​Quoniam, at the second color statement, which starts
with a clearly audible musical quotation of the beginning of Garrit gallus. It is a quota-
tion that involves all three parts, changing their roles (mutating, again) and applying
light camouflage. The motetus (as noted) is the lowest voice, and the triplum outlines
the Tribum tenor Merito (Ex. 4.4 above). The Ovidian motetus In nova fert lies above
the triplum at the beginning of Garrit gallus for the duration of the quoted line and
106 Fauvel and Vitry

Ex. 4.6 Musical relations between Garrit Gallus/​In nova fert and Tribum/​Quoniam

beyond; it is echoed again at the midpoint of Tribum at ascenderit. Tribum’s motetus

also picks up the strongly derogatory vispilio (vispilionum, motetus line 2) from Garrit
gallus (triplum line 5).
All this suggests that the composition of Garrit gallus preceded Tribum, as do its
tenses; it would be harder to explain the quotation if the order was reversed, though
they must surely have been planned together. Indeed, recognition of the full resonances
of the quotation depends on considering the text and music combinations together. In
Tribum, the quotation directly follows the central words of the triplum, trans metam
(across the boundary)—​a kind of ‘meta’morphosis, possibly a further Ovidian pun—​
and is followed by the words concinat Gallus Nasonis. Concinat is the verb used by
Philippe de Vitry to signal his authorship in the motet Cum statua/​Hugo, Hugo as ‘hec
concino Philippus publice’. Then comes the word gallus which, as we saw above, has
multiple meanings in this context. Gallus comes twice in the motetus of Tribum; the
gallos are gnawed by the fox, and the Gallus ventriloquises Ovid. Philip IV, still alive
 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 107

(present tense) in Garrit gallus, is now dead in Tribum/​Quoniam, motetus line 4, past
tense: ‘tempore quo regnaverat leo cecatus’. Ovid named himself (Naso) in line 10
of the letter: ‘quisquis sit, audito nomine, Naso, rogas’. Naso is named in line 8 of the
Tribum motetus as the author of the couplet from the letter. Naso is Ovid’s signature
name: the author aligns himself with Ovid by announcing the couplet from Epistulae ex
Ponto from both authorial mouths, Ovid’s and his own (‘concinat gallus nasonis dicta’).
At the same time, Tribum alludes to the opening of Garrit gallus/​In nova fert which
presents the declaiming Gallus simultaneously with In nova fert, the first line of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
The multiple quotation cements the authorial link between the Gallus ‘singing out’
(concinat) in Tribum, ‘prating’ (garrit) in Garrit gallus, and the Ovid whose words
are present in and fundamental to both motets. [Con-​]-​cinat Gallus is set to a promi-
nent four-​note motive (b d c b) that precedes three of the Tribum blocks, and it recurs
in conjunction with words whose special significance we have already observed. It
introduces the second (central) A block at L33 (ruere before merito), the central B
block at L45 (Gallus Nasonis) and the final B block with the Ovid couplet at L69
(subito/​casu). This placing of motetus casu (fall) reflects the triplum casurus in the
middle B block.
The Ovidian In nova fert is located as prominently as it could be at the beginning of
Garrit gallus. The middle of the central B block in Tribum/​Quoniam falls on Nasonis.
Thus the same words and music are emphasised by repetition and quotation and by
positions that are proportioned in relation to each other as well as internally. We now
see that the central interruption to the pattern of musical rhyme (z in Fig. 4.1 above)
is made precisely to enable the centrally placed quotation from Garrit gallus. There
are significant coincidences at the junction with color 2: the middle words of both
parts, which occur in those lines; a palindrome in triplum and motetus melodies;
and a repetition of ascendere/​-​it that introduces color 2 with a coincidence of music
and words.
Tribum/​Quoniam and Garrit gallus/​In nova fert share the same beasts: gallus, vulpes,
pullis and leo (cockerel, foxes, chicks and lion). Garrit gallus twice has in the tenor (at
B92 and B129) the notes bb a at the motetus’s leo (see Ex. 4.7). The two triplum lions
fall at the midpoint of each color (B36 and B111 in Ex. 4.5). The Garrit gallus tenor
notes bb a at leo become the long and deliberate bb a for leo in the motetus of Tribum/​
Quoniam at L27–​L28 in Ex. 4.1. These notes sound, as they do in the tenor of Garrit
gallus, as the lowest notes of the texture (despite the tenor being the middle voice in
Tribum), and are written at the same pitch in both motets. They are preceded, in the
first B block, by the emphatic past-​tense verb regnaverat, also set to long notes, as if to
emphasise the past tense, and to suggest that he (Philip IV) reigned too long. The par-
ticular prominence given here to the lion (albeit the blind lion, Philip IV) recalls Vitry’s
personal seals, both surviving instances of which date from the late 1340s and appro-
priate classical imagery in portraying the figures of Hercules and the lion. The second
seal shows Hercules and David conquering the lion, precisely as the text of Tribum does
in what, above, I called a ‘striking marriage of pagan and Christian elements’. The lion
in the seal is overpowered, and the regal lion in Garrit gallus is blind, so it would hardly
108 Fauvel and Vitry

Ex. 4.7 Musical relations between Garrit Gallus and Tribum at the word leo

qualify as an honourable Vitry signature alongside the likelier Gallus, prominent in

both motets.47

Appendix
Commentary to Tribum/​Quoniam (musical edition, Ex. 4.1)

Sources: Paris146, ff. 41v–​42; Br19606, recto, no. 3; Stras, f. 71v, no. 115, in
Coussemaker, Le Manuscrit de Strasbourg, 110–​11, which I neglected to use in Bent,
‘Tribum’. Plicas and the few downstems are in Paris146 only; in Br19606 and Stras the

47 Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, 145–​46. I thank Julian Gardner for his observation of this correspondence

between seal and text.

 Tribum/Quoniam and Garrit gallus/In nova 109

rhythms are confirmed by minim stems. None of the Paris146 plicas are realised as ad-
ditional notes in those sources. But for the motetus bbs, triplum f s would be suggested.
f fg
Triplum: Paris146 36.4, 60.4 e ; rhythm matched to 12 ( ) on authority of Br19606
and Stras, equalising the A blocks; Br19606 and Stras 27.2–​29.2 one lig; Br19606 tr
35.2–​4 b a b g fgfg ; 54 no b; Stras 3, before 3.3; 4 ab dotted ; 11. 2–​4, 35. 2–​4, 59.2–​4
∂ d
cbag f g fg d dffg
; 27.2–​3 g ; 51 a g f e f g fg
; 54.4 .
Motetus: Paris146 b signature appears only at the beginnings of staves 2, 5, 6
(preceding the clef), 8, but b precedes the first b on the other staves except staff 4 where
it precedes the second b (33), not the first (31). Br19606 b sig every staff except the last;
c and f clefs on first two staves; Stras b sig on every staff; Paris146 34 long plica followed
by ff a g; 35–​39 om (thus for 33–​40 it has: b d c b a–​a g f); 60.3–​4 no lig, Paris146 over
erasure; Br19606 and Stras 54 no b; Br19606 56.2–​4 a g a b f g fg ; 57.2–​3 lig; 66.2–​67
∂ ß
e d c b a; Stras mo 1–​3 3rd rest instead of ; 12.3–​13, 33.3–​4, 57.2–​3 lig; 67 68.3 ;d s
Paris146 47, 71 d: correctly c in Br19606.
My transcription of the motetus differs from Schrade’s in several places: at 34 (as
Br19606: Paris146 omits 35–​39, giving just two semibreves a g), 47 (c as Br19606), 66
(as Paris146, rescuing the imitation by descent from d), 71 (c as Br19606; this and 47,
66 are confirmed both by Stras and by the intabulation in Lo28550). L74 is a possible
further candidate for emendation, but without support from the manuscripts. There
are no plicas in the later sources, which between them confirm details of the identical
passages.

Commentary to Garrit/​In nova (musical edition, Ex. 4.5)

Paris146 has been followed unless Pic is clearly preferable. Pic’s variants are mostly
equally good.
The tenor repetition is marked in Pic by two little strokes, in Paris146 by an inscrip-
tion that appears to have four minims followed by ‘etc’. In the same paler ink, the tenor is
preceded by ‘n’, probably for ‘Neuma’.
Pic no b at tr 12, 79, 129, 142, mo 12, 26, 41, 54, 98, 139; Pic no s at tr 8, 59, 125, mo 6,
18, 136; 78, s before 80 not 79; mo 104 b Pic (placed before 101), not in Paris146.
s
Pic tr 8.1 g; 61.2 d; 101 dotted ; 106.2 c; 111.2 fg g f; 114 lig; 135.3 d; 144.1 d; mo
f
28.2–​3 g; 44 ff g s
g f e; 45 downstem ; 85.2 fg g a; 119 ff g e d c; 123–​4 ff g f fccc
f
e f; 128.2–​3 f; 142–​4 fe ed cb; 144 lig.
s
Paris146 tr 27.1–​2 a g (at line change); 41 rest om Paris146; 95 ; tr 101 no dot, there-
fore implying perfect modus (dot in Pic), but 137 is dotted; dot after mo 119, 124, 128.
 5
Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me

As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the three motets fit the Fauvel narrative in manu­
script order: Aman—​Tribum—​Garrit gallus, and the historical narrative in reverse order.
Aman novi comes just beyond where the short version of Fauvel ended,1 at the most serious
crux in that narrative (f. 30), immediately after Fortuna has rejected Fauvel’s presump-
tuous marriage suit. The other two motets (Tribum, Garrit gallus) go on, in that order and
in Fauvel time, to increasingly bitter reflections on the bad times and reversals of nature
brought about by Fauvel and his progeny. On the manuscript opening containing Aman
novi/​Heu Fortuna (ff. 29v–​30), both central characters, Fortuna and Fauvel, reach climactic
crisis.2 In Aman novi, Fauvel sings the motetus, Heu Fortuna, the (mostly) lower of the two
differently texted upper voices. He usually sings in ‘vulgar’ (vernacular) French, but here,
as noted, he laments in the higher register of Latin, signalling aspiration above his station.3
His first-​person sung lament is addressed to Fortuna, who has rejected his suit after raising
his expectations, only then with her wheel to sink him in the lake of tears. She has prom-
ised him much, but now deceived him. If he will die like Haman (i.e. be hanged), this is no
more than Fortuna predicted in the final stanza of her lai (f. 19r–​v), that he and his tribe will
be hanged (‘Puis soit Fauvel a seür | que j’entendré | a li honnir | et destruire | et de sa gent
mainz pandré’: Strubel vv. 61–​65, preceding Långfors 2115). The motetus is introduced
with the following words in French, which describe his face as being wet with tears, and
place the motetus specifically in his mouth (‘Ha fait le motet qui s’ensuit’):4

Fauvel oi et entendu
Ce que la dame li a rendu,
Esperduz est, ne set que face

Older versions of this chapter, as ‘Icarus, Phaeton, Haman: Fauvel and Dante?’, were presented jointly by Bent
and Kevin Brownlee to the Oxford Medieval Society on 23.5.1996, at the Vitry conference at Yale in 2015, and
now published as Bent and Kevin Brownlee, ‘Icarus, Phaeton, Haman: Did Vitry Know Dante?’, Romania, 137
(2019), 85–​129. I thank the editors of Romania for permission to reuse my part of that article here.
1 On the short and expanded versions of Fauvel, see Ch. 3 n. 1. Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me is in

Paris146, f. 30.
2 The opening is so arranged that the names of Fauvel and Fortuna alternate in the top lines of four of the

six columns, one pair on each page. There are many examples of similarly contrived choreographies of layout;
on ff. 41v–​42, as noted in Ch. 4, the triplum of Tribum starts at the end of f. 41v so that the first word on f. 42
will be ‘Fortuna’. The third column of f. 30 deals with the wise and foolish virgins. In part, they are prophetic
of Fauvel’s wedding with Fortuna’s daughter Vaine Gloire, for which unhallowed nuptials he is attended by
(female) virtues and vices. For ‘F–​F’ see also Fig. 3.1.
3 This motet is the final musical item in the courtship episode, of which Ruxandra Marinescu gives an excel-

lent account, including its use and reversals of French and Latin between Fauvel and Fortuna (‘The Politics of
Deception’, 51–​78). Shortly afterwards, Fauvel sings for the last time, once more in Latin, in a fragment of pseudo-​
chant based on Ps. 80: 4, to give gravitas to his wedding invitation: Buccinate in neomenia (p.mus. 76, f. 31v).
4 In addition it is a piece of the utmost sophistication. The argument in Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of

Philippe de Vitry’, that it is untidy and unworthy, fades under an expanded range of criteria for the evalua-
tion of quality and competence, as does his claim that it cannot have been written by Vitry later than ‘tidier’
but ‘earlier’ pieces. Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 20–​21a, 24b, refer mainly to the topical references
in this group: ‘none of these pieces includes explicit reference to the figure of Fauvel’, and it is further implied
that none of the newly composed motets in modern style began life with a text specific to Fauvel. But at other

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0006
112 Fauvel and Vitry

En plourant mouilliee la face

Non sachant quel chemin tenir
Doie, n’a quel fin doit venir,
Ha fait le motet qui s’ensuit:
Mes il n’i prent point deduit.

(Compare the last line of the motetus: ‘hoc me docuisti’.)

(L 1032–​ 39; S 4094–​ 1039.5 Strubel 4094–​

4101; cf. Dahnk 1032–​ 4101 follows
Långfors 3145–​52.)

Fauvel heard and understood what the lady said. He is lost and doesn’t know what
to do. Weeping, his face wet, he doesn’t know what route he should take, nor to what
end he should come. [He] made the motetus which follows, but took scarcely any
pleasure in it.

Triplum (ed. Rihmer) Syllable count and rhymes

Aman novi probatur exitu, 10a
quantum prosit inflari spiritu 10a
superbie, quid plus appetere 10b
quam deceat, et que suscipere 10b
5 non liceat, tantumque scandere 10b
quod tedeat, ut alter Ycarus, 10c
qui tanquam ignarus 6c
in mari est mersus, 6d
aquis iam submersus. 6d
10 Sic nec est reversus 6d
Pheton usurpato 6e
Solis regimine, 6f
ed ipso cremato 6e
victo conamine 6f
15 est exterminatus. 6g
Sic nimis elatus, 6g
Ycari volatus 6g
affectans transcendere 7b
noster Aman, vincere 7b
20 rapinam Phetontis, 6h
in Falconis montis 6h
loco collocatus, 6g
evectus a pulvere 7b
ymbre sepe lavatur, 7i

points in the introductory essay it is shown that the motetus of Aman novi/​Heu fortuna is indeed introduced
as the words of Fauvel (18b), and that the Fauvel and Marigny ingredients are linked (51b–​52a).
5 Dahnk (Da) refers to the separately numbered verses of the Långfors edition (as ‘texte’) and the 1808

verses of the ‘addicions’ printed in its appendix (‘La’), and introduces a new numeration in parentheses for the
further 1069 verses published together with the texts of the musical interpolations, which are now addition-
ally in Strubel.
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 113

25 aura flante siccatur 7i

suis delictis in ymis: 8k
Non eodem cursu respondent ultima primis. hex k

The end of a new Haman proves what good it brings to swell with the spirit of pride,
what [it means] to grasp after more than is appropriate and what one is not allowed to
receive, and to rise so much that it offends, like another Icarus, who unaware, as it were,
sank into the sea, now drowned in the waters. So [too] Phaeton did not return, having
usurped the command of the Sun[’s chariot], but, himself burned, [his] effort defeated,
was exterminated. So [too] our Haman, excessively elevated, affecting to transcend the
flight of Icarus, to surpass the theft of Phaeton, set up in the place of Montfaucon, lifted
up from the dust, is repeatedly washed by the rain, dried by the blowing wind, [and yet
is] in the depths because of his crimes: Not by the same course do the last things accord
with the first.

The triplum text is corrupt and has undergone emendations, which are compared
in Table 5.1. These include Zoltan Rihmer’s version, used here and in Ex. 5.1.
Then follows the motetus, Heu Fortuna, Fauvel’s sung Latin lament on his rejection
by Fortuna.6

Motetus text: Fauvel’s words, first person7 Disyllabic rhymes

Heu Fortuna subdola, 7a
que semper diastola 7a
usque nunc fuisti, 6b
promittendo frivola 7a
5 tanquam vera sistola 7a
nunc apparuisti. 6b
Heu, quociens prospera, 7c
longe ponens aspera 7c
mihi promisisti, 6b

6 Another instance of a motetus text being introduced in the surrounding verse, in this case by the author

or narrator: ‘Pour Phelippes qui regne ores/​Ci metreiz ce motet onquores: O Philippe prelustris francorum’
(Da vv. 35–​36, p.mus. 33). See also (above and below) on the absence of a motet for Philip IV, apparently
announced with ‘Recitant de lui un motet. Ha, sire diex’. Another instance is the first fully French motet, Je voi
douleur/​Fauvel nous a fait/​Autant (F 14, p.mus. 29), whose tenor is put into Fauvel’s mouth in the first person.
7 Commentary on motetus text by ZR:

1 Fortuna capitalised as a personified concept, like a number of similar notions in Vitry’s motets (for
example, Fides, Ratio), and, ultimately, Fauvel himself.
2, 5 Diastola (from the Greek word diastole) and sistola (from Greek systole) are the categories of
ancient rhetoric (and medieval grammar), the former meaning the lengthening of a short vowel, the
latter the shortening of a long one. Strubel (p. 529) points out that diastola and sistola are medical
metaphors for cardiac expansion and contraction.
11 ad deleted, restoring the regular pattern of the syllable count.
12–​13 As Becker pointed out, this stanza lacks its expected first half—​or perhaps its second. The
composer, even if he wrote this verse, could not have accommodated a further twenty syllables in the
setting as it stands. It was either a deliberate irregularity by the poet, there being no obvious lacuna in
the sense, or its omission was a musical compositional decision.
114 Fauvel and Vitry

10 me ditans innumera 7c
gaza usque ethera 7c
nomen extulisti. 6b
Nunc tua volubili 7d
rota lacu flebili 7d
15 nudum demersisti. 6b
Velud Aman morior; 7e
de te sic experior 7e
quod me decepisti; 6b
quanto gradus alcior, 7e
20 tanto casus gravior: 7e
hoc me docuisti. 6b

Tenor: Heu me, tristis est anima mea

Motetus: Alas, deceitful Fortune, you who have until now always been a means of
expansion, by promising worthless things you have now appeared as a true means
of contraction. Alas, how many times have you promised me prosperity, putting
troubles far off; enriching me with countless treasures, you have exalted [my] name
to the heavens. Now with your revolving wheel you have sunk me naked in the lake
of tears. I die like Haman; thus do I find out about you by experience that you have
deceived me. The higher the step, the graver the fall: this you have taught me.
Tenor: Alas for me, my soul is sad [even unto death].

While Tribum and Garrit are also preserved in later sources with explicit notation
of minims, Aman novi is uniquely preserved in Paris146, f. 30r. The triplum begins not
with not an ornamental ‘A’ but with ‘Q’: see Fig. 5.1. The obvious explanation is that
the flourisher saw three minims (ma) with macron over the a, following the space for
the initial and, in the absence of a guide letter, read it as niam, supplying the ‘Q’ for
Quoniam. The three minims were likewise construed by Dahnk as ni, the macron over

Fig. 5.1 Triplum incipit of Aman/​Heu in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 146,
f. 30r. © BnF
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 115

the a as representing m, reading the word as Quoniam, irregularly abbreviated. This

would create an eleven-​syllable line. In a long critical review, Becker, ‘Fauvel’, recognised
this as an error for what would at first sight seem the apparently less likely word Aman,
as confirmed later within both texts, and that the initial letter should have been ‘A’.8 So
in the absence of a visible guide letter, the ‘Q’ was assumed to be a crass error, the scribe
perhaps short-​circuiting to the Quoniam secta latronum motetus of Tribum que non
abhorruit. Although the correct reading Aman is beyond doubt, it is possible that the
Q might not after all be an error. I was alerted to the phenomenon of fausses lettres
by Elizabeth Cullinane (‘Les Dits entés’, 49–​50), who gives an instance of ‘Q’ being
substituted for ‘A’ in a vertical acrostic in the final dit enté of the Lescurel songs, Gracieus
temps est quant rosier, which reads J E Q N (n) E (Jeanne), the additional ‘n’s in the
‘N’ line being provided alliteratively. In the ‘ABC’ of the thirteenth-​century self-​styled
‘Huon, le roi de Cambrai’, ‘Q’ has negative connotations as a reversal of ‘P’.9 P stands for
Père and Paradis; Q is bestourné: ‘Q étant un P tourné à l’envers, est une vilaine lettre,
comme son nom.’ Thus associated with retrogression and negativity, it may just possibly
have been in this case a deliberate substitution for ‘A’, all the more telling for suggesting
yet another link between Fauvel and the songs of Lescurel.
Fauvel’s lament in the motetus (Heu Fortuna subdola) would sit equally well in the
voice of Marigny, likewise raised by Fortuna and then dashed down. Fauvel speaks in
the first person singular and in the present tense (both also used for the tenor) and
aligns himself with Haman (‘like Haman I die’), but he is still alive to say so. There are
clear parallels between Haman’s career and Marigny’s, and obviously also with Fauvel’s.
Marigny was raised from relatively modest estate to disproportionate advancement,
basked in royal favour and honour, and was finally hoist on his own petard. Haman
rose to favour and then presumed to usurp royal status and its insignia (in his case,
garments, crown, and indeed a horse), and was hanged for his treachery on the gallows
he had prepared for Mordecai, as recounted in the Book of Esther.10 The hanging of
Haman’s ten sons also mirrors the roman’s emphasis on the foul offspring of Fauvel. In
dying ‘like Haman’, Fauvel’s progeny are implicitly included in his fate. From this point
on, in Fauvel’s progress, his nuptial celebrations are very firmly located in Paris. Indeed,
Montfaucon (the gallows of Paris) is named here in the triplum of Aman novi, as it is
in the Chronique;11 the manuscript’s famous and recognisable depiction of fourteenth-​
century Paris is on the verso of the same leaf (f. 30), just one example of the subtle and
subversive choreography of Fauvel’s physical layout.

8 Becker, ‘Fauvel’, 40; reported in Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 336.

9 Huon, le roi de Cambrai: Oeuvres, ed. Artur Långfors (Paris, 1913). Cullinane cites Paris837, f. 127r, in a
context which emphasises reversal (‘Si com li q va bestournant’).
10 In the English MS Morgan978, the text of Singularis laudis digna invokes Esther and Ahasuerus in the

course of beseeching the Virgin for English victory: Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’, 315–​17, dates it to 1369, rejecting
the interpretation of Sanders, ‘English Polyphony’, 172–​73. The motetus of Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis (datable
in the late 1370s) names Esther, Ahasuserus, Haman and Mordecai in a prayer to the Virgin to grant victory
to France.
11 The gallows of Montfaucon were constructed in the late 13th c. and remained in use until the time

of Louis XIII. Strubel says (p. 527) that they were constructed on the orders of Enguerrand de Marigny
(born c. 1260), but does not document this statement. Strubel further notes (p. 529) that the image of
hanged men being washed by the rain and dried in the sun is found elsewhere, notably in Roman de la Rose,
ed. Strubel, v. 6485.
116 Fauvel and Vitry

Verb tenses are a significant aid to managing and signposting the fictive chro-
nology of the double narrative, and especially to reinforcing the secondary historical
strand. The triplum Aman novi sounds simultaneously with this motetus. It stands
(physically as well as in import) as the final culminating text of the backwards his-
torical sequence. It is a past-​tense narrative, not in Fauvel’s voice, but in the third
person, except for the first person plural of ‘noster Aman’, our Haman, the historical
Marigny. Fauvel’s narrative is in the present tense, the historical narrative in the past.
‘Our’ Haman is now dead, like the long-​past hanging of Marigny (the ‘new Haman’)
on Montfaucon, in the last of the three motets in historical, ‘backwards’ order. As we
learn from the Chronique métrique, the body of Marigny, washed by rain on the gal-
lows, fell or was cut down. It was found naked on the ground, and on the vigil of St
John the Baptist (23 July 1315), dressed, like a cloche, and re-​hanged (see below). It
remained there as an example for two years after his execution, before finally being
released for burial in 1317, when Marigny’s reputation enjoyed some rehabilitation
by Philip V. The triplum text confirms that the exposed body of this ‘new Haman’
was left hanging in the rain and wind, therefore dating the motet no earlier. All
sources unanimously attest the terribly wet weather of the summer of 1315, which
gives added point to the inclusion in the motet texts of the watery ends of Icarus and
Phaeton, Fortuna sinking Fauvel (with his tear-​wet face) ‘naked in the lake of tears’,
and Marigny’s rain-​washed corpse. In the myth, Phaeton fell burning into the river
and his sisters swelled the waters with their tears.12 Indeed, in the triplum, Icarus
is paralleled directly by Phaeton and then by ‘our’ Haman, the unnamed Marigny.
Both Phaeton and Marigny committed crimes while still on high, and both paid for
them with a fatal fall. In Marigny’s case, ironically, his fall incurred the punishment of
being raised on high in a different, negative and terminal sense, on a mount which in
turn parallels the mount of crucifixion, a gallows from which he, in turn, fell. Fauvel’s
metaphorical death from a love-​rejection in the motetus is literally aligned (by si-
multaneous presentation of the two texts) with the account in the triplum of a death
(Marigny’s) which, like Haman’s, was a real one on the gallows; but real death is not
yet part of Fauvel’s narrative. Downfall is predicted but withheld. Fauvel’s words be-
come Marigny’s ante mortem lament, invoking Haman, at his execution, spoken by, or
as if by, one not yet dead.

The Tenor

It is highly unusual for a motet tenor to combine two chants. The tenor of Aman novi
is just such a hybrid, combining a chant for the Office of the Dead, Heu me (Alas for
me), with one for Maundy Thursday, Tristis est anima mea (My soul is sad), implying
its continuation, usque ad mortem.13 Both texts are the first-​person words of Christ.
The first seven tenor notes (the entirety of the Heu me chant excerpt), rhythmicised
in short note-​values, form the opening of the triplum, Aman novi. After the second

12 Wathey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 87.

13 For sources see Rankin, ‘The Divine Truth of Scripture’, 241–​42, ex. 10.
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 117

chant, the tenor ends with three iterations of the opening four notes (to Heu me), an-
other trio to add to those already pointed out in Tribum and Garrit gallus; the placing
between those two of the Trinity motet Firmissime/​Adesto may not be accidental.
Christ’s agonised first-​person words on the eve of His crucifixion in the tenor sound
simultaneously with the account of Marigny’s hanging in the triplum and Fauvel’s
first-​person lament in the motetus. If Fauvel is indeed Marigny, another first-​person
dimension is added to the lament put into his mouth, combining (besides Haman)
Fauvel, Marigny and Christ in a deliberately incongruous trinity of voices. Both
tenor texts affirm the first person singular, but the second chant’s words are those of
Christ, not of Fauvel’s first-​person motetus. The striking, indeed blasphemous juxta-
position rolls the trinity of villains—​Haman (biblical), Fauvel (fable), and Marigny
(historical)—​together with His words. Haman’s hanging, or crucifixion, was often
seen as an antitype of Christ’s. While in liturgical time the chant tenor signifies the
eve of Christ’s crucifixion, in historical time the triplum text refers (after the fact) to
the hanging of Marigny, which took place on the eve of Ascension (Wednesday, 30
April 1315), with much play in the texts on height, ascent and fall. Here is a small
sample from the Chronique métrique:14

vv. 7274–​88
Reprouchié li sera tozjors
Monfaucon; la fu mis en cage,
Mat en angle, au plus haut estage
Tele sepulture esleü
N’avoit pas, s’en fu deceü.
Je ne sai se saint ert trouvé
Car bien haut a esté levé;
et puis tel[le] cortoisie ot,
Desouz ses piez un Paviot.
En la fin d’avril lors fina,
Por ce que d’embler ne fina,
La veille de l’Ascention
En cest an d’incarnation
Couvert sis vints et onze quines;
C’est en cest an, or le devines.
...
vv. 7313–​18:
Et du remanant du lignage
Engerran, qui t’a fet damage
Et qui vis encore demeurent,
Oste les, si que plus ne queurent:
Tout ont escorchié et plumé.
Chascun en crie: ‘Heu me!’ (initiating a fourteen-​line citation).

14 Diverrès, La Chronique métrique. Between the lines cited here are vv. 7301–​5, which tantalisingly include

three obliterated lines rendered wholly illegible by earlier chemical attempts to recover them: ‘Puis Engerran
de Marregni/​Que . . ./​D . . ./​F . . ./​Et de Michiel de Bordenai’.
118 Fauvel and Vitry

...
vv. 7333–​46:
En cele annee voirement,
Ne say par quel consentement,
Ont aucuns si bien entendu
Qu’il ont Engerran despendu;
Et despoillé fu trestout nu,
Tout ainsi l’en fu avenu.
Por ce commandé ra esté
Que pendu fust et remonté;
Et si fu il en une cloche,
Ainsi sa besoingne li cloche.
Autrement eust esté crevé
Charles, s’il ne fust relevé.
Ce fu la veille Saint Jehan
Que rependu fu en cel an.

Heu me in v. 7318 is, as noted above, the tenor incipit of the motet, one of many
close links between Fauvel and the chronicle. In Fauvel’s chronology, his lament in
the motetus text precedes the next major Christian festival following the Ascension,
Pentecost, the day following which will mark his marriage to Fortuna’s handmaid
Vaine Gloire. So he did not die, but in a sense heightened the blasphemy by rising again
(resurrecting), marrying, on Pentecost. Similar counterpoints and collisions between
liturgical time and narrative chronology are worked out on a large scale in Fauvel, here
with maximum play on the eves of the crucial dates, whether historical (Marigny’s exe-
cution, specified precisely in the chronicle), fictional (Fauvel) or biblical (Christ’s cruci-
fixion). Liturgically, these refer to the eves of Good Friday (the Crucifixion), Ascension
(Marigny’s execution), Pentecost (Fauvel’s marriage) and John the Baptist (Marigny’s
re-​hanging, specified in the chronicle).

The Music of Aman novi

For a diplomatic transcription of Aman from its only source (Paris146) see Ex. 5.1. As
in Tribum and Garrit gallus the semibreves are separated into breve groups by dots, and
either unstemmed, or with downstems on some first beats. These downstems are much
more copious in Aman. They indicate that a note is long but, when there are just two
semibreves in the space of a breve, not necessarily longer than the second one; they are
equal. Although this is not corroborated for Aman by a later source with minim stems,
the intention is clear from the later notations of other motets. Views of the musical
quality of Aman have varied widely. Ernest Sanders rejected Vitry’s authorship partly
on grounds that, although referring to a later event, it was less tidy than the ‘earlier’
Garrit gallus. He neglected to observe that the tenor chant of Aman is structured in
segments, measured in longs, of 12 +​1, 13 +​1, 12 +​1, 13 +​1, 3 +​1, 3, where each ‘1’ is
a long rest, and the final two short segments are the repetitions of Heu me at the end.
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 119

Ex. 5.1 Edition of music of Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me, tristis est anima mea, with
text as emended by Zoltán Rihmer: see Table 5.1
120 Fauvel and Vitry

Ex. 5.1 Continued

 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 121

Ex. 5.1 Continued

122 Fauvel and Vitry

Ex. 5.1 Continued

 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 123

This is precisely the kind of patterning that qualified his more favourable rating of the
other Marigny motets. The upper parts are indeed more irregular, but the composer
avoids simultaneous rests between any two parts. By contrast, Alexander Blachly
championed Vitry’s authorship of Aman novi for its ‘melodically superior . . . excite-
ment, surprise, and imaginative juxtaposition of fast and slow rhythms’.15 He is one of
very few writers to have found this a composition of superior quality. He discerns a nu-
merical structure which is deployed with skill, avoiding simultaneous rests, although
requiring special pleading by the tidier numerical criteria used by his teacher Ernest
Sanders. He commented on the ‘thrilling’ and ‘novel’ effects of the notated and implied
sharps, but without linking them to the text, as I do here. Sanders noted incipient
imitation within and between voices, comparing (in Ex. 5.1) triplum L1, L12–​L13 and
L36 and motetus L21–​L22; triplum L26 is echoed at motetus L30 and L35. The melodic
writing is predominantly stepwise, with a fourth or fifth only at L44, L50, L53. In three
instances, the rhythm ffg
occurs two or more times consecutively (Ex. 5.1, motetus
L32–​L33, triplum L36–​L37 and L56–​L57). Blachly relates the framing principle of the
threefold repetition of the tenor notes c c b a at the end to the tenor of Vitry’s motet Tuba
sacre/​In arboris/​Virgo sum, whose opening two-​note motive a g is repeated three times
at the end, and similarly the repetitions of the opening a g f at the end of Colla jugo/​Bona
condit/​Libera me. The case for Vitry’s authorship will be further considered in Chapter 7
in relation to Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores.
Musically, the many visually and audibly conspicuous sharps in Aman novi
(notated on f and g by cross-​l ike signs, and necessitating unnotated dss, unusual
and extreme in this repertory) may suggest crucifixion (in later music a common-
place of word-​p ainting). The one notated gs in the tenor (Ex. 5.1 at L46) is on the
chant melisma of mortem and coincides with Fauvel’s ‘velud Aman morior’ in the
motetus, aligning the cross sign of Christ’s crucifixion in the tenor with Haman’s
in the motetus, and further suggesting the gibbet of Montfaucon (‘Falconis
montis’). (See Fig. 5.2.)
In addition, the audible harmonic twist (with dss) at ‘noster Aman’ (Marigny) in this
motet (L38) might indicate that the composer was aware of Jewish Purim traditions
of noise-​making to drown out the name of Haman. Those festivities could have been
perceived by Christians as a parody of the crucifixion. The striking harmonies of this
motet might also relate to the Fauvel charivari, where instruments such as cliquetes and

Fig. 5.2 Notated sharp in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 146, f. 30r, tenor,
bottom staff. © BnF

15 Blachly, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 56–​77 at 56.

124 Fauvel and Vitry

macequotes (making hauz brais and hautes notes; see Långfors, vv. 717–​18) recall the
rattles traditionally used in Purim ceremonies.16
Recent work has drawn attention to the creative use of voice-​crossing in motets,
sometimes in ways that suggest metaphorical word-​painting.17 We have noted a striking
instance at the beginning of Garrit gallus, where the Ovidian first line in the motetus
rises prominently above the triplum. In Aman at L37–​L39 this sharp-​laden introduc-
tion of ‘noster Aman’ in the triplum is surmounted (metaphorically ‘put down’) by
Fortuna, who is addressed in the motetus, which at this point symbolically crosses the
triplum to sing above it. The progression at L24–​L25 following ‘Pheton usurpato’ also
allows the motetus to usurp the triplum range, rising above it; at L34–​L35 Fauvel’s refer-
ence to his elevation in the motetus rises above ‘Ycarus’ in the triplum. At L18–​L21 the
motetus rises above the ‘watery’ triplum at the point where Icarus is submerged. This
happens again at L29–​L30, where Phaeton too is ‘exterminated’, and at L42–​L44, where
Montfaucon in the triplum dips below the motetus. This is followed by Fauvel’s ‘velut
Aman morior’, where the motetus still rises above the triplum, which in turn overtakes
the motetus to reach the top of its range as the dead Marigny is raised from the dust to be
displayed ghoulishly on high; at L57–​L59 the ‘fall’ in the motetus perversely rises over
the triplum. The extent of this metaphorical play on rise and fall, height and depth, is
particularly suited to the concept of this motet, and is one of many instances that go be-
yond a general perception that word-​painting in early repertories barely exists.
Here we are dealing not only with classical citations and allusions, but with biblical
ones too. Fauvel and Christ are alive at the time of their first-​person soliloquies, though
anticipating different kinds of death. We are clearly meant to read Fauvel’s motetus in
the light of the ‘hangings’ of Haman and Marigny, a trio of crucifixions sounding simul-
taneously with Christ’s in the tenor. (Christ’s crucifixion was itself a trio in which he was
flanked by the two malefactors.) The gallows of Montfaucon in the triplum becomes
the Parisian mount of crucifixion. Fauvel, however, does not die but lives on to marry
Vaine Gloire and beget his wretched progeny, who are rejuvenated in the heresy and
filth of the Fountain of Youth. Christ rose again; Marigny’s body was re-​erected as an
example, another blasphemous parallel. These resurrections or rebirths anticipate the
rise of Antichrist, which is made quite specific in the apocalyptic Fauvel, both referred
to by Fortuna, embodied in Haman, and implicitly also in Marigny. The motets that
form this trio are further connected by trios of names, as noted above, and packed with
allusions that carry unstated context with them. We have noted that Garrit gallus names
the trio of Absalom (a traitor), Ulysses (a liar), both deceptively attractive, and Thersites
(a churl), but also Absalom, Michael and Christ. Tribum (another pun on three, tribus)
names its protagonists allegorically—​the lion, fox and cockerel. Aman has a double trio
all of whose components also stand for Fauvel: Marigny, Haman and (blasphemously)
Christ, all hanged or crucified; Icarus, Phaeton and Marigny, who aspired too high and

16 First pointed out by Manuel Pedro Ferreira in a Princeton seminar paper in 1989, published as Ferreira,

‘Vitry’, where he also calls attention to a notated diminished fifth in Floret on the word ‘Aman’; Sanders, ‘The
Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, also invoked Purim in connection with Floret. Jews were expelled from
France and readmitted at several dates during this period. The great Jewish exile of 1306 was followed by their
return in 1315.
17 Bent, ‘Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9’ (2003, here Ch. 9), and Zayaruznaya, ‘She Has a Wheel’

(2009).
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 125

fell. The names of Icarus, Phaeton and Haman each occur twice in the triplum text; the
repetitions of key words (here, names) will by now be a familiar technique from the
other two Marigny motets, like the well-​placed musical recapitulations in these motets.
There could also be here a trinitarian link to the Fauvel motet Firmissime/​Adesto sancta
Trinitas (f. 43r–​v), the most advanced of five motets placed between Tribum and Garrit
gallus; just one motet stands between Aman and Tribum.18
The ‘other Pharaoh’ of Garrit gallus parallels the ‘new Haman’ of Aman novi. Both
Pharaoh and Haman are Old Testament oppressors of the chosen people, here the
French, who should be properly ruled over by heirs of the recently canonised Saint
Louis. ‘Noster Aman’ in the triplum of Aman, the word recapitulated in the first person
plural, speaks for ‘us’, the contemporary Frenchmen who have been oppressed by
Marigny. The beast fable themes played out in Fauvel and augmented from Renard are
present in Garrit gallus as the galli (cockerels/​roosters and Frenchmen), the blind lion
(King Philip IV) and the traitorous fox (red-​headed Marigny). The Archangel Michael
conquers the dragon, Satan, whose fall from grace allegedly punished the sin of pride,
his bid to be equal to and independent of God. Satan and Haman in their different ways
bid too high, and fell, as did Marigny ‘the satrap’, Fauvel his beastly literary embodiment,
as well as Icarus and Phaeton. A series of bestial metamorphoses and reversals unfolds
in both narratives. In ‘backwards’ historical order, the beast allegories of Garrit gallus
become increasingly human throughout the three motets, culminating in Aman novi,
which by naming Montfaucon alludes as specifically to Marigny as it can do without
naming him. The motet tenors also become increasingly personalised, from the neu-
tral melisma (Neuma) of Garrit gallus, through the first person plural of Tribum’s tenor
Merito hec patimur, to the double first person singular of the hybrid tenor of Aman, with
its additional blasphemous dimension of the words of Christ.
Aman is if anything even more densely packed than Tribum and Garrit with
quotations and allusions. Ovid is present as the source for the stories of Icarus and
Phaeton, though not quoted or named directly. Dahnk identified a citation from Lucan,
one of several in the Fauvel motets.19 Leofranc Holford-​Strevens locates this to the re-
port of a ‘deceitful dream’ of Pompey before a disastrous defeat, and reports that this
‘would be a very apt parallel, if the position in the text, the presence of innumera(m),
and the raising of the name above the earth can establish it’; it could so be argued, since
the elements of pride before a fall and deception are clearly present.20 The last line of the
triplum is from the distichs of Cato, a hexameter couplet:

cum fueris felix, quae sunt aduersa caueto:

non eodem cursu respondent ultima primis.21

(When you prosper, beware of adversity: the end does not match the beginning.22)

18 For Firmissime/​Adesto see Robertson, ‘Which Vitry?’

19 Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel, p.mus. 71, 173, points out that the phrase ad ethera . . . nomen in motetus
lines 10–​12 ‘est fréquent dans le latin classique de même qu’au moyen âge, mais le voisinage du mot innumera
fait croire qu’il s’agit ici d’un souvenir de Lucain VII.10: innumeram effigiem Romanae cernere plebis/​attolique
suum laetis ad sidera nomen/​vocibus et plausu cuneos certare sonantes’.
20 In Bellum civile 7.10–​12. Holford-​Strevens, ‘Fauvel Goes to School’, at 61–​62.
21 Disticha Catonis, I. 18.
22 Translated by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens.
126 Fauvel and Vitry

In addition to the moral message, there is yet more play on symmetries and on
inversions of beginnings and ends. The final line sums up the preceding content of
the triplum: Marigny’s being raised on high corresponds to his previous elevation
(respondent). This is also reflected in the voice crossing at L57–​L59 noted above,
which suggests the great difference (non eodem cursu) between hanging on the gallows
(ultima) and enjoying his previous royal favour (primis), words spanning time between
situations, both of which were of notable duration, and apply also to Fauvel’s identi-
fication with Haman (velud Aman morior). The hexameter not only seals the unity of
the three motets and confirms the bi-​directional narrative, but it is also reflected in
the music: whereas both Garrit gallus and Tribum begin and end on f (f–​c–​f), Aman
starts on c (c–​g–​c) and ends in a different place, on a (a–​e–​a): the end does not match
the beginning. Andrew Wathey points out that the use of sistola and diastola (motetus,
lines 2 and 5) to criticise Fortuna alludes to the critical tradition around the Cato
commentaries, and that the (syllabic) couplet at the end of the motetus, ‘Quanto gradus
altior/​tanto casus gravior’ (as the ascent is higher, so the fall is graver) is also elaborated
in a thirteenth-​century commentary to Esopus, fable 35 (in the widely circulated
distichs of Gualterus Anglicus); the allusion to a beast fable is clearly particularly ap-
propriate in this context.23 Thus all three Marigny motets introduce the voices of older
authors in a rich textual polyphony, by beginning, including or ending with citations or
allusions. In several cases these are highlighted by standing outside metrical structures
that are already extremely irregular with respect to line length and rhyme structure,
mixing classical metres with goliardic or medieval rhythmic verse.24 The triplum text
of Aman as transmitted is notably irregular, while the motetus falls neatly into tercets of
seven, seven and six syllables.25 These are texts crafted for music, not texts that happen
to have received a musical setting; their purposeful irregularities are easily undervalued
if treated as self-​standing verse.
Despite their presentation in a ‘wrong’ historical order, we have seen in Chapter 3
that the topical content of the motets has been taken literally by most scholars, as if they
were newspaper reports, to provide termini post and ante quem for dating the motets.26
It has been assumed that their real-​life documentary function came first, that they were
imported or adapted for Fauvel, and therefore that their compositional order must be

23 Wathey, ‘Auctoritas’, 72. In fact, many classical authors are cited for this sentiment in Thesaurus

Proverbiorum, iii, s.v. ‘Fall’, 143–​45.

24 Garrit gallus: Ovid (Metamorphoses, ‘In nova fert’), and Joseph of Exeter, De bello troiano, I. 386

(Howlett). Tribum: Ovid (Ex Ponto), and Joseph of Exeter. De bello troiano, VI. 804–​5. See Ch. 4 nn. 9 and 35.
Vitry used this couplet to annotate a passage in his own copy of the Chronicon of Guillaume de Nangis. See
Wathey, ‘Myth and Mythography’. In Aman novi: Ovid (Metamorphoses, Phaeton and Icarus); Lucan; Cato’s
commentary to Gualterus Anglicus, Esopus, fable 35; Bible (Book of Esther; the name of Haman is marked in
the Nangis chronicle owned by Vitry); Christ’s words in the tenor. In all these cases, animals standing in for
human agency goes back to Aesop. Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 107 n. 60 locates in the University of Paris
the prevalence of quotations from the Bible, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace, and notes that some of the motets cite
the same quotations: Matt. 7: 15 appears in Scariotis/​Jure, Super/​Presidentes and Cum statua/​Hugo; Lucan, De
bello civili 10. 407 is quoted in both Colla/​Bona and Detractor/​Qui secuntur. Holford-​Strevens, ‘Fauvel Goes to
School’, 60. Secuntur is the last word of Colla/​Bona.
25 See Table 5.1 for an emended version by Zoltán Rihmer, used here in the musical edition Ex. 5.1. His
revision makes better sense of the syllable count and rhyme scheme, and it stays much closer to the manu-
script text than Becker’s drastic (and undefended) revision used in Schrade’s musical edition. Rihmer’s ver-
sion also fits the music better than either Becker’s or Strubel’s emendations with respect to text underlay.
26 Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 338; Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’.
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 127

that of the historical narrative to which they refer, as set out above. Working from the
end of the book, in Garrit gallus, the ‘blind lion’ (Philip IV) is still reigning (present
tense, monarchisat), so, it is argued, it must antedate his death on 29 November 1314;
in Tribum his reign is already past (past tense, regnaverat), but it antedates Marigny’s
execution on 30 April 1315; the gallows has been prepared, but his imminent execution
is still in the future: ‘[Fortuna] has not refrained from preparing the gallows . . . [for] a
certain man who might, perhaps, fall’. Aman novi, the third motet of the historical nar-
rative, reports the situation two years after the execution, in 1317.
Thus, the unity of the three Fauvel motets as a group is even tighter than previ-
ously recognised. The careful planning of their double narrative function means
that all were composed retrospectively no earlier than 1317, later than the events
to which they refer, later than datings which assumed their simple documentary
chronicle function. Even if the conception and compilation of Fauvel started before
1317, these motets at least must be later; the project must have been completed at
the latest by the death of Philip V in 1322. The masterly programme of the trio of
motets makes their common authorship virtually certain: if Garrit and Tribum are
by Vitry, so too is Aman.

From Ovid to Dante: The Pairing of Icarus and Phaeton

Ovid, as noted, is present in all three Marigny motets. In Fauvel order, the Ovidian
references increase in explicitness through the three texts. Ovid’s myths (Icarus and
Phaeton) are present but not attributed in Aman, he is cited as Naso in Tribum, and the
motetus of Garrit opens with the first line of the Metamorphoses. Garrit gallus/​In nova fert
is the last piece before the envoi. In ‘Marigny’ order it is the beginning, so advertised by
using that famous first line, and the Ovidian text leads the story through the three motets
from nature’s first beginnings, through exile (Tribum) to modern catastrophes (Aman).
The central doom-​laden motet, Tribum, builds its texts from an elegiac couplet from
the letters Ovid wrote in exile, the Ex Ponto, reproaching a faithless friend for failing
to contact him. Thus, in Marigny order, starting from the end, the three motets start
with a very clear Ovidian reference in Garrit gallus/​In nova fert (the first line of the
Metamorphoses), a less familiar but attributed one in Tribum, and an unsignalled pair of
references in Aman, now to be discussed.
The Ovidian link concerns two key over-​ambitious high flyers, Icarus and Phaeton,
to whom the ‘new Haman’ is likened. The high flyer Fauvel was raised by Fortuna from
the stable to the palace. The naming twice each of the trio Haman, Phaeton and Icarus
in the triplum of Aman novi gives unmistakable emphasis (lines 1, 6, 11, 17, 19, 20).
And although this motet (the first in Fauvel order and the third in Marigny order) nei-
ther names nor quotes Ovid, the Metamorphoses are its source for the stories—​there
quite separate—​of Icarus and Phaeton. At the end of Metamorphoses 1 and the opening
of Metamorphoses 2, Apollo promised his son Phaeton whatever he wished, and he
tried in vain to dissuade him from his request to drive the sun’s chariot. He described
the route and its dangers, advising a middle course, and how to discipline the horses.
The young Phaeton was unable to control them and plunged to his watery death, after
causing great and unnatural damage on earth. (Fauvel is also an out-​of-​control horse.)
128 Fauvel and Vitry

In Metamorphoses 8, Daedalus encouraged his son Icarus to take the feathered wings
he had made for them both for their flight out of their imprisonment in Crete, likewise
advising a middle course. The son ignored this advice and flew too close to the sun; the
wax on his wings melted and he crashed down into the sea.
The two stories obviously have much in common. In one case a son is encouraged
by his father to fly, in the other reluctantly permitted to do so; both sons are advised to
moderate their course; both fail disastrously and fall from on high to a catastrophic and
watery end. Fauvel’s horrid progeny are rejuvenated by a black baptism in the Fountain
of Youth. Fauvel’s wet face links him (via an albeit dry Haman) to Marigny’s rain-​
washed body post-​execution; but it also links him directly and explicitly to Phaeton
and Icarus, who are named in the triplum, and whose deaths involve plunging into the
sea. To link Icarus and Phaeton is an obvious strategy, but precedents for this linkage
are extremely rare.27
By far the most striking classical-​medieval presentation that explicitly combines the
fall of Phaeton with that of Icarus is in Dante’s Inferno 17, where the author-​protagonist
compares his fear to theirs.28 Dante uses both Phaeton and Icarus programmatically
in the rest of the Commedia, where their flight serves as a key negative model for the
protagonist’s ascent. Purgatorio 17, the central canto not only of the second cantica but
of the Commedia as a whole, is important—​for present purposes—​both for its reading of
the Dantean Phaeton and because it contains the Commedia’s only reference to Haman.
He is not explicitly named in the canto, but he is there as clearly as Marigny (also un-
named) is in the motet text. In Purgatorio 17 Haman is referred to as ‘one crucified’ (‘un
crucifisso’, line 26), preceding the naming of the trio of Ahasuerus, Esther and Mordecai
(ll. 28–​9). He also ‘rains down’ (piovve, l. 25) in a striking formulation, which adds a
watery dimension to his alignment both by Dante and, in this motet, with Icarus and
Phaeton, as well as the rain-​washed corpse of Marigny.
Given these striking juxtapositions, and knowing Kevin Brownlee’s articles on Dante,
Phaeton and Icarus, led me to ask him: did anyone before Dante link Phaeton, Icarus and
Haman in this same way? How early were the Inferno and the Purgatorio known in Paris?
Lacking other evidence of such an early French circulation of the Commedia, is this con-
nection merely coincidental, or is it strong enough to provide a link with the Roman de
Fauvel in Paris146? The discussion that followed resulted in a few joint oral presentations
from the 1990s onwards, eventually published as Bent and Brownlee, ‘Icarus, Phaeton,
Haman’. The reader is referred to the second half of that article for Brownlee’s extensive
and brilliant exploration of the Dante connection. Our conclusion was:

It does not seem to be mere coincidence that two innovative Romance authors around
1307–​17, Dante and Vitry, should not only have linked the Icarus and Phaeton stories, but

27 This double reference occurs in the pseudo-​Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, a late play, which many critics

do not attribute to Seneca himself but to an educated imitator. In the passage involving lines 675–​90, the
puer of 678 is Phaeton, and Icarus is explicitly cited in 687, a key citation kindly communicated by Pedro
Memelsdorff. For further details, see Bent and Brownlee, ‘Icarus, Phaeton, Haman’, 104 n. 54.
28 It was two articles by Brownlee, ‘Phaeton’s Fall’ and ‘Dante’s Transfigured Models’, that first suggested

the Dante–​Fauvel parallel to me. The Metamorphoses is the Ovidian work that Dante cites by far the most
frequently and elaborately. While he also references Ovid’s erotic poetry (Amores, Ars amatoria, Remedia
amoris), Dante never cites the Ovidian exilic works. The only Ovidian loci containing the combined refer-
ence to Phaeton and Icarus are thus only found in a work that is systematically and purposefully ignored by
Dante: Tristia I. 1. 79–​90 and III. 4. 21–​30. I thank Pedro Memelsdorff for this reference.
 Aman novi/Heu Fortuna 129

also linked them to the story of Haman in the book of Esther and to Christ’s crucifixion.
While they might have arrived independently at these connections (with in Vitry’s case
an application to contemporary events), we would prefer to infer from this commonality
that some knowledge of the first two cantiche of the Commedia was available in Paris at an
earlier date than hitherto documented.29

29 Bent and Brownlee, ‘Icarus, Phaeton, Haman’, 121.

 6
Floret/​Florens: Intended for Fauvel?

Ernest Sanders has convincingly connected a fourth motet to the three Marigny motets
in Fauvel.1 This is Floret cum Vana Gloria/​Florens vigor/​Neuma, based on the same tenor
(Neuma quinti toni) as Garrit gallus (which is in Fauvel) and Douce playsance/​Garison
(which is not, but is accepted as a work by Vitry). Floret is preserved not in Paris146
but in two other sources: Ca1328, which, although much damaged, identifies the tenor
as Neuma, hence the ‘N’ by the Garrit tenor in Paris146 (as noted by Schrade, ‘Philippe
de Vitry’, 339), and in the rotulus Br19606, no fewer than six of whose ten pieces, in-
cluding this, have a version in Fauvel. Schrade, Sanders, Edward Roesner and others
have assumed that the topical motets were adapted from obsolete historical motets and
interpolated in Paris146. They, and Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson, took the historical datings
as compositional dates, which strongly influenced the style chronology and composer
assignations they proposed (see Ch. 3 above), and indirectly allowed the now-​rejected
datings of Per grama and Flos/​Celsa in the mid-​to late 1310s (see Ch. 30 below). By con-
trast, I have proposed that especially the three Marigny motets, and perhaps also Floret,
were custom made for Paris146 specifically with a double function in the two narratives.
If this is right, then arguments about stylistic development within a short period, or what
is and is not possible from the same composer in a particular order, fall away.
Triplum and motetus texts and translation, based on translations by Sanders and
David Howlett:

Triplum Translation
Floret cum vana gloria Together with Vain Glory there flourishes
novitatum presumpcio the presumptuousness of novelties,
ypocrisis iactancia as do hypocrisy, boastfulness,
discordia contencio discord, contentiousness,
5 ac inobediencia and disobedience,
pertinencie captio seizure of property;
procedit ex invidia from envy proceeds
in prosperis afflictio affliction in prosperity,
detractio et odia slander, hatreds and
10 nocensque susurratio harmful whispering,
de proximi iniuria gleeful exultation at misfortune
iocunda exultacio befalling neighbours;
ex ira contumelia from anger arise
exit et indignacio insult and indignation,

1 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, with a transcription of the motet on pp. 37–​42. Whether

he has equally convincingly attributed Floret to Vitry must remain open. He argues (p. 31): ‘Like Tribum/​
Quoniam/​Merito [Floret/​Florens] must be attributed to [Vitry] for the two reasons that it seems characteristic
of his early style and that it is one of the most advanced motets to be utilised by Chaillou in fr. 146. Moreover,
the other motets based on the same or closely related cantus firmus are both by Vitry.’ See also Ch. 7 n. 26.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0007
132 Fauvel and Vitry

15 clamor rixe blasphemia the clamor of strife, blasphemy;

mentis viget inflacio conceit flourishes and
profluit et accidia disgust is spreading,
foras mentis vagacio as are mental derangement,
malicia pigricia malice, sloth,
20 rancor et desperacio rancour, and despair;
manat ex avaricia from avarice flow
fallacia prodicio intrigue, treachery,
iniquitas periuria iniquity, perjury,
fraus cordis obduracio fraud, hardheartedness;
25 ex gula inmundicia from gluttony come uncleanness
sensus hebes in genio and dulled sensation in spirit;
scurrilitas leticia scurrility, vain pleasure
vana cum multiloquio and garrulousness,
sequitur ex luxuria From self-​indulgence follows
30 huius mundi affectio the love of this world,
cecitas inconstancia blindness, inconstancy,
ac inconsideratio and inconsiderateness;
horror futura gloria future glory will become horror,
gravis precipitacio grave headlong descent;
35 in deum perit odia odious love of our flesh
nostre carnis dilectio. begets hatred of God.

Motetus Translation
Florens vigor ulciscendo Flourishing power, in your avenging
iuste vincens omnia justly winning all
ad tibi fides loquendo to you, Faith, speaking
fastus ad supplicia for punishment for arrogance
5 qui Aman genu flectendo those who by bending the knee to Haman
impediunt obsequia impede proper observances,
causatori adherendo by adhering to the plaintiff seek
fugiunt causaria to avoid adversity;
sicque falsum sustinendo and thus by sustaining falseness,
10 succumbit iusticia justice succumbs;
Mardocheo detrahendo by humiliating Mordecai
preparant exidia they prepare ruin,
que in ipsos convertendo which as it turns on themselves
sencient duplicia will suffer doubly,
15 cum iudex discuciendo when the deliberating Judge
iusta dabit premia. will give just rewards.
 Floret/Florens: Intended for Fauvel? 133

Dahnk recognised that a monophonic ‘prose’ (so designated) in Fauvel, Carnalitas,

luxuria (f. 12r–​v), was an adapted version of the triplum of Floret, and not vice versa;
Schrade (later) thought the motet was an elaboration of the prose.2 The motetus text is
not used in the prose adaptation. Carnalitas retains the long rests of the motet triplum,
which would be unlikely in an original monophonic composition; and it is the only
monophonic composition in Fauvel to use syllabic semibreves, though there are some
among the Lescurel songs. Nowhere does Sanders hint that Floret had anything to do
with Fauvel before it was fauvelised by Chaillou.
Almost every line of the motet triplum Floret has a direct correspondence in
Carnalitas, with lines 7–​28 almost identical to lines 7–​28 of Carnalitas. The triplum text
has been topped and tailed, and the correspondences reordered at the beginning and
end, as shown in Table 6.1. The first six lines of the Carnalitas text replace the motet’s
opening six lines, name Fauvel, and associate with him the predominant vices of car-
nality and luxuria. The next twenty-​two lines in Carnalitas have preposition changes
which enhance the presentness of Fauvel’s courtier vices there listed.3 The motet
triplum’s last eight lines are replaced by eight new lines referring to the future marriage
of Fauvel (named) and Vain Glory, and warning Fortune of trouble ahead. Then follow
lines 3–​6 moved from the opening of the triplum, and then by three more new lines.4
The purpose of the prose adaptation was to fauvelise the text, to associate the vices spe-
cifically with the court of Fauvel, and to make it appropriate to its planned location in
the roman by placing his marital flourishing still in the future. The text of the prose care-
fully takes account of the fact that the marriage is in the future (‘harbinger’), whereas in
the motet Fauvel is already flourishing with Vain Glory: Floret cum Vana Gloria.
All four Marigny motets are laments or complaints about the events they report, and
all forecast a disastrous fall, in this case a ‘gravis precipitacio’. This motet does not actu-
ally name Fauvel, though it is clearly he; and it incidentally plays into the letter emphasis
of ‘F’, as for Fauvel and Fortuna. Sanders treated Floret/​Florens as primarily a political
text dating from when Philip IV was still alive (as he, the blind lion, is in Garrit gallus),
thus no later than 1314. He elucidated the motetus text as a thinly veiled attack on the
unnamed Marigny in the guise of Haman, who was hanged on the gallows prepared for
Mordecai, identified by Sanders as standing for Charles de Valois.5 But this is still in the
future in the historical dimension of the Floret/​Florens text. Its references to Haman and
Mordecai (from the Book of Esther) anticipate the explicit Fauvel–​Haman alignment in

2 Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel, 74–​77. Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 350–​51, but he added the identification of

the Ca1328 source of the motet and the tenor label Neuma.
3 Texts and translations are printed in Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’: the motetus on

p. 32, triplum pp. 42–​43, musical editions of the motet pp. 37–​42, and the end of Carnalitas on p. 45 from
breve 118, from which point it differs from the motet. Comparative texts and Howlett’s translations of the
triplum Floret and the prose Carnalitas are given in Clark, ‘The Flowering’, at 183–​86.
4 This expansion of seven lines adds about 40 breves of music. Floret is 153 breves long, Carnalitas 191

breves; the music differs from B118 to the end. There is an interesting copying miscalculation: exactly the
right number of staves was provided, but there is a blank staff at the foot of f. 12, which necessitated the inser-
tion of an extra staff at the foot of f. 12v, perhaps because the text scribe turned the page too soon.
5 Nicolaus de Lyra (c. 1270–​1349) had become professor of theology at the University of Paris in 1308. For

him Haman and Mordecai were the prototypes of the evil and the just courtier. Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of
Philippe de Vitry’, 33–​34.
 134 Fauvel, and Vitry

Table 6.1 Textual correspondences between the prose Carnalitas and the motet triplum Floret

Beginning and end of Prose, Fauvel, f. 12r–​v Motet triplum, with

the prose corresponding line
(translation David Howlett) numbers in the prose

Carnality, lechery rule Carnalitas, Luxuria Floret cum vana gloria. =​29
in Fauvel’s palace, in Favelli palacio novitatum presumpcio =​41
and inconstancy; presunt et Inconstancia ypocrisis iactancia. =​37, 40
with them, worldly deceit, cum hiis mundana Fictio, discordia contencio. =​40, 37
blindness, horror. Idleness, Cecitas, Horror, Octia, 5 ac inobediencia =​38
drunkenness, passion; Ebriositas, Passio. pertinencie captio =​39
(see Floret triplum translation for lines 7–​28)
post procedit Invidia 7 procedit ex invidia
in prosperis, Afflictio, in prosperis afflictio
Detractio et Odia detractio et odia
nocensque Susurracio, 10 nocensque susurratio
de proximi Iniuria de proximi iniuria
iocunda Exultacio. iocunda exultacio
Ira hinc, Contumelia ex ira contumelia
exit et Indignacio, exit et indignacio
Clamor, Rixe, Blasphemia, 15 clamor rixe blasphemia
mentis urget Inflacio. mentis viget inflacio
Non longe sunt Accidia, profluit et accidia
falax mentis Vagacio, foras mentis vagacio
Malicia, Pigricia, malicia pigricia
Rancor et Desperacio. 20 rancor et desperacio
Assistit Avaricia, manat ex avaricia
Fallacio, Prodicio, fallacia prodicio
Inequitas, Pariuria, iniquitas periuria
Fraus, cordis Oduracio. fraus cordis obduracio
Post gula Immundicia. 25 ex gula inmundicia
Sensus habet in gremio. sensus hebes in genio
Scurrilitas, Leticia scurrilitas leticia
vana cum Multiloquio. 28 vana cum multiloquio
Finally, Vain Glory in fine Vana Gloria sequitur ex luxuria. =​1
by a harbinger vision of Fortune visu Fortune previo. 30 huius mundi affectio =​4
is joined in matrimony iungitur matrimonio cecitas inconstancia =​5, 3
with Fauvel, to whom let his cum Fauvello cui quod ac inconsideratio
name be a warning. nuncia horror futura gloria =​5
A commission is given vox sit, datur commissio gravis precipitacio =​43
on the depravity of the coming de adventus nequicia    (34) 35 in deum perit odia =​?9, ?5
of Antichrist. Woe to the Antichristi. Ve nuncio! nostre carnis dilectio. =​?1
messenger. Hypocrisy, daughter Vane Glorie filia
of Vain Glory, contention Ypocrisis; Contencio,
and disobedience, hac Inobediencia,
the seizing of property, Pertinacie Capcio,
boastfulness, discord, Iactancia, Discordia, 40
the enjoyment of vanities Vanitatum Presumpcio
lead the bride through Sponsam ducunt per devia.
devious ways.
May they fall from a great height. cadant in precipicio!
 Floret/Florens: Intended for Fauvel? 135

Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna, where Haman’s hanging is far in the past, Fauvel–​Marigny’s
imminent, on the gallows whose preparation is announced in the triplum text of
Tribum (line 8).6 Sanders noted the Haman connection with Aman, but in missing the
double meanings did not yet realise that not only the explicitly fauvelised adaptation
Carnalitas in Paris146, but also the motet, relate as closely to Fauvel as they do to ex-
ternal historical events. Fauvel is not named in the triplum (Floret), but he is present in
the first two lines by already ‘flourishing with’ (marrying) Vain Glory and all the vices.
Recognition of the dual function of all four Marigny motet texts raises the question
whether Floret/​Florens was originally intended to have a place in the double narrative of
the interpolated Fauvel: it is so closely related to both narratives that it was surely orig-
inally planned to carry this double function in Fauvel. The motet differs from the prose
(where the marriage is in the future) in that it follows the marriage and would have been
appropriately placed at the very end of the Fauvel narrative, near where Garrit gallus is
now, after the ‘flourishing’ with Vain Glory with which the triplum begins has produced
the ‘Fauveaux nouveaux’ (a lieto fine, however sardonically reported), and at the be-
ginning of the backwards Marigny sub-​narrative that will culminate in the hanging of
Haman in Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna, together with all the other threads that are drawn
together in that motet.
If Floret/​Florens was indeed planned for this position, why was it not included? It has
been pointed out (Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 6b) that the blank verso after
the envoi, f. 45v, is ruled in two columns as if for another motet comparable to Garrit
gallus/​In nova. Folio 45r was likewise originally ruled with a central margin that would
have accommodated a two-​column motet, as well as having superimposed the preva-
lent three-​column ruling that was used for the envoi. Could Floret/​Florens have been
intended for one of these places? Could it have followed Garrit gallus, i.e. preceded it
in the backwards cycle of historical motets? There is already an alliterating alphabet-
ical backwards sequence starting with the present explicit on f. 45, ‘Ferrant fina . . .’ ,
Garrit gallus/​In nova/​Neuma (on the pitch f: the initial letters of Fauvel and Fortuna),
and [H]Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me, perhaps intended to reinforce the order of
the historical narrative (F G H). Such a placing of Floret/​Florens (on the same neuma)
would have contributed to that sequence. (Tribum/​Quoniam and In nova fert lie outside
this alphabetical pattern.) Alphabetical order up to the letter G is given particular prom-
inence in Paris146. It is the ordering principle for the songs of Jehannot de Lescurel,
which finish at G, rounded off by two final pieces that are different generically from
their predecessors (dits entés rather than rondeaux or ballades), perhaps indicating that
the cut-​off at G was not accidental. Another ‘F/​F’ motet of similar date (late 1310s or
early 1320s) has recently been reconstructed by Cristina Alís Raurich: Flos vernalis/​Fiat
intencio. The subject is Marian, and there is no reason to connect it to Fauvel, though the
floral beginning in both cases (Floret/​Florens), and the ‘F’ alliteration are suggestive.7

6 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 32 expands this idea; see also Bent, ‘Marigny’ (Ch. 3

above).
7 Alís Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’ (forthcoming); first presented at a seminar in All Souls College,

4.3.2021. Flos vernalis/​Fiat intencio has been reconstructed from three fragmentary sources, is listed in Trém,
and has long been known only from its intabulation in Robertsbridge in company with two Fauvel motets,
Firmissime/​Adesto and Tribum/​Quoniam.
136 Fauvel and Vitry

Chronologically, for both forwards and backwards narratives, Floret would have
had to come either before or after Garrit gallus/​In nova, probably after, given that
f. 45r may have been ruled to accommodate another motet; to have placed it after
Garrit gallus, however, would have diluted the strong beginning-​at-​the-​end now pro-
vided by In nova fert. But there is another possibility: could Floret/​Florens originally
have been intended to be placed where Garrit gallus/​In nova now is? In Garrit gallus/​
In nova the political allegory is more developed, and the Fauvel narrative recedes be-
hind the fox of antecedent beast-​fable romans as well as yielding place to a sharper
apocalyptic message. The two motets are on the same tenor, surely not a coincidence,
a neuma that is liturgically neutral, both in perfect modus, imperfect tempus.8 There
is also a link with Tribum: the Floret tenor likewise has two color statements without
reduction, each bipartite with a different ending; the first three units of its talea
dsdß share their rhythm with Tribum’s short talea s a s ßß
. Garrit gallus/​In nova
is the stronger piece with respect to both text and music, infinitely rich and closely
interconnected with Tribum/​Quoniam and Aman/​Heu. Floret offers an upbeat end
to Fauvel’s story, celebrating his union with Vaine Gloire; was it decided to replace
that happy ending with the darker and cleverer Garrit gallus/​In nova that more
strongly initiates the reverse motion of the Marigny story and the overriding apoc-
alyptic foreboding? Once it had been decided to exclude the motet, its triplum could
then be cannibalised for the prose on the vices, Carnalitas, luxuria, and the motet
itself discarded, at least for purposes of this manuscript. If this is what happened,
it has considerable implications for the planning of the interpolated Fauvel. Floret
would have been not only earlier than Garrit gallus, but earlier than all three of the
Marigny motets; even so, I cannot believe it is by the same composer.9 It is musically
and textually much less tightly linked to them than they to each other. It is a vig-
orous piece, dominated by repeated notes for text declamation and melodic leaps of
fourths, but I must confess to finding it less interesting and less sophisticated, lacking
similar musical and textual citational play.10 It lacks the Ovidian ingredient and clas-
sical quotations which, after their roles in the double narratives of Fauvel and current
events, are among the strong factors binding the trio of motets as presented, and its
simple catalogue of vices falls short of the tone and learnedness of the other Fauvel–​
Marigny motets.11 We may therefore have here a precious relic from the cutting-​room
floor in the process of compiling Fauvel. Even if Sanders’s chronology of the Marigny
motets no longer applies, and if the more palpably structured Garrit gallus was indeed

8 The three tenors are set out comparatively by Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’.
9 Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson finds ‘its counterpoint . . . far more crude with ugly upper-​voice clashes, mo-
notonous decorations of lengthy sonorities (often by leaping up and down over a fourth, the last resort of a
composer lacking voice-​leading skills) and inconsequential progressions’. Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence
of Ars nova’, 302.
10 Immediately after an illuminating explanation of the counterpoint at the beginning of Se grace/​Cum

venerint (see Ch. 29 below), Johannes Boens Musica, 68, cites this motet for the much less challenging seconds
with the tenor, which can be explained as passing notes: ‘Sic et secunda admittitur in motheto Florens vigor
super verbo Mardocheo et secunda et quarta in tenore motheti Rex quem metrorum’ (‘Likewise explained is
the second admitted in the motet Florens vigor on the word “Mardocheo” [bb. 94–​100], and the second and
fourth in the tenor of the motet Rex quem metrorum’). The motet is transcribed in Sanders, ‘The Early Motets
of Philippe de Vitry’.
11 Bent, ‘Tribum’, and Bent, ‘Marigny’, incorporated above. Sanders observes that ‘If “Haman” is Marigny,

“Mordecai” can only be Charles de Valois’ (‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 32). He also gives the con-
text for Floret from the book of Esther.
 Floret/Florens: Intended for Fauvel? 137

(as I now suggest) a late and better replacement for Floret/​Florens, it could still be the
case that Garrit gallus was composed after Aman. Their musical and textual interre-
latedness notwithstanding, the three (or four) Marigny motets are different from each
other, with deliberately cultivated distinctiveness that cannot be plotted on a chro-
nology of style evolution.
 7
Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry

The challenge to the setting of terminal composition dates for ‘historical’ motets
also has implications for the completion of the interpolated Fauvel itself, and for the
wheels within wheels of its own assembly. Consequent upon the removal of firm ter-
minal dates for the Marigny motets, the whole compilation may not be bound by a
terminus ante quem as early as c. 1317, as had been proposed; there may have been
more time for the careful planning, adaptation of pieces, editing, and replacement
to which the possible substitution of Garrit gallus/​In nova for Floret/​Florens might
attest, as suggested in Chapter 6, and with it the intimately linked trio of Marigny
motets now in Paris146 and the double narrative to which they contribute.
Evidence of adaptations and fauvelisations in Paris146 from earlier motets and
conducti is well documented. More scattered, and inviting further interpretation, is
the evidence from later sources of discards and adaptations. Since Ernest Sanders,
‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, the preparation of two early manuscripts
that contain concordances to Fauvel motets, Paris571 and Br19606, both originally
thought to be earlier than or contemporary with Paris146, have been moved later
by a decade or more, Paris571 to 1326 and Br19606 to 1335, though in both cases
their repertories are demonstrably older. The contents of Paris571 include Raoul le
Petit’s beautifully illustrated Dit de Fauvain, a she-​ass counterpart of Fauvel.1
Just preceding Fauvain in Paris571 are two Fauvel motets once thought to have
preceded their inclusion in Paris146: Servant regem/​O Philippe (Ludowice)/​Rex
regum (F 16, p.mus. 33) also listed in Trém; Detractor/​Qui secuntur/​Verbum iniquum
(F 9, p.mus. 12).
The motetus of Servant regem/​O Philippe is presented in the left-​hand column in
Paris571, as if it were the triplum, with a text beginning not O Philippe but Ludowice.2
This was assumed to refer to Louis X (1314–​16), and therefore an earlier version of a
motet that was recycled for his younger brother, Philip V. Sanders hence dated Paris571
1315–​16,3 to accommodate the presumed earlier form of the motet, just before its adap-
tation for Paris146. In other words, it was claimed that both royal motets in Fauvel were
originally written for Louis X.
But Andrew Wathey has shown that Paris571 was written and illuminated in 1326,
at least partly in England, as a presentation book celebrating the marriage contract of
Prince Edward of England (later Edward III) and Philippa of Hainaut, organised by
Edward’s mother, Queen Isabella, daughter of Philip IV, as the arms on the opening
miniature on f. 6 establish. Besides Fauvain, the volume includes Brunetto Latini’s Livre

1 Taylor, ‘Le Roman de Fauvain’.

2 Paris571, f. 144. A three-​staff indentation was left for initial ‘L’; this was not provided, but ‘ludovice’ is
written (small) in the margin. Servant regem/​O Philippe was attributed to Vitry by Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’,
and more recently affirmed by Robertson, ‘A Musical Lesson’, 259.
3 Citing RISM B IV 2, 173.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0008
140 Fauvel and Vitry

du Trésor, a rule for princes, a coronation rite and other moralising works on kingship
in the ‘Mirror of Princes’ tradition. Isabella spent much of 1325 in Paris on diplomatic
missions, including arranging the marriage. Wathey argues that, in view of this dating,
O Philippe has been adapted for Louis IX, St Louis, the common ancestor of Edward
and Philippa, and a saintly model for them, invoked more than once as the forebear of
the recent kings. Wathey has removed any grounds for regarding O Philippe as a hastily
updated contrafact of a motet for Louis X. The companion royal motet that precedes it
in Paris146 and in historical time, though not necessarily in order of composition, was
indeed written for Louis X (Se cuers ioans/​Rex beatus/​Ave, F 15, p.mus. 32). O Philippe
was written for Philip V and no one else, no earlier than mid-​November 1316 or early
1317, the latest such terminus in Fauvel. Indeed, the triplum Servant regem is a stern
reminder of kingly duty, and the tenor Rex regum is also appropriate to the purpose of
the book. The other Fauvel motet in Paris571, Detractor/Qui secuntur (f. 4, F 9, p.mus
12) also elaborates the theme of wise kingship, and the triplum and motetus parts are
similarly reversed on the page. Prince Edward performed a homage in September 1325,
attested by royal notaries of whom the most senior was none other than Gervais du Bus,
one of the authors of Fauvel. Philippe de Vitry was also in the royal chancery at this
time; this suggests the opportunity for a direct line of transmission to England for these
two French motets from Paris146 that nicely complemented the aims of the presenta-
tion book.4
Fully six of the ten pieces in Br19606 (see Table 7.1) are in Paris146 in some
form, two heavily adapted. All of them have the notation updated with minim stems,
confirming (along with other later sources) the default readings of the stemless or
downstemmed semibreves in Paris146. They form the core repertory of the rotulus,
and five of them are also known from other sources, as shown in Table 7.1. Three are
copied consecutively on the recto (face) and three on the verso (dorse). The other
four pieces are the (conventional and old-​fashioned) opening conductus Deus in
adiutorium, the notational and stylistic outlier Mater formosa/​Gaude virgo at the
bottom of the recto,5 and the two pieces at the bottom of the verso, the incomplete
O/​Nostris lumen tenebris and the later partial addition of Vitry’s Impudenter circumivi/​
Virtutibus. Sanders dated Br19606 c. 1320 with repertory going back to 1300. Even if
that now seems too early, Karl Kügle’s dating to c. 1335 on the strength of its coat of
arms is surprisingly late, and surely reflects either a very conservative patron or a late
copy of earlier material. Without Kügle’s evidence, I would have placed its repertory
and notational stage in the 1320s. I will now consider Br19606’s status as a repository
for versions of the Fauvel material.
The other motet in Br19606 besides Floret/​Florens that was subjected to even
more radical adaptation, and immediately follows it, is Trahunt in precipitia/​An diex/​

4 Wathey, ‘The Marriage’, especially 14–​18. Brown, ‘Rex ioians’, 62, still accepted that the motet was written

for Louis X and adapted for Philip. Dillon, ‘The Profile of Philip V’, 219, acknowledged Wathey’s new dating,
but hesitated to accept its implications. Robertson, ‘A Musical Lesson’, also leaves the question open. See
Taylor, ‘Le Roman de Fauvain’ for further historical speculation. See below for two further English sources of
Fauvel motets, Robertsbridge and YorkN3.
5 See Kügle, ‘Two Abbots and a Rotulus’, and Koblenz701. Discussed by Desmond, ‘ “One is the loneliest” ’,

as an example of a piece that was updated from Fauvel notation. Koblenz701 had descending and ascending
stems and dots, some of which were erased, strongly suggesting that we are witnessing a hesitant process of
conversion.
 Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry 141

Table 7.1 Contents of Br19606

Compositions in Paris146 are in boldface (Floret in adapted form).

Composition Other sources of

Paris146 pieces

recto
Deus in adiutorium
Super cathedram/​Presidentes in thronis/​Ruina Ca165, Troyes1949,
Ox271*
Tribum que non abhorruit/​Quoniam secta latronum/​Merito Stras, Robertsbridge
[hec patimur] (and two other later
adaptations)
Firmissime fidem teneamus/​Adesto sancta Trinitas/​Alleluia Koblenz701 and
Robertsbridge
Mater formosa, tu nobilis/​Gaude virgo mater Christi/​[Tenor]

verso
Floret cum vana gloria/​Florens vigor ulciscendo/​[Neuma quinti toni] Ca1328
Trahunt in precipitia/​An diex/​[Displicebat ei]
Se cuers joians/​Rex beatus, confessor domini/​[Ave] McV, Trém
O/​Nostris lumen tenebris dat [motetus only]
Impudenter circumivi solum/​Virtutibus laudabilis/​Alma redemptoris
mater [solus tenor II and contratenor only]

Displicebat, presumably its original form. It appears as a motet quite early in Paris146
with a new added quadruplum, Quasi non ministerium, and with the French-​texted
motetus replaced by the Latin Ve qui gregi (the motet occupies the whole of f. 6v, F
11, p.mus. 21).6 The monophonic composition on f. 26v intersperses the music and
text of the dismembered French motetus Han Diex! ou pourai je trouver with fur-
ther text (without music) starting Han Diex! de tout le monde sire. Ardis Butterfield
has outlined the complex network of this formally anomalous piece that leaves its
mark all over Fauvel.7 She describes a central complex including ‘two pieces of seem-
ingly inscrutable generic complexity’, to which she applies the term ‘semi-​lyric’. They
frame a central ballade (Se j’onques a mon vivant, p.mus. 57, f. 26). The first, Amour
dont tele est la puissance, is placed in Fauvel’s mouth as he presents it to Fortune. It is
described in the classified table of contents as a dit; Butterfield calls it a dit à refrains.
The refrains have musical notation but the intervening ‘narrative’ sections do not.
The second semi-​lyric piece is quite different. It consists of the text and music of the
fourteen-​line French motetus of Trahunt in precipicia/​An diex dismembered into

6 The tenor, Displicebat, has been identified as the verse of a responsory for St Augustine beginning Volebat

enim (Clark, ‘The Flowering’, 175 n. 2 and Clark, ‘New Tenor Sources’, 108–​16). There may be some play on let-
ters here: Quasi and Trahunt alliterate with what would be their part-​names quadruplum and triplum, as well
as with Quoniam and Tribum. The words ‘gravis precipitacio’, Floret, line 34, also occur in the triplum Trahunt
in precipicia.
7 Butterfield, ‘The Refrain’, 132, 146–​48 reports ‘a pre-​existent 14-​line motetus part, An diex on [ou?] pora

ge trover found without music on the guard leaf of BN lat.7682’. See also Brown, ‘Rex ioians’, 63.
142 Fauvel and Vitry

consecutive fragments (with just the music of the second line omitted), each of which
is used as a ‘refrain’ heading a six-​line strophe that amplifies, purely textually, each so-​
called refrain. The Latin version of the melody in Paris146 is more ornamented than
the original French-​texted one in Br19606, but it is this more ornamented version
whose original French text is restored for its generic conversion, signalling a com-
plex relationship both with Br19606 and the Paris146 adaptation. Six of the lines,
which come to be treated as refrains, are identical with part of the fourth strophe of
the Dit d’Amour by Nevelon d’Amiens.8 There is further remarkable recycling within
Paris146: one of these newly created refrain lines is in turn quoted in Jehannot de
Lescurel’s dit enté Gracieus temps est (on this alphabetical series ending at G, see
Ch. 6), just as the first line of this piece and the Br19606 motetus, Han Diex! ou pourai
je trouver, is the first line (words and music) in the enté structure of a sotte chanson
later in the Fauvel manuscript on f. 34v. This creates a network of verbal and musical
recapitulation at three positions within Fauvel, and beyond it in the Lescurel section
of Paris146. In that context, it may not be too far-​fetched to connect the interpolated
Han Diex! de tout le monde sire with Ha, sire Dieux! (Strubel v. 1254), the exclamation
that seems to announce an absent motet for Philip IV on f. 10v, preceding the two
‘royal’ motets for his sons Louis X and Philip V. The Latin substitution of this motetus
suits the purposes of a royal admonitio rather well. Was it perhaps to a version of this
motet that the rubric refers? In Br19606 it immediately precedes the Louis X motet
Se cuers ioans/​Rex beatus/​Ave, which it would likewise have preceded at this point
in the interpolated Fauvel had it been part of an admonitio intended for Philip IV
while he was still alive.9 The tenses at the end of Book I are managed with delibera-
tion: Philip IV, the debonair lion, reigned jadis; then Philip V is referred to as reigning
now (ores). The tenses are self-​consciously mirrored by their reversal at the end of
Book II: Philip IV, the lion, now blind, reigns (monarchisat) in Garrit gallus/​In nova;
he reigned (regnaverat) in Tribum/​Quoniam. The regal blind lion at the end of Book
II, no longer debonair, mirrors the blind goddess Fortuna, portrayed with blindfold
only at the beginning of Book I. The fact that Fortuna holds a mirror in some images
(ff. 12, 12v) is a further hint of reversal.
Other later copies of Fauvel or Fauvel-​related motets:

Servant/O Philippe Paris571 (Ludowice), Trém

Detractor/​Qui secuntur/​Verbum Paris571
iniquum
Tribum/​Quoniam Br19606, Robertsbridge, Stras and two later
adaptations, Rostock and Mu2977510

8 Butterfield, ‘The Refrain’; see also Plumley, Grafted Song, 112.

9 It could have been placed on f. 6v for reasons of space (it would have taken up too much space in the tight
composition of ff. 10–​11); this is also a good place for it, because it follows a complaint about the king’s false
counsellors, and we know that king to be Philip IV (the Fair). The upper-​voice texts draw heavily on the con-
ductus repertory. See Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel, pp. li–​lxvi. Together with a series of musical interpolations,
the motet follows line L 668, S 666 (close to or at the number of the beast, 666). Fauvel allots the alms. The king
is complicit in taxing the church, which is riven with simony (in the text following the motet) and other vices.
10 The text only was preserved in Lübeck, Stadtbibliothek, MS 152 (destroyed in 1945). See Wathey, ‘The

Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 123.

 Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry 143

Super cathedram/​Presidentes Br19606, Ca165, Ox271*, Troyes1949

Firmissime/​Adesto Br19606, Robertsbridge, Koblenz701,
Darmstadt521 (tr text)
Floret/​Florens (in Fauvel only as the Br19606, Ca165
prose Carnalitas)
Trahunt in precipitia/​An diex/​ Br19606
Displicebat
Se cuers/​Rex beatus Br19606, McV, Trém
Garrit gallus/​In nova fert Pic
Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores Koblenz701
Scariotis/​Jure Trém
Inter amenitatis/​O livor/​Revertenti Trém, YorkN3, Tr87

Super cathedram/​Presidentes/​Ruina with five witnesses is one of the most widely

circulated of the Fauvel motets; exceptionally, all its later sources retain unstemmed
semibreves with dots. Only Tribum has more sources (six, including later
arrangements).11
The two leaves of the considerably later Ca165 clearly belong together, and are con-
sistent with each other and with Ca1328. F. 1, however, has unstemmed semibreves on
both sides, the only leaf in the related Cambrai complex without stems; f. 2 has stemmed
minims. Surprisingly, at the evidently later date, it presents the whole motet with
semibreves separated by dots, presumably following an exemplar without updating the
notation.12 The triplum text of Super/​Presidentes mentions Hercules. Both of Vitry’s
seals, dating from the late 1340s, show the figures of Hercules and the lion.13 Together
with its wide circulation and vitriolic texts, the presence of Hercules in Super/​Presidentes
may further support Vitry’s authorship of this motet. I increasingly favour the view that
many of the motets in Fauvel generally judged ‘less advanced’, but which already de-
ploy imperfect tempus, and especially those with vituperative texts, are likely to be early
works of Vitry, as he found his way to the ‘more advanced’ motets generally accepted as
his. Fauvel in any case documents a transition from the Mo repertory to what we know
as the ars nova. Ars nova innovations, foremost of which is imperfect time, are well es-
tablished in Fauvel long before a further wave of innovation made it necessary to notate
their rhythms with stems. Recent controversies about the term fall away if we can accept
that there were multiple waves of newness; and that some writers are using the term ars
nova to indicate the musical concepts and rhythms, as I continue to do, while others
define it as a stage of notational evolution, increased precision, and systematisation

11 Ox271* contains fragments of Super cathedram, notated in grouped semibreves with dots and with no

stems, no plicas. Folios numbered 6v–​1 have the beginning of the motetus (with a gap in between); f. 3v sits
below f. 6v with the end of the motetus (‘-​uli caret basis’), tenor, and the end of the triplum (‘delictum atr’ . . . ’
and ‘sanius’), presumably overflowing onto this original recto from the preceding verso.
12 The motet is discussed by Desmond, ‘Notations’, 112–​19, who mentions the motetus fragment in Ox271*

(on ff. 6v–​1), but misses the continuation and the triplum fragment on f. 3v.
13 See above, Ch. 4 n. 47, and Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, 145. Also leo in vulpem occurs in Presum preces

(p.mus. 18), perhaps anticipating these beasts in Tribum and Garrit. Hercules is also mentioned in stanza 2
of Mundus a mundicia, the polemical conductus by Philip the Chancellor of which stanza 1 was adapted for
Fauvel (p.mus.2). See Welker, ‘Polyphonic Reworkings’.
144 Fauvel and Vitry

that lagged behind the musical phenomena.14 Troyes1949 has only the tenor, Ruina,
and the final line of the triplum text written across the full page width. Presumably the
upper parts started in two columns, and the triplum reverted to full width after the end
of the shorter motetus. Only unstemmed semibreves are used throughout this frag-
ment, so we can assume that the missing upper parts of Super/​Presidentes were likewise
unstemmed.15
Given the wide range of mostly fragmentary sources preserving versions of Fauvel
motets, it is surprising that none is in Ivrea. However, three more Fauvel motets be-
sides Servant regem/​O Philippe/​Rex regum (Philippe V)16 were cited by their motetus
parts in the index to Trém: Scariotis/​Jure (F 5, p.mus 5), and, as a later addition, Se cuers
ioans/​Rex beatus/​Ave (for Louis X). Trém thus contained both the ‘royal’ motets. Trém
also lists O livor, the motetus of Inter amenitatis/​O livor/​Revertenti, a three-​part motet
preserved in the much later Battre fascicle of Tr87, probably from the 1430s (ff. 231v–​
232), as reported by Emilie Dahnk. Paris146 gives only the two outer parts without
that motetus (f. 21v, F 22, p.mus. 50), reduced from what must have been the three-​part
original. It is very surprising to find this motet more than a century later, in a version
very close to Paris146, but of course by then and long since with explicit minims.
Thus the motetus does not survive until more than a century after Fauvel, but is docu­
mented in Trém. The triplum alone appears on a musically isolated page in YorkN3
(f. 10v), in an early fourteenth-​century English hand and notation with groups of up to
four stemless semibreves separated by breves or dots; the possibility of English origin
for the motet has been suggested.17 The early date of this copy, together with the
English associations of Paris571, for which contact with Vitry could have been a con-
duit for those motets, points at least to an early circulation in England of some of the
Fauvel material, as do the two later keyboard arrangements in Robertsbridge.18

Marigny, Floret, ‘Quotations’, and Possible Attributions to Vitry

All preserved anonymously, three tightly linked motets have floated in and out of the
unstable canon of works by Philippe de Vitry (1291–​1361), with Aman considered the
most doubtful. Vitry was a considerable, even towering, intellectual, poet and com-
poser, protégé of Louis of Bourbon, French royal secretary, papal familiar of Clement
VI, close friend of Petrarch, and bishop of Meaux.19 Of the Fauvel motets, Heinrich

14 See especially Desmond, Music and the moderni, and Bent, ‘Artes Novae’.
15 Troyes1949 was discovered by Dominique Gatté. See Catalunya, ‘Nuns, Polyphony’, which gives
photomontages of the still pasted-​down sides, revealing capital letters and a few notes. I wondered if the ‘D’
tenor in the photomontage of fragment b could be the Displicebat tenor of (Quasi) Trahunt/​Ve/​Displicebat.
What can be discerned of the tenor has some similarities of shape and range. It is to be hoped that the paste-
down can be lifted.
16 As Trém cites motets by motetus, this motet is a likelier identification than the O Philippe triplum which

opens Ivrea.
17 Bent, Hart and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus, 32 n. 27. See also Colton, ‘Making Sense of Omnis/​Habenti’,

224 n. 15.
18 It is striking that the Robertsbridge arrangements of Tribum/​Quoniam and Firmissime/​Adesto are

copied on successive folios in Paris146 and are directly adjacent in Br19606. For the similarly early motet
Flos/​Fiat, also intabulated in Robertsbridge, see Ch. 6 n. 7.
19 For Philippe de Vitry, see NG2 (and Grove online), s.v. Vitry, by Bent and Wathey. Errors in the print

edition of the NG2 worklist have now been corrected online and include the following: Cum statua/​Hugo and
 Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry 145

Besseler attributed Tribum/​Quoniam, Firmissime/​Adesto and Garrit gallus/​In nova

(but not Aman) to Vitry, and as the most obviously advanced motets in Fauvel, these
attributions have won wide if not universal acceptance. Ph. Aug. Becker stated that
Garrit and Tribum ‘are said to be by Philippe de Vitry, and [Aman] might also be’.20
Leo Schrade correctly affirmed the three motets as inseparably linked by their histor-
ical order, though wrongly equating that with their dates of composition. He thought
they must be by the same composer, and endorsed Vitry’s authorship of Aman.21 If
Tribum and Garrit are by Vitry, so must Aman be; I agree. Others including Daniel
Leech-​Wilkinson have rejected Aman, which seemed to lack the indirect testimony that
attributes Garrit gallus and Tribum to him with more confidence; Edward Roesner even
rejected Garrit gallus.22
Many of the arguments put forward by Sanders against Vitry’s authorship of Aman
are challenged by the case made here with respect to the chronology, function and con-
ceptual unity of the three motets in Fauvel as well as their historical coding, and by new
arguments in favour of the musical and textual quality of Aman. As set out in Chapter 3,
Schrade, Sanders, Roesner and Leech-​Wilkinson all assumed the historical dates to be
dates of composition, and this conditioned their inferences about composer identity
and stylistic chronology. All except Schrade leave Aman aside. Sanders adopted and
extended Schrade’s motet datings based on a literal reading of the historical events,
leading him to reject Aman on grounds that, as a historically ‘later’ composition than
Garrit and Tribum, it was less advanced, arguing that Vitry would not have composed a
less coherent or more conservative piece (as he judged it by the rather narrow criteria he
sets out) after ‘as advanced a piece as Garrit gallus’.23
Sanders then linked Floret/​Florens to the Marigny group, though because he
only recognised their historical associations but not their central role in the Fauvel
programme, he drew different conclusions from those put forward above. In favour of
Vitry’s authorship, he invoked the neutral Neuma quinti toni tenor that underpins three
motets: Vitry’s Douce playsance/​Garison (not in Fauvel), Garrit gallus/​In nova (widely
accepted as a work by Vitry), and Floret/​Florens.24 Use of a version of the same tenor
is arguably an imitable feature, given the number of cantus firmi common to different
composers; Sanders admits this is insufficient in itself. The choice of the same tenor
for Floret and Garrit may be significant for a composition designed for Fauvel, for the

Vos/​Gratissima are not named in the ars nova tradition; Douce/​Garison and Firmissime/​Adesto are listed in
Ars nova.

20 Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 203; Becker, ‘Fauvel’, 36–​37.

21 ‘But if we assume Philippe to be the composer of one of the works in the group, the inseparable associ-
ation of the three motets as well as their close stylistic affinity make the same authorship for all three manda-
tory’, and ‘safely establishes the dates’ (Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 335–​39).
22 Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., 39–​42.
23 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 36. Sanders continues: ‘their attribution to [Vitry]

would force us to postulate a curious inconsistency in the composer’s development: . . . written after as ad-
vanced a piece as Garrit gallus, lack a coherent phrase structure and generally exhibit a conservative facture
in some ways reminiscent of the time of Petrus de Cruce’. This argument has many problems. Apart from
the fallacious assumption of a developmental crescendo, Sanders’s criteria for structural coherence are too
narrow for a repertory where ingenuity takes many varied forms. They have largely to do with regular perio-
dicity (‘modular numbers’) and are set out in Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, and in Sanders,
‘The Medieval Motet’.
24 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 35.
146 Fauvel and Vitry

reasons given in Chapter 6, but is not a reliable indicator of authorship. He also pointed
out that Floret has the same clefs and opening sonority as Garrit gallus (likewise hardly
a confirmation of authorship), and claims (more convincingly) that the text’s original
character and tone are clear Vitriacan hallmarks, going on to argue that the melodic,
rhythmic and contrapuntal vocabulary falls within the style range of the larger group of
motets that have been attributed to Vitry.
Still following chronological criteria, Sanders says Floret would have been out of date
by the time Chaillou de Pesstain was making his edition in 1316, hence the recycling to
the purposes of Fauvel of a motet triplum, from an obsolete external political context,
as the prose Carnalitas, luxuria.25 While admitting that Floret is ‘less advanced in tech-
nique’ and ‘somewhat untidy’, because he evaluated it as an early work, he did not hold
it to the same criteria of numerical tidiness which led him to deny Vitry’s authorship to
the different artfulness of Aman/​Heu, which he assumed to be a couple of years later.
This chronological case for Vitry’s authorship of Floret but not of Aman is weakened if
the compositions, as suggested here, could all be later than the events. At this innovative
period in the early ars nova when nearly every motet explores a different challenge, and
there is no such thing as a standard template, the application of a single criterion can be
limiting.26
Although noting the Haman link with Floret, Sanders regarded Aman rather as
the creation of a lesser, anonymous musician, who ‘was apparently reminded by
Marigny’s hanging of the biblical imagery so originally used in Vitry’s early motet’
[Floret], ‘even though, admittedly, [Aman’s] melodic lines are somewhat reminis-
cent of the élan of Vitry’s style’.27 Perhaps Sanders realised that, in his enthusiasm to
claim Floret for Vitry, with his belief in the documentary datings, and with his criteria
of numerical tidiness, he was underestimating the originality of Aman novi; he cer-
tainly underestimated the textual richness and its interrelatedness with the other two
motets brought out above. Indeed, Floret and the more complex Aman share many
musical features, including rhythmic vocabulary, similar amounts of repeated-​note
sub-​breve declamation and striking use of sharps (especially pronounced in Aman),
not to mention textual bite. In the absence of attributed comparands, there is no com-
pelling stylistic reason why both Floret and Aman could not be by Vitry.28 Leaving

25 ‘The motetus poem can certainly, though not inevitably, be understood as reflecting the situation that

prevailed between Sept. and Nov. of 1314. In 1316, however, when Chaillou was making his edition of the
Roman de Fauvel, this text was no longer topical; nor is it in any way pertinent to the passage of the roman to
which he added the triplum. The latter, being an impassioned diatribe against an impressively comprehen-
sive catalogue of flourishing evils, suited the context well, and so, altering it somewhat, he incorporated it.’
Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 33. Neither Sanders nor Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, gives any
indication that they thought the political motets (the Marigny motets, and those listed in Ch. 3) had any con-
nection to the Fauvel story.
26 Sanders on modular numbers (‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 29): ‘The phrase structure of

Floret, utilizing the first nine multiples of the number 3, is still somewhat untidy, not unlike that of Firmissime/​
Adesto/​Alleluya.’ His number analysis of Floret is as follows (but changing his count in longs to breves, for a
total of 153):
[Triplum] (30B +​27B) +​(18B +​21B) +​(15B +​21B) +​9B +​12B
[Motetus] 24B+​(18B +​21B +​18B) +​12B +​(21B +​21B +​18B)
[Tenor] [2(6B +​6B +​27B)] +​[(6B +​6B +​27B) +​(6B +​6B +​24B)].
27 Ibid., 36.
28 Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 350. In the case of Aman, as Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’

put it, ‘throwing Becker’s caution to the winds’, 36. See also PMFC 1, Commentary.
 Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry 147

Sanders’s chronological argument aside, and adding the Fauvellian programme to the
historical one, if Floret is by Vitry, as he claims, so could Aman be; and if Aman is, as
I claim, so could Floret be. However, as stated above, I find Floret musically and tex-
tually less interesting than the three established Marigny motets, and certainly less
conceptually entwined with them; other Fauvel motets may have a stronger claim on
Vitry’s authorship than Floret.

Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores

Hitherto unique to Paris146, this motet was recently uncovered in Koblenz701 by

Karl Kügle, headed de prelatorum avaricia. It is complete, though the end of the tenor is
damaged. Some dots are curiously placed over the tenor, apparently to show alteration.
Others between some groups of semibreves, and the occasional downstem, betray its
transcription from a source with mainly stemless semibreves; the provision of minim
stems is inconsistent and unreliable, showing this to be a bungled attempt by an inexpe-
rienced notator to resolve the intended rhythms.29
Besides the three Fauvel motets named above, Firmissime/​Adesto, Tribum/​Quoniam
and Garrit/​In nova, Besseler first also counted Orbis/​Vos as a work of Vitry, the
earliest and most doubtful, but not Aman; he then backed off from this attribution
and affirmed the other three.30 Schrade claimed a close affinity of textual and musical
style (‘stylistic identity’) between Aman and Orbis/​Vos, which he thought was also by
Vitry, particularly noting the characteristically vituperative texts, rhythmic vocabulary
and declamation. If Aman is by Vitry, so might Orbis be. But both attributions have
been brushed aside, rejected by Sanders, Leech-​Wilkinson and Roesner. Schrade fur-
ther pointed out that the tripla of Aman and Orbis/​Vos share their opening rhythm and
pitches (with the differences that the g in Orbis is sharp, and Orbis is in perfect modus)
and also the first six tenor notes, transposed.31 What he did not point out is that since
Aman’s tenor is chant-​based, and that of Orbis/​Vos is unidentified, Aman may have
come first, which brings Besseler’s stylistic ordering into question. Moreover, as noted
above, the triplum of Aman (and hence of Orbis) is a diminished version of that chant
opening, another reason for placing Aman first. The text of Orbis/​Vos is vitriolic in the
way we have come to associate with Vitry. Moreover, there are clear links with the texts
of other Marigny motets, which further helps an attribution to Vitry. In addition to
other shared bestial imagery, line 7 of In nova fert is ‘mox lupinis dentibus armatus’; the
final couplet of Orbis is ‘Nec ut lupos armamini | horum armati dentibus’—​armed with
wolves’ teeth, again. The Orbis/​Vos tenor carries the biblical quotation ‘Fur non venit
nisi ut furetur, et mactet, et perdat’ (John 10: 10), but no melody for this non-​liturgical
text is known or likely. Each color contains three nearly identical periods. This serpen-
tine conjunct tenor within a narrow range is strongly reminiscent of the Fera pessima
tenor color of Machaut 9 (a bb a g/​a bb a g/​f g a g) (Ex. 9.10 below) and other tenors
there cited. (See Ex. 7.1.)

29 Kügle, ‘The Aesthetics of Fragments’.

30 Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 192.
31 Schrade, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 335–​39.
148 Fauvel and Vitry

Ex. 7.1 Tenor of Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores: three taleae, three color statements

We saw above that the choice of chant for Tribum related to Garrit gallus, and that
the opening of the triplum of Tribum was likewise a diminished version of the same
chant. Use of this strategy in both pairs of motets may further help to support a claim
of common authorship. The incorporation of chant tenor material into upper parts has
received little notice in this repertory, where it is in fact quite widespread. There are
famous fifteenth-​century examples, such as Dunstaple’s four-​part Veni sancte spiritus/
​Veni creator, which paraphrases the opening of the chant in the upper parts before
the tenor takes over at the point where the triplum leaves off, and earlier instances in
the early fourteenth-​century English voice-​exchange motets in Ox81.32 These earlier
instances are perhaps less obvious but still quite striking; they augment the arsenal of
craft which can be built up alongside narrower criteria.
Sanders rejected both Aman and Orbis. He objected that, if by Vitry, Orbis and Aman
would be the only such works preserved as unica in Paris146. This criterion is made
dangerous by the regular discovery of new sources; although it remains true of Aman,
it is no longer applies to Orbis, whose recent appearance in Koblenz701 would by
Sanders’s criteria elevate its eligibility.33 A high proportion of Fauvel motets that are
also preserved in later sources have at some point been tentatively attributed to Vitry;
their later circulation could possibly indicate the regard in which these works and their
author were held, though it would be rash to confirm their status on this basis. Most
attributable motets whose verbal texts are separately preserved in later manuscripts
are by Vitry. Orbis is also the only Fauvel motet cited in any of the ars nova treatises
(here, Vat307) besides the Vitriacan candidates Garrit and Firmissime. It also appears
to be the only motet to be cited in that complex of treatises by its triplum, Orbis, rather
than the presumed motetus, Vos, which, however, has a higher overall range and lies
predominantly above Orbis. The layout in both surviving manuscripts assigns triplum
status to Orbis, and it is clear that the parts have not been reversed. Orbis, laden with
biblical references, is much more active, and gallops largely syllabically through three
seven-​line octosyllabic stanzas against the single similar stanza in the slower-​moving
Vos, with its strong invective against sinful priests. The status of these voices may have
been ambiguous then, as now. The motetus voices of Garrit gallus and Floret also spend
significant time above the triplum, and in terms of voice order, Tribum innovates with
a central tenor above the motetus. Some of these reversals and voice-​crossings may ac-
cord with the reversal and inversion themes of Fauvel.34
On the strength of his study of motet texts, Leofranc Holford-​Strevens believes Vitry
to have been the author of all three Marigny texts in Paris146. Their often-​biting tone

32 A solis and Hostis Herodes quote in the first seven longs of their upper parts the openings, respectively,

of well-​known Christmas and Epiphany hymns (PMFC 16). Harrison in PMFC 15 sequesters their stylistic
sibling Salve clere speculum into a different (motet) classification on the strength of chant paraphrase (but only
from section 2) in its tenor. On the Hatton pieces, see now Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus.
33 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’, 36 and 31.
34 Voice-​crossing is also a major strategy in several Machaut motets, as shown in Ch. 9 for Motet 9 and else-

where, and has since been fruitfully pursued in Zayaruznaya, ‘She has a Wheel’, and Shaffer, ‘Finding Fortune’.
 Related Manuscripts, Related Motets; Vitry 149

and learned frame of reference is entirely consistent with the texts of later motets more
certainly attributed to him. Because of the intimate relationship of text and music,
I cannot believe that text and music are not by the same author, and therefore give
my vote to Vitry as the composer. If they reinforce the climax of Fauvel, it is not to be
excluded that other Fauvel motets that have from time to time been attributed to Vitry,
without general acceptance, but which already exploit the then-​novel imperfect tempus,
may be earlier works by him. The elaborate process of adaptation, both of earlier reper­
tory, and of pieces such as the two heavily reworked motets in Br19606, open his au-
thorship as a possibility. Born in 1291, he was already in his mid-​to late twenties when
Paris146 was compiled, so experiments with the imperfect tempus that is new to the ars
nova and copiously present in Paris146, but in no earlier source, could well have started
a few years earlier and included his earliest work, not yet considered as such by modern
scholars. If he was centrally involved in devising the musical programme for Fauvel,
could he have learned his craft partly by making those arrangements of older reper-
tory? What was he writing before he began his more radical innovations? I would place
a strong bet on his authorship of some of the other Fauvel motets which also innovate in
imperfect time, if not yet with modus changes and coloration. Some of the earlier motet
texts in Fauvel are learned and vituperative, in a style later confirmed in Vitry’s texts,
and for which the Fauvel project was a natural outlet. Schrade also noted similarities
between the triplum texts of Orbis and Garrit (p. 339). They share a level of invective
rhetoric that is characteristic of more securely attributed Vitry works.
Internal punning ‘signatures’ (including the Frenchmen/​cockerels, the galli of Garrit
gallus), and a pattern of musico-​textual cross-​references and allusions, link especially
Garrit and Tribum, but all three motets were carefully planned as a unit, with often ir-
regular verbal texts written ‘for’ music and conceived together with it, and Aman is re-
plete with allusions.35 All three motets incorporate one or more classical lines, and each
motet ends with a classical ‘quotation’ (which, as argued for Tribum, may be a building
block rather than a quotation). Possible authorial signatures include the gallus who
speaks in Garrit gallus; in Tribum Ovid’s words are voiced or ventriloquised by this same
gallus who concinat Gallus Nasonis dicta (sings the words of Ovid). Vitry’s authorship
receives further support from the discovery that the hexameter couplet from Joseph
of Exeter’s De bello troiano that ends Tribum (see above) was later written into his own
copy of the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis, as a marginal autograph annotation to a
historical passage parallel to the contemporary events criticised in Fauvel: ‘Nota: Post
zephiros plus ledit hiems, post gaudia luctus, etc.’36
There has been widespread but not universal acceptance of Vitry’s authorship of
Garrit and Firmissime, and probably also of Tribum, all named in ars nova treatises.

35 Wathey, ‘The Motet Texts’, 195, also advances the view that the words and music were conceived together.
36 The Chronicon of Guillaume de Nangis (a monk of Saint-​Denis, and the main historiographer of the
French royal house at the end of the 13th c.) exists in two states. Vitry owned one of two surviving copies of
the first redaction, Vat. Reg. lat. 544, as reported by Wathey, ‘Auctoritas’. See also Wathey, ‘Philippe de Vitry’s
Books’, where Vitry’s annotations are further discussed, and Wathey, ‘Words and Music’. De bello troiano VI.
784–​87 and 818–​52 give Hecuba’s lament, which has some similarity with the language of Aman; Wathey,
‘Myth and Mythography’, 96 n. 39. He notes Hecuba’s Heu meus at VI. 814–​15 (cf. Aman’s tenor Heu me) and
the references by both Hecuba (VI. 838) and the motet triplum to the fires that consumed Phaeton and their
‘common emphasis on the cruelty of fate’. Following earlier studies that underestimate the Fauvel component,
he calls the motetus Heu Fortuna the lament of Marigny. It may be that too, but it is explicitly placed in the
mouth of Fauvel.
150 Fauvel and Vitry

Both have innovations beyond the primary one of duple time; Garrit by using tenor col­
oration to change modus, Firmissime by newly rhythmicising the first color in longs in
perfect maximodus to become the second color in breves in imperfect modus, all fully
and necessarily written out (but over a page turn, Paris146, f. 43r–​v). It has proved less
straightforward to claim advanced technical and musical innovation for Tribum than
for Garrit gallus, though all three (and only those of the Fauvel motets) have been ac-
cepted as Vitry’s by Besseler, Sanders, Leech-​Wilkinson and others. Sanders excluded
Aman on style-​chronological grounds we have judged to be weak, and excluded Orbis/​
Vos despite the shared material pointed out by Schrade.37 He depended, too heavily I be-
lieve, on criteria which he found lacking in Aman. Hartt’s computation of sonority in
some Vitry motets also, in my view, depends too heavily on a single criterion as a tool for
attribution, and takes too little account of layered dissonance, resolved appoggiaturas,
and text–​music relationships.38 Above all, neither of these authors, and some others,
seem ready to concede that a composer may deliberately cultivate different styles and
strategies in different compositions, as I believe to be the case with the Marigny motets.
All three Marigny motets are masterly and strikingly original constructions of text
and music, musically very different from each other, despite their coordinated sub-
stance and musical cross-​referencing. I hope by augmenting the tight links between
them, and broadening the criteria for evaluating craft, to have revived the case for
Vitry’s authorship of Aman and Orbis, and with them perhaps that of other imperfect-​
tempus Fauvel motets.

37 A shared tenor was sufficient to persuade Sanders that the same composer was responsible for Floret

and Garrit, but he included Floret despite it lacking the regular periodicity on which basis he excluded Aman.
A shared tenor is no guarantee of composer identity. Many instances of sharing by different composers in-
clude Ruina, in Super/​Presidentes and Machaut M13; Gaude virgo gloriosa . . . Super omnes speciosa in Vos/​
Gratissima and Machaut M17. See Ch. 8. The striking vocative of Vos pastores may be reflected in that of
Vitry’s Vos quid admiramini. Shared opening words sometimes link motets.
38 Hartt, ‘The Problem of the Vitry Motet Corpus’. In view of the close text–​ music relationships
demonstrated for these and other motets, I cannot agree with his suggestion that Vitry could in some cases
have provided words for others to set.
 8
Vos quid admiramini/​Gratissima virginis
species/​Gaude gloriosa

Sources

Two motets considered to be among the most certain works by Vitry are attributed
to him by John of Tewkesbury, the author of the Quatuor principalia, whose earliest
source is dated 1351. One, Cum statua/​Hugo, is also authorially signed in the
triplum: ‘hec concino Philippus publice’; the other is Vos/​Gratissima.1 Both are an-
yway probably considerably earlier than this by criteria of their upper-​voice rhythms,
which go only minimally beyond the Fauvel defaults for stemless semibreves, but
they are among the earliest indications that French repertory was circulating in
England by this date.2 Leo Schrade knew Vos/​Gratissima only from Ivrea and the
partly illegible copy in Ca1328, and its listing in Trém. Since then, it was identified
in Brussels5170 (announced by Gilbert Reaney in 1965; triplum and beginning of
motetus only), the English source Durham20 (announced by Frank Ll. Harrison in
1967), and Aachen (announced by Joachim Lüdtke in 2001; motetus and lower parts
only).3
Esc10 is a collection of mostly standard astronomical writings heavily annotated
by Johannes de Muris, together with many miscellaneous personal notes, calculations
and observations (for example, of eclipses), financial transactions and book loans. It
is thus a hugely important source for his biography; datable entries range from 1321
to 1344. An incomplete version of the tenor of Vos/​Gratissima was copied sideways
in void notation in the margin on f. 223v, in a section of the manuscript thought to

This chapter is based on the oral presentations on Vos/​Gratissima that I gave in the late 1980s in Princeton
and then in Oxford and elsewhere (some jointly with David Howlett); since then, much has been discovered
and written about this motet. The present observations, not previously published, are here partly (and imper-
fectly) updated to take account of sources that have since come to light and to note work by others. Among
many discussions of this motet are Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 50–​67; Hamilton, ‘Philippe
de Vitry in England’; Desmond, Music and the moderni, 198–​202, 222–​28; Clark, ‘Super omnes speciosa’;
Dudas, ‘Another Look at Vos/​Gratissima’.
1 Aluas, Quatuor principalia. This treatise also refers to Vitry having used red coloration in ‘several motets’

(‘pluribus motetis’) to change modus, tempus or prolation. For Cum statua/​Hugo see Zayaruznaya, The
Monstrous New Art, ch. 4 and appendix 2. A more recently discovered source is in Leipzig431. See Maschke,
‘Entfernte Einbandfragmente’.
2 Tabulated in Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’; he accepts paired minim rests in hockets Ìgas
equivalent to fg; see Ch. 13 below. Zayaruznaya, ‘Reworkings’, 156, shows how the Ivrea semibreve
hockets of Cum statua/​Hugo were revised with minims for Ca1328; but those too do not involve single
minim rests.
3 Reaney, ‘New Sources’; Harrison, ‘Ars Nova in England’; Lüdtke, ‘Kleinüb erlieferung’; and Zayaruznaya,

The Monstrous New Art. It is published in PMFC 1, Vitry no. 7, p. 76. The essential contratenor and the
twinned nature of the two supporting lower parts qualify this as a piece for which a solus tenor could be
expected. Ivrea preserves two versions of a solus tenor. The first, with many dissonant departures from a

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0009
152 Fauvel and Vitry

date around 1330 or soon after.4 On the same page, Muris records the loan to Vitry of
his Boethius (with commentary) and the Didascalicon of Hugh of St-​Victor: ‘Magister
Philippus de Vitriaco habet musicam Boecii cum (commento) et didascalicon
Hugonis’; and in a longer list of book loans on f. 225v: ‘Magister Philippus de Vitriaco
habet meum commentum super musicam’ and ‘Dominus D. Legrant habet tabulas
Tholetanas et speram, compotum, astrolabium, theoriam planetarum etc.’. Both Vitry
and Denis le Grant were composers who later became bishops, and were evidently
in social and intellectual contact with Muris.5 It seems plausible that the likely pres-
ence together of two or all three musicians may have occasioned a discussion of this
tenor and its annotation in Esc10. Both on notational grounds and on the evidence
of Esc10, Vos/​Gratissima has been dated before or around 1330.6 On stylistic and
notational grounds, I am inclined to accept a date around the middle or second half
of the 1320s.

Texts

Some of the most remarkable features of this motet arise from the structuring of the
texts and from the text–​music relationships. The texts are given here in Table 8.1,
showing textual alignment between triplum and motetus, but discussion of them
and those relationships will follow the resolution of some musical and notational
issues.

Table 8.1 Texts and translations of Vos quid admiramini/​Gratissima virginis species

Triplum Motetus

C1T I 1 Vos, quid admiramini, 1 Gratissima virginis species

2 virgines, si virgini
3 pre ceteris eligende
T II 4 dignati fuerimus 2 quam decorat carnis mundicies
5 nubere, dum nupsimus
6 tanquam valde diligende. 3 usque centrum plagasti intima

T III 7 Ista pulcra specie,

8 humilis manerie
9 ac opere virtuosa;

lower-​voice conflation, is marked vacat iste and is followed by a ‘normal’ solus tenor, also partially pre-
served in Aachen.

4 Esc10 was announced by Gushee, ‘New Sources’ (1969), noting its connections with Muris, Vitry and

Denis le Grant; but the unlabelled tenor on f. 223v was not identified as that of Vitry’s motet until 1991: Kügle,
‘Frankreich und sein direkter Einflußbereich’, 354. The tenor is reproduced and parsed in Hamilton, ‘Philippe
de Vitry in England’.
5 See Ch. 31 for a new attribution to Denis le Grant in the Trém index.
6 Some dating criteria are summarised in Desmond, Music and the moderni, 198.
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 153

Table 8.1 Continued

Triplum Motetus

T IV 10 turpis vestrum altera, 4 mei cordis plaga dulcissima,

11 ausu nimis aspera
12 necnon virtutes exosa. 5 intra stillans amoris spiritum

TV 13 Ista lux, vos nubila,

14 ista velox aquila,
15 vos colubres gradientes;
16 ista super ethera 6 nescientem pectoris exitum.
T VI 17 regnat, vos in misera
18 valle languetis egentes. 7 Gratissime simili vulnere

19 Ista virgo regia

C2T i 20 dulcis est amasia
21 mea sponsaque pia. 8 peperisti mundum me ledere.
T ii 22 Rex ego sum, hec regina.
23 Quid tanta referimus? 9 O regina, tuum amplectere
T iii 24 Nos qui cuncta novimus
25 dignam preelegimus 10 astringendo pectus cum ubere.
T iv 26 et ut rosam hanc pre spina.

27 Surgite vos igitur, 11 O rex regum, oculum oculo

Tv 28 quia tempus labitur
29 et mors vos persequitur. 12 et os ori junge pro osculo
T vi 30 Huic servite, hanc vocate,
31 quod si neclexeritis, 13 ac inspira verbum in labia,
T vii 32 illam non videbitis
33 gloriam quam cupitis. 14 quo recepto fiat caro dia.
(T viii) 34 Vos eÿa properate!

Tenor: Gaude virgo gloriosa, super omnes speciosa

Source: David Howlett in the Orlando Consort recording, ‘Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova’, CD-​SAR 49.
Notes: Hockets are marked in italics, Vos and Ista in bold. Unless noted, Brussels5170, Ca1328 and
Aachen agree with the given text where present and legible.
Variants: tr 23 Durham20 Quis; 27 Ivrea Urgete; mo 3 Ivrea placasti; Aachen 8 delere, 9 ampectore,
14 receptum.

Triplum: You virgins, why are you astonished if in preference to the others we have
deigned to wed the chosen virgin, since we have wed, so specially to be loved. She
beautiful in appearance, humble in manner, and virtuous in work; the other of you
filthy, too harsh in daring, and also hating virtues. She light, you cloudy; she a swift
eagle, you slithering snakes; she reigns above the heavens, you languish needy in the
miserable vale. She a royal virgin, is a sweet mistress and my holy spouse. I am the king,
she the queen. Why do we say such things? We who know all things have forechosen
her as worthy, and as this rose in preference to the thorn. Arise, therefore, because time
is passing and death pursues you. Serve her, call upon her, because if you neglect her
you will not see the glory which you desire. Oh hurry!
154 Fauvel and Vitry

Motetus: Most gracious figure of a virgin, whom beauty of flesh adorns, you have
wounded to the centre the inmost parts of my heart with a very sweet wound, pouring
within a spirit of love that knows no exit from my breast. Most graciously you have
brought forth a pure one to injure me with a similar wound. O queen, embrace your
own one, binding bosom with breast. O king of kings, join eye to eye and mouth to
mouth for a kiss, and breathe the word on my lips, which, once received, may make the
flesh divine.
Tenor: Rejoice, glorious one.

The Tenor: Relationship to Other Motets

The tenor is shown in Ex. 8.1a. It has long been known that Vitry’s tenor Gaude gloriosa,
super omnes speciosa is from the middle of the Marian antiphon Ave regina celorum,
and that the tenor of Machaut’s Motet 17 uses the last part of this segment, from Super
omnes speciosa to the end. Machaut’s tenor color coincides with the last eighteen notes of
Vitry’s tenor (notes 13–​30 in Ex. 8.1b); in the second color statement of Vos/​Gratissima
this is the passage from talea iv to the end.7 The shared section is melodically identical in
the two motets, though at different pitch levels (Vos/​Gratissima on f, M17 on c) and dif-
ferently rhythmicised. The fact that the version used by both differs from known chant
sources led Alice Clark to infer that Machaut borrowed from Vitry, not directly from
a chant.8 She also noted that Machaut’s talea appears to be modelled on Vitry’s, rather
than the other way round. Such a causal relationship would then require M17 (generally
thought on grounds of notational usage to be one of Machaut’s earlier motets, and dated
by Lawrence Earp to the 1320s) to follow Vos/​Gratissima, which would then need to be
placed considerably earlier than its usual dating towards 1330.
The dependence of Machaut on Vitry has been called into question by the more re-
cent discovery of Paris934 by Richard Dudas. An anonymous motet on f. 79r, labelled
and based on Super omnes speciosa, uses exactly the same segment at the same pitch

Ex. 8.1 The tenor of Vos/​Gratissima: (a) The taleae of color 1 are marked (with |) above the
staff, of color 2, below it. Brackets show repeated cells and chiasms. (b) The background
contrapuntal relationship of tenor (black noteheads) and contratenor (void)

7 Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, V7 and M17, 204 and 251.

8 Clark, ‘Machaut Reading Machaut’, 95. Clark, ‘Super omnes speciosa’, 248, cites three instances where
Machaut borrows a tenor from another motet. In Ex. 8.1a the chant text is not underlaid in detail, because the
chant differs from known sources.
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 155

as Machaut M17, and is judged by Earp to date from around or even before 1320, too
early to postdate Vitry’s motet.9 The tenor color in M17 is simply repeated without
change, whereas the new motet is much more complex, with two written-​out and
differently rhythmicised colores, each of which is marked for repetition; there is no
contratenor in either motet. The second reading of the second color statement of the
Paris934 motet, as Earp observes, reinterprets its single notated form with differently
placed and evaluated alteration and imperfection in two different context-​dependent
rhythmicisations, pointing the way to Machaut’s similar treatment of a homographic
tenor in his M6. These different levels of complexity raise questions about the relative
chronology and actual dating of the three motets on this shared tenor, but complicate
the case for claiming direct dependence between them. Like the two main (notated)
color statements in the Paris934 motet, Vos/​Gratissima provides a new rhythmicisation
of the second color, as in two other early motets attributed to Vitry: Firmissime/​Adesto
and Douce/​Garison. In none of these cases could the new rhythmicisation have been
notated homographically; it could not have been derived from the first statement by
diminution or mensural change. Machaut’s M17 and Paris934 each have a six-​note
talea, three taleae per color; the color in both cases contains eighteen notes and is at the
same pitch (c). The relationship is thus closer between them than either is to Vitry’s,
suggesting that Machaut’s source may have been the Paris934 motet, whose texts,
insofar as they survive, are to my eye Vitry-​like in tone, and include the words Rex
regum and filia, also evocative of Vos/​Gratissima, as is the use of the first person and
the learned Latinate style. Leofranc Holford-​Strevens observed that the triplum text is
modelled on Ovid’s Ex ponto (I. 6.51–​53), from which Vitry cites IV. 3.35–​36 in Tribum.
Another motet in Paris934, on f. 79v, has an essential contratenor which functions as
a pair with the tenor in a manner contrapuntally similar to Vos/​Gratissima, but with
tightly interlocked mensural coloration.10
Yet another motet using the same tenor segment was identified by Michael Cuthbert.
It is Pura placens/​Parfundement, in Ox7, a mid-​fourteenth-​century English manu-
script of similar date to Durham20, which includes Vos/​Gratissima which, as noted,
is attributed to Vitry in the English treatise by John of Tewkesbury, the Quatuor
principalia dated 1351.11 This tenor is pitched on f like Vitry’s version (Machaut and
Paris934 being on c). It has one small variant, likewise not in known chant sources: in
the other three tenors, notes 8–​12 are d f g f f (in the version of Vitry; transposed to c
in the other two) and in Pura placens/​Parfundement they are d f f g f. Until a matching
version of either form of this melody is found in a chant source, some relationship be-
tween the four compositions must be assumed. The probable chronological order was
Paris934, Machaut, Vitry, Pura placens/​Parfundement, thus reducing the reasons for

9 Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars nova Motets. It appears that the motet was originally notated without

minim stems, which were added later.

10 Dudas and Earp, ‘Paris 934’; first presented at a seminar in All Souls, Oxford, 22.10.2020.
11 Cuthbert, ‘Hidden in our Publications’. The motet is in PMFC 15, no. 24, where the tenor is listed as

unidentified. With two mid-​century attestations to Vitry’s motet being known in England, Pura placens/​
Parfundement might have borrowed its tenor. The style and alliteration suggest English origin. On the other
hand, it shares an opening in Ob7 with a motet also in Ivrea, so it might be a French motet in England,
as suggested by its possible identity as the opening motet (‘Profondement’) of a lost French source reported
(from Barrois, from the 1487 inventory of the Burgundian ducal library) in Besseler, Studien I, 184 and 222
n.1, and more recently in Kirkman, The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass, 245.
156 Fauvel and Vitry

placing Vitry’s motet before Machaut’s, though both their motets could be of similar
date in the mid-​1320s.

The Tenor–​Contratenor Relationship

The contratenor of Vos/​Gratissima is grammatically essential, and works as a pair to-

gether with the chant tenor. It is shown in void notes in Ex. 8.1b. The tenor has a range
of a full octave: roughly the first third explores the range a fifth above f, the middle
third the fourth below, and the final third the fourth above. The descending fourth bb
a g f occurs near the beginning and at the end, and the two low cs form the centre of a
chiasm, bracketed in Ex. 8.1a. The contratenor provides a fifth below higher notes of the
chant tenor at places which would otherwise have unsupported fourths, and it is above
the tenor when the tenor descends to its lower range. The tenor and contratenor colores
of Vos/​Gratissima each have thirty notes. The first color is divided into six taleae of five
notes, marked at the top of the staff in Ex. 8.1a, the second into seven taleae of four notes,
marked at the bottom of the staff, leaving the final two cadential chant notes and their
preceding rest to start an unfinished new talea. Each talea of the first color extends over
five longs, the contratenor syncopated by an initial imperfect long rest, and each talea of
the second extends over three longs, the tenor syncopated by an initial breve rest.
Ex. 8.1b shows the background contrapuntal relationship of tenor and contratenor.
The parallel fifths at notes 10–​11 are mitigated in the composed form by rests at B28–​
B31, but not at B113–B115, where they coincide with two bars of parallel unisons be-
tween the upper parts on astringendo, perhaps to emphasise, or even depict, the ‘close
binding of breast to breast’ (motetus line 10; see Table 8.1). Such a striking effect was
surely deliberate, and can be added to a growing list of instances of affective word-​
painting, where the music departs from an implicit norm.
My analytical comments in what follows were originally based on a transcription
from Ivrea. Richard Dudas has graciously allowed me to use his transcription from
Durham20 (see Ex. 8.2), which for present purposes has been adjusted at my request
in a few places where I felt the readings of Ivrea or of other sources to be preferable.12
The result is therefore an interpretation; readers may have different opinions on indi-
vidual decisions. The relatively few variants are noted above the staff, and listed with
sources in the note.13 In this case, the lower-​case roman numerals for the taleae of the

12 Richard Dudas has offered substantial analytical insights in email correspondence in 2021, now included

in Dudas, ‘Another Look at Vos/​Gratissima’.

13 Commentary notes to Ex. 8.2): Ivrea, Ca1328, Brussels5170, Durham20, Aachen (further abbrevi-
ated here to Iv, Ca, Br, D, A). Durham’s plicas are not present in the other sources, apart from a few in Ca and
Br. Where legible, breve plicas are in Br at mo 17, tr 52, 86, 122, 124, 135, 149, and Ca mo 45. If the ending is
to be aligned (as here), the penultimate tenor note is, wrongly in all legible sources, an imperfect L before a
L. The ligature in Iv had a stem (correctly) for a B (alt), but it was erased, here restored.
D: tr 40.4, 41.4, 42.4, large minims on the last of a group of four, presumably for syllabification. Elsewhere the
last minim is separated, as at tr 97, 114–​15, 123. These distinctions are not made where the group is melis-
matic. Ex. 8.2 follows D except as noted (changes on authority of other sources or of subjective critical judge-
ment). Ca and Br variants are noted where legible. Music variants from Ex. 8.2: tr 44 Iv and Br fg fg preferred
to D, Ca f ggg fg fg
; tr 87 Iv fede preferred to Ca, D, Br f fg ede; tr 94.2 Ca, Iv g preferred to A, D f; tr 143 Iv
aag f fg d
; mo 6 Iv c preferred to D, Br, A cbca fg fg ; mo 7–​9 Iv A Br two ligs (D one lig); mo 9.1 b Iv, A, Br
preferred to D d; mo 30 Iv gfg f fg ff
; mo 45 Iv fe ; mo 58.1 Iv d preferred to Ca A D e.
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 157

second color do not mean that they are diminished forms of the upper-​case ones in the
first color; they are newly rhythmicised.
There are surprisingly few progressions of third to fifth between the tenor–​
contratenor pair (Ex. 8.1b), so that normal cadences are largely avoided. At two places
where one part descends by step, it is undercut by the other, making a third to unison
(tenor notes 8–​9, 29–​30, Ct 14–​15, 24–​25). Progressions of third to fifth occur only
at notes 3–​4 on g–​f (with Ct below), 17–​18 on d–​c and 22–​23 on g–​f (both with tenor
below). The first of these falls (in Ex. 8.2) at breves 9–​10 and 97–​98, the second at
breves 51–​52 and 127–​30, and the third at breves 66–​67 and 141–​42. Of these, breves 9–​
10 and 141–​42 make a normal 6/​3–​8/​5 cadence; breves 66–​67 and 97–​98 make a weak
cadence in the upper parts; B127–​B130 avoid the cadence with rests. B51–​B52 make a
strong 3–​5 cadence with parallel octaves f s–​g, requiring fs in triplum and contratenor
on the triplum word aspera (harsh)—​the only occasion for any sharp in the whole
motet, and arguably another instance of word-​painting, taking the musical language
outside an implicit norm that has been set up for the motet, such as astringendo (above)
and oculi oculo (below).

Variant Notational Readings and the Reciprocal

Syncopation of the Lower Parts

The annotation in Esc10 is not the only indication that the tenor notation gave rise
to debate then, as now. The Quatuor principalia cites both Cum statua/​Hugo and Vos/​
Gratissima for the use of a dot to perfect the long. In the case of Vos/​Gratissima:

Posset tamen prima longa imperfici a parte ante per brevem precedentem vel per
valorem nisi punctus immediate eam sequatur, ut patet in tenore de Gratissima.

The first longa can be imperfected at the beginning part by a preceding brevis or
its value, unless the punctus immediately follows it, as is apparent in the tenor of
Gratissima.

This description does not apply to the first tenor color, but seems to describe the begin-
ning of the second, where the first long is preceded by a breve rest, as shown in Fig. 8.1.
The dot on the final long of the first color ensures that the newly rhythmicised second color
starts with that breve rest. If it were not for the dot after the long, the breve rest would im-
perfect it. The first long of color 2, after the breve rest, has a dot in Durham20; but that long
precedes another long and would be perfect by similis ante similem, so its dot is helpful but
not essential.
Ivrea has many erasures in the second half of the tenor. The scribe (or reviser)
misunderstood the syncopated taleae of color 2, failing to recognise that each group is
offset by the rest, and the syncopation made up at the end of each short talea. He erased
the (originally correct) long stem from the first long of each talea, making it a breve to
be altered, which without the syncopation would be notationally but not musically cor-
rect. He then (wrongly) added a dot to the second long. Despite this garbled version in
Ivrea, on which he was then dependent, Schrade was able to correct the faulty reading
empirically; there is no doubt on grounds of musical sense about the intended tenor
158 Fauvel and Vitry

Fig. 8.1 The tenor and contratenor taleae of the two colores of Vos/​Gratissima. The excerpts
are reproduced with permission from the Biblioteca Capitolare, Ivrea for MS 115; from
Stadtbibliothek Aachen, for MS Beis E14; from Durham Cathedral Library, for MS C I 20

values. These are now corroborated by Durham20 and Aachen, which were not avail-
able to him. Fig. 8.1 shows the faulty Ivrea reading as just described, Aachen lacking an
(accidental) dot after the long following the breve rest, and Durham20 with dots (albeit
faint) after both longs before and after the color join.14
The scribe of Ivrea was not the only one to be confused. The notation of Esc10 is
somewhat casual with respect to the notation of breves and longs, but the note forms
are often overruled by small arabic numerals giving values as 1, 2 or 3 breve units.
The indications are too imprecise to support Karen Desmond’s claim that the rest
‘transgressively’ extends the first color. Esc10 wrongly gives dots and rests to some of
the breves at the ends of taleae in the first color; ironically, its final talea ‘needs’ a dot
but does not have one, though it does get the numeral 3. Nor does the second color in
Esc10 correspond to Vitry’s motet. Even where some notes appear to be breves they are
assigned ‘wrong’ values with small numerals. It is as if one of these men (Muris, Vitry, le
Grant) was puzzled by the tenor rhythm and wrote it down in Muris’s notebook in the
course of a discussion, quite possibly in the presence of the composer. The breve unit
values given there for the tenor talea of the second color, 3 3 2 2, are wrong: they should

14 Ca1328 is illegible at this point. Durham20 has plicas which suggest it may have been copied from an

early source; Fauvel plicas are usually resolved or ignored even in slightly later copies. Plicas, however, were
sometimes retained in England longer than elsewhere. Durham20 also observes an English distinction be-
ƒ
tween major S rests, crossing the staff line, and imperfect rests, suspended from it ( ); that rest in major
prolation in French notation came consistently to designate a major semibreve. Short rests were often irregu-
larly or unstably notated in the early ars nova; see Ch. 13 and n. 9, and Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’. Ivrea,
Ì
Ca1328, Aachen and Brussels5170 use pairs of M rests ( ) for these hockets.
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 159

be, as in Fig. 8.1 (Aachen and Durham20), 1 (rest) |3 |2 1| 2, the final imperfect long of
each talea making up a perfection with the initial breve rest that sets off the syncopation.
Much of what has recently been written about this motet hinges around that dot of
perfection at the end of the first tenor color (talea VI), showing similar modern indeci-
sion.15 The first five taleae of that first color end with a long imperfected by a breve rest,
as shown in Fig. 8.1. In the sixth talea the long is followed instead by a dot, preventing
its imperfection by the ensuing breve rest. So this final talea of color 1 appears irregular.
But all becomes clear when we take the essential and complementary contratenor into
account. The bottom line of Fig. 8.1 shows the contratenor for the same passage at the
junction of the colores. The contratenor is syncopated in color 1, the tenor in color 2. The
syncopation only seems more extreme in color 2 because it occupies a relatively greater
part of the shorter talea. For the last note of color 1, the parts simply change rhythmic
s∂
places, on a unison f.16 The contratenor has L +​rest, ( ) the tenor a perfect L dotted,
s., instead of the other way round, preparing both parts for their swapped functions in
color 2 and clarifying the join: the contratenor now starts on the beat, and it is the tenor
that is displaced by a rest. But in her ex. 6.2, Desmond counts the tenor breve rest as
part of color 1 ( s. ∂ s
), and starts color 2 with the long on the second beat of the modus
group.17 If the start of tenor color 2 were to be thus delayed, one would expect a dot after
as well as before the breve rest to confirm the displacement, in order to place the first
long of color 2 on a downbeat ( s ∂ .∂ . s
) and avoid syncopating the second color. This
proposal fails to take account of the above-​noted complementarity with the essential
contratenor; the tenor breve rest at the beginning of color 2 is the syncopating agent,
and similarly in all its short taleae, as the contratenor rest was in color 1.18 In a nota-
tion without cumbersome barlines and ties, and where tenor and contratenor are offset
against each other, complex relationships between the parts are often set up.
Desmond gives a fine detailed analysis of sonorities, attacks and directed progressions
(her ex. 6.9), which brings out the wide range of interplay between different ways of
achieving emphasis. It is true that the heard directed progressions in color 2 fall on the
second beats of the modus groups, and that this creates a playful ambiguity, but complex
music of all periods invites listeners to hear and enjoy surprises and playful tensions be-
tween surface and underlying metrical organisation. Beethoven and Brahms often keep
one guessing where the barlines fall. Vitry is doing something similar here, brilliantly.

15 The motet, and the dot, were discussed at length in Elina Hamilton’s paper delivered at the Medieval and

Renaissance Music Conference, Brussels, 2015, now published as Hamilton, ‘Philippe de Vitry in England’.
This was followed, with different conclusions, by Desmond, Music and the moderni, 222–​28. Hamilton does
take account of the contratenor, and makes a case that it, and not the tenor, is what the Quatuor principalia is
referring to, but I think the second color of the tenor is a better fit; the long is preceded by a breve and followed
by a dot. Desmond acknowledges the contratenor displacement in color 1, 224 n. 52, but considers it less
pronounced.
16 Clark, ‘Super omnes speciosa’, 261, makes a similar point.
17 Desmond, Music and the moderni, 201: ‘This dot forces the tenor in the second color to transgress the

mensural organisation set up in the first color, where its talea patterns now begin on the second breve of the
modus unit’. I see the dot as clarifying and enabling, rather than transgressive, and the reversal of syncopating
functions between tenor and contratenor in the second color as a balancing complement.
18 Such offsetting and longer-​term syncopation is found in other motet tenors. Desmond cites Machaut’s

M10, which was the subject of my paper in Hartt, Machaut Motets, here Ch. 12 and Ex. 12.1. The case in
M10 is clear; the syncopation starts at the beginning of the tenor, is made up at the end of each talea and wraps
around to the next one. A more spectacular syncopated offsetting involving tenor and contratenor is in Alma
polis, Ch. 19 and Ex. 19.1 below.
160 Fauvel and Vitry

The recurrent rhythmic motives (see below and Fig. 8.3) do not always fall at the
same point in the modus group (compare B3, B6, B11 with B19, B97), and that creates a
teasing instability, hinting at unrealised isorhythm in the first color. By contrast, in the
second color, the strict isorhythm of the upper parts (including the hockets), for the first
four and last nine breves of each double talea (or period) of the lower parts, establishes
a clear affirmation of their perfect-​modus boundaries, with one purposeful exception
to be noted below. That the upper parts are not displaced by any decision about the
lower-​part colores is shown by emphatic rhythmic recurrence, and by the notation of
rests, which observe the modus boundaries. The triplum rest at the beginning of each
pair of tenor taleae in color 2 is an imperfect long rest in all sources including Ca1328
and Brussels5170. Conversely, the motetus has two purposefully separated breve rests
in each talea of color 2 in all sources, including Ca1328 and Aachen; they straddle the
modus division.19 The difference in rest notation between triplum and motetus shows
the notator’s sensitivity to maintaining a regular perfect modus division in the upper
parts. The upper parts are construed in perfect modus while the syncopated tenor sings
against them, rather than, as Desmond suggests, that they ‘sing against the implied
mensuration of the tenor’ (p. 224).20
The ending is problematic. The last two notes of the tenor of Vos/​Gratissima ap-
pear to begin a new talea. As two successive longs, the first (B155) should be perfect
(syncopated, as in the other taleae). To continue the syncopation here would, however,
dissonantly delay the tenor’s arrival on the final cadence. In order for the parts to cadence
together the penultimate g should be an altered breve, as shown on the main staff in
Ex. 8.2, though this is no longer the notation of any source. Among Ivrea’s many
tenor erasures, this note originally had a stem, correctly specifying a breve, but the
stem was erased. Thus, at some point, perhaps in Ivrea’s exemplar, the end was cor-
rectly adjusted. Earp accepts the non-​coincident cadence as intentional, Ivrea’s orig-
inally normalised notation notwithstanding.21 The contratenor is adjusted here to
achieve a coincident ending; the breve rest of the other taleae is omitted, placing the
final long together with the upper parts, as must surely have been intended also in
the tenor, whose two final longs as notated appear visually to coincide, but without
allowing for the syncopation. It may not be too fanciful to see both the truncated
final talea and the curtailed penultimate notes (the actual omission of the contratenor
rest and the needed shortening of the tenor long) as reflections of the final line of the
triplum text: ‘O hurry!’

Texts and Text–​Music Relationships

The opening words of the triplum recall the Introit antiphon for the Feast of the
Ascension, Viri Galilei, quid admiramini aspicientes in celum (Ye men of Galilee, why

19 Two separate breve rests are notated at mo breves 93–​94, 111–​12, 129–​30, 147–​48.
20 Her statement that ‘One might even go so far as to say that the compositional conceit of this entire motet
is this dot’ seems to me somewhat exaggerated. Desmond, Music and the moderni, 228, 201.
21 Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, 98 n. 66. For possibly non-​coincident endings in Machaut’s motets 9, 15, 4 and 10 see

Chs. 9, 10, 12 and Exx. 12.2–​12.4 below, and especially, for an overview, Ch. 1 above.
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 161

stand you looking up to heaven?). Even closer to Vitry is the second text and refrain of
an English motet Ascendenti sonet geminacio/​Viri Galilei, quid vos admiramini?22
The texts (Table 8.1 above) are carefully structured for music. In color 1 the triplum
has three six-​line stanzas of 778, 778 (aabccb), 18 lines. The color 2 triplum has two
longer (eight-​line) stanzas each of 7778, 7778 (aaabcccb), 16 lines. The motetus has 14
decasyllabic lines, rhymed in couplets, seven lines in each color. The first two triplum
stanzas are tidily distributed over the music, one half stanza for each of the first four
taleae; but the text setting and general density are accelerated in the central stanza 3,
where an extra line is squeezed into color 1 (line 19, the first line of stanza 4), and the
accelerating alternation of the key words Vos and Ista is at its most dense. The last Ista,
in line 19, is the 55th word of 109, the middle word of the triplum. This line (Ista virgo
regia) is the first of the ‘color 2’ stanzas 4 and 5, but it is placed at the end of color 1,
anticipating the new color and binding the colores together. These new stanzas actually
bridge the main structural join (at B90–​B91), of which more below.
First person singular and plural forms seem to be used somewhat interchangeably
(singular, tr 21, 22, mo 4, 8; plural, tr 4, 5, 23, 24, 25), though the singular (mei) is linked
to the ‘intimate wound’ in motetus line 4. The first person plural occurs first in tr lines
4–​5: ‘We have wed . . . the chosen virgin’, next in the rhetorical question in line 23, ‘Why
do we say such things?’, followed immediately in lines 24–​25 with a reprise of the dec-
laration of choice: ‘We . . . have forechosen her.’ The use of the plural form with such de-
liberation by the solo protagonist of a marriage which appears to be both mystical and
physical can perhaps be explained as the royal or ‘majestic’ plural, used interchangeably
with the singular (‘I am the king’). But a clear distinction is maintained between the use
of the second persons plural and singular. The plural forms are all in the triplum (1, 10,
13, 15, 17, 18, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34), all for ‘you’ (bad). The second person singular
forms (all good), are all in the motetus (3, 8, 9), addressed to the virgin, holy bride,
queen (the ista of the triplum, here gratissima), linked to the intimacies of embrace,
eyes, breasts, kissing mouths, lips.
Fig. 8.2 shows the grand chiasm of these triplum Vos–​Ista alternations, contrasting
‘you’ (plural), bad, with ‘her’, good. Those words are absent from the motetus. The al-
ternation, as noted, is most dense in the central stanza 3, where Vos occurs three times,
three times in stanza 5, seven times altogether in the triplum; Ista five times. The last
Ista is the first line of stanza 4; the placing of this final Ista of the chiasm before the join
confines this key word to color 1. The main part of the chiasm concludes at the climactic
end of the first color, with triplum line 19, Ista virgo regia, whose pivotal placement was
discussed above. We are kept waiting for the last Vos until the very end, the final triplum
line, framing the chiasm: Vos begins the first and last triplum lines. Fig. 8.2 also shows a
secondary chiasm in color 2, framed by regia (line 19 again), the last triplum word of the
first color, and eÿa in the final line, with which it forms vowel rhyme. In between are the
symmetrical rex –​regina –​regina –​rex of the hockets, also with e-​i-​a vowel rhyme on
regina. The beginnings and ends of these chiasms thus bridge the two colores and stitch
them together.

22 The ultimate source of these words is Acts 1: 10–​11, ‘viri Galilaei quid statis aspicientes in caelum’, but

without the word admiramini. The motet is in Dor and Lwa12185. See Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset
Rotulus, ch. 3.
162 Fauvel and Vitry

Fig. 8.2 The chiasm of triplum Vos–​Ista alternations

Parallels with the erotic language of the Song of Songs have been noted, as have textual
similarities with Impudenter/​Virtutibus, which is specifically Marian.23 Like Desmond,
I associate vulnere with the striking moment at the beginning of color 2 (B91), when
this word is heard alone while the triplum has an imperfect long rest (=​two breves),
laid bare with an imperfect sonority on vulnere at B91.24 She stresses the association
of the wound both with the crucifixion and the birth of Christ and with its importance
in fourteenth-​century devotion, as well as its demarcation of the junction between the
colores. But I have also taken this striking image in directions more literally associated
with the verbal and musical material of this motet. The wound is inserted (inflicted?)
by the motetus into the exposed interrupted (wounded) triplum phrase: ‘She a royal
virgin’ (motetus, ‘by a wound’) ‘is a sweet mistress and my holy spouse’. The same op-
portunity to interpose a suggestive motetus three-​syllable word during the triplum rests
also occurs at each periodic recurrence in the upper parts, coinciding with the begin-
ning of each odd-​numbered tenor talea in color 2. At B109 ‘Why do we say such things?’
(motetus, ‘embrace’) ‘We (or us, nos) who know all things’; and perhaps more tellingly
at B145 ‘if you neglect her’ (motetus, ‘lips’) ‘you will not see the glory’. The words that
conspicuously interrupt the triplum lines at those places are ‘wound’, ‘embrace’, ‘lips’,
giving new erotic as well as christological meaning to the way the combined texted
parts are knitted together (as they were for Ista/​plagasti)—​powerfully suggesting those

23 Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 50.

24 Desmond, Music and the moderni, 222–​33. She calls this a ‘tear’, ‘a hole—​of one breve—​in the fabric of
the previously harmonically audible perfect modus of the musical surface’.
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 163

connections, though it would be asking too much that they also made perfect grammati­
cal sense between the two parts.
This is one of a growing number of motets that signal a musical structural join with
words of cutting, division or proportion, in this case, a wound. The phenomenon has
been noted in Tribum, Chapter 4 above; ‘trans metam ascende-​|rit’ takes us ‘over the
boundary’. In Musicorum, Chapter 18, the verbal phrase ‘cum bis acuto | gladio’ is cut
with the twice-​sharp sword at the juncture of the colores, and the word incidere liter-
ally cuts an earlier talea division: ‘incide-​| re cum silice’. In Machaut’s M4 (Ch. 14),
desmesuree (beyond measure) coincides with the unsignalled switch to perfect modus.
These instances can be multiplied. David Howlett’s prescient suggested emendation
of Ivrea’s placasti to plagasti is now confirmed by both Aachen and Durham20: ‘you
have wounded to the centre (usque centrum) the innermost parts of my heart with a
very sweet wound’. Both Ista and the wound-​words are proportionally placed. The first
color is ninety breves. The motetus’s noun ‘plaga dulcissima’ (‘most sweet wound’) falls
at its exact centre, B45, as prepared by usque centrum, and is flanked at proportioned
distances by the ‘wounding’ verbs plagasti (B30) and vulnere (following B90). The first
Ista (stanza 2) is also at B30 in the triplum, one-​third of the way through the first 90B
color. At that point, Ista (tr) and plagasti (mo) coincide on a unison g, the highest note
of the motetus, which occurs only this once, as if to signal that it is she who inflicts the
‘sweet wound’, to which height the lower-​range first-​person motetus aspires. The second
Ista (stanza 3) is at B60, two-​thirds of the way through the first color; we have already
located the noun plaga at B45, the centrum.25
As well as pointing to the centre of color 1, ‘usque centrum’ may also point forward to
the third wound-​word (vulnere, following plaga and plagasti) at the main structural join
of the motet. Although that is not the actual centre by breve count, it is certainly ‘cen-
tral’, the centre of gravity, a striking but by no means isolated instance of ways in which
words of measure can mark the passage of musical time through a motet. The ‘plaga
dulcissima’ is echoed immediately after the join by the succession vulnere (motetus) and
dulcis (triplum), once again linking those two texts. A final ‘hurting’ phrase, me ledere,
punctuated with rests, initiates the hocket at B102.

Rhythmic Vocabulary

The upper parts have some detectable periodicity in the first color, mostly involving
the rhythms of Fig. 8.3, for example at tr breves 6–​9, 36–​38, 65–​67; 19–​21, 49–​51,
79–​81. There is much more correspondence in the second color, especially for the
isorhythmic hockets. I still prefer to call them periods, confining the word talea to
rhythmic iterations, usually in the lower parts. Here, a partially isorhythmic upper-​part
period in color 2 spans two tenor taleae, starting at Ti, iii, v, vii. Each period reproduces
isorhythmically in both upper parts the opening four breves of color 2 that were so strik-
ingly shared between the triplum and motetus, as described above, which in turn is the
opening Vos rhythm. The one deviation is the rhythmic variant at talea v, which can be

25 Durham20 has a descending breve plica which places plaga on the first beat, whereas Ivrea’s underlay

places pla-​on the second S of 45.

164 Fauvel and Vitry

Fig. 8.3 Some instances of prevalent rhythmic motives (Vos and Gratissima)

explained by an unusual piece of literal word-painting—​in this case the ‘eye music’ of a
purposeful musical repeat for oculum oculo, ‘eye to eye’ (Fig. 8.4). This may be paralleled
by the unisons on astringere, binding breast to breast, noted above, in that instance
departing from an established contrapuntal norm, in the case of the final triplum line,
‘O hurry!’, by the structural curtailment of the final talea, and here by departing from an
established isorhythmic pattern.

Fig. 8.4 Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare, MS 115, f. 9r, staff 4: ‘eye music’ in Vos/​Gratissima. This
excerpt is reproduced with permission from the Biblioteca Capitolare, Ivrea

The hockets are strictly isorhythmic, and occupy the second half of each period,
corresponding to the even-​numbered tenor taleae. Text for the hockets was pre-
cisely calculated so that the texts would coincide at those points, and so as to place
monosyllables where the isolated notes would be; no words are broken by rests. Of sev-
eral places where triplum and motetus have musical and textual interplay, the hockets
bring them together most strikingly. The triplum hocket on ‘hec regina’ is interlocked
with motetus O regina, which at words 28 and 29 are also the central motetus words
of a total of fifty-​eight: the queens are brought together at B102–​B104, two-​thirds
of the way through the music. The interlocking of the hockets, shown in Fig. 8.5,
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 165

Triplum

T2 Rex e go sum, hec re gi na

T4 Et ut ro sam, hanc pre spi na
T6 Huic ser vi te, hanc vo ca te

Motetus

T2 me le de re O re gi na
T4 cum u be re O rex re gum
T6 pro o scu lo ac in spi ra

Fig. 8.5 The hockets of Vos/​Gratissima

rhythmically equal in both parts, suggests the paired sensuous intimacies of this sec-
tion of the motetus.26
As in some other motets, the strategy was often to establish a neutral or restricted
rhythmic vocabulary for a particular motet, in order to allow purposeful deviations
from it to stand out audibly (a similar phenomenon is noted in Ch. 9, on Machaut, M9).
The five-​note figure ggg fg
occurs just twice in the motet, both times strikingly in both
triplum and motetus simultaneously, in both cases emphasising key words. The first oc-
currence is at B72 on the triplum word Ista (line 16), the second at B153, on the triplum
word Vos (starting the final line 34), the ingredients of the chiasm shown in Fig. 8.2
above. Just as the verbal recurrences in the texts are carefully placed, so here a rhythmic
figure is used sparingly to highlight these key words. In Vos, there is just one depar-
ture from the Fauvel defaults for unstemmed semibreves: nubila (B63) has in all f ggg
sources, instead of the default for a four-​note group fgfg
. (Durham20 also has at f ggg
B45 on turpis, but the fgfg
of Ivrea and Brussels5170 has been preferred here, in view
of the way this rhythm has elsewhere been reserved for a very particular purpose.)

The Rhythmic Motives

Two distinct rhythmic motives, slightly differing in length, but composed of the same
units differently ordered, stand respectively for Vos ( f f d fgfg f f d
) in the triplum and
Gratissima ( d d fgfg d f f d ) in the motetus. (That last breve in Ivrea is cbca in fgfg
d
other sources, but the has been retained here, on grounds of its use as a recurring mo-
tive.) Fig. 8.3 shows some instances of these motives.
She who is the Gratissima of the motetus equates with the triplum’s Ista. Fig. 8.3 shows
the alignment of the opening Gratissima motive with the first two rhythmicisations of
Ista. The motives associated with the words Vos and Gratissima (see also Ex. 8.3a) are al-
most constantly present throughout the motet, in various combinations, mingling and
mutating. fgfg f f d, for example, occurs at least fifteen times, mostly in the triplum,

26 The first hocket is at B100 (‘Rex ego sum’), the golden section of the 162 breves of the motet. This Rex

is also at the golden section of triplum lines, ‘hec regina’ at the golden section by word count, all crucial
words. For other motets that observe this discipline, see Ch. 13 below. Some of these conjunctions are noted
by Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson in his notes to the Orlando Recording on CD-​SAR 49, p. 7.
166 Fauvel and Vitry

often at different points in the modus groupings, thus loosening any sense of predictable
regular recurrence.
Both motives are deployed with particular ingenuity and density around the struc-
tural join. The motetus recapitulates the opening word Gratissima as Gratissime at
line 7, the last line of the first half of the text, with its three significant and signifi-
cantly placed words ‘Gratissime simili | vulnere’ across the musical structural join.
(See Ex. 8.3a–​b.) Instead of initiating color 2, these words anticipate the new section at
the end of color 1, just as the triplum’s first line of stanza 4 does (‘Ista virgo regia’). But
it is also a musical recapitulation: the full Gratissima motive at the beginning of the
motetus ( d d fgfg d f f d ) recurs for Gratissime, B87–​B92. Moreover, in the version
of Ivrea, used in Ex. 8.2, the triplum (‘-​tes, Ista virgo regia’) is in exact rhythmic
canon on that same motive ( d d fgfg d f f d ) with the motetus (B85–​B90), as shown in
Ex. 8.3b–​c. (Durham20, Ca1328 and Brussels5170 have ffg instead of fgfg at B87,
making the rhythmic canon slightly less strict but still perceptible.)
The placing of simili and vulnere on either side of the color join in the motetus marks
the musical form both by announcing the ‘similar’ second color and the ‘wound’ of the
structural join. Simili does multiple duty. It flags the verbal recapitulation (Gratissime)
and the new (similar) color; it draws attention to the (similar) verbal repetition
of the wound, and to its echoing role in the (near or exact) rhythmic canon. This is
the triplum’s only use of that motive, seeming further to cement the identity (‘sim-
ilar’) of the motetus’s Gratissime with the triplum’s Ista virgo, she who is Gratissima.

Ex. 8.3 The main structural junction of Vos/​Gratissima, demonstrating several instantiations
of simili: (a) Vos and Gratissima motives together at the motet opening B1–​B6; (b) B85–​B90
up to the join; (c) B91–​B95, from the join, continuing the rhythmic canon, and showing the
‘wounding’ rests
 Vitry: Vos/Gratissima 167

In addition, the end of that motive and of the canonic imitation have melodic inversion
across the join (regia, a g f, vulnere, d e f, to the same rhythmffd ); and at the very be-
ginning of the new color (simili), motetus and triplum combine to share the Vos motive
f f d fgfg f f d
( | ) for ‘vulnere | Dulcis est amasia’ (B91–​B95, vulnere dulcis recalling
plaga dulcissima), made audibly prominent by rests in the ‘other’ part (Ex. 8.3a and
c). It is also laid bare at the beginning of the second color where the lower parts have a
unison f. In color 1, the upper parts provided more sonorities over that f; here, vulnere
sounds a bare octave with those lower parts.
The prominent d e f of vulnere, mentioned above, recurs at the very end of the motet
in the last three pitches of the triplum, for the final line ‘Vos eÿa properate’, whose sig-
nificance in completing the verbal chiasm (Vos), with both pitch and vowel rhyme con-
nection (eÿa, e-​i-​a), has been signalled above. Thus to end the motet emphatically with
the three pitches of vulnere could identify the truncated eighth talea as a final musical
allusion to the wound.
I hope to have demonstrated just a few of the features that contribute to this motet’s
inexhaustibly subtle creation of many layers of meaning within and between the texts
in combination with each other and with the music. Meaning is achieved in both text
and music, separately and together, by recapitulations, contrasts, chiasms, imitations,
leitmotivic use of rhythmic associations, successive and simultaneous juxtapositions,
different means of emphasis, by proportioned or symbolic placements, and striking
instances of word-painting. Much has been written about this wonderfully rich com-
position, saturated as it is with musical and verbal meaning; others will surely find even
more artfulness than what has been pointed out here.
 PART III
MAC HAU T
170 Machaut

The chapters of Part III deal analytically with text–​music relationships in individual
motets by Machaut. Chapter 9 (on Motet 9) was written with pedagogical intent, and
is accompanied by sound clips and many notated examples; it explores several under-​
explored dimensions of those relationships that may be fruitfully employed in other
analyses. Chapter 13 deals with aspects of Motet 18 (dating and text–​music relationships)
and Motet 2 (notation); Chapter 11 deals not with a motet but with a counterpoint-​
based reading of the Gloria of Machaut’s Mass. Three chapters on the French-​texted
motets (M15 in Chapter 10, M10 in Chapter 12, M4 and M8 in Chapter 14) were
stimulated by collaborations with Kevin Brownlee. Together we explored a rich seam
of intertextuality, new to literary scholars, which gives precise musical placement to si-
multaneous texts. The earlier version of Chapter 10 (on Motet 15) was published in 1991
alongside a companion article by Brownlee, and his study of the text of Motet 10 is also
published elsewhere.
 9
Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9

The article lightly revised as the present chapter on M9 (Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris
feritas/​Fera pessima) was designed to serve as an introduction to a Machaut motet
at an accessible level, while at the same time pointing out some features previously
little noted.1 These include text–​music relationships; purposeful voice-​crossing and
uneven text distribution across the musical structure; and whether a self-​imposed
discipline of not breaking words with hocket rests is honoured. Some elementary
explanations have been allowed to remain in order that this section can still serve an
introductory purpose. Throughout Part III, Machaut’s motets are often numbered as
‘M’, here M9.
Accompanying sound clips were recorded in 2003 by members of Musick’s Feast, a
professional ensemble based in Iowa City: Elizabeth Aubrey, director, Barbara Evans
O’Donnell and Marvin Bergman, and can be accessed on the companion website for
this book, for which Professor Aubrey has given permission. The style of Machaut’s
music can be foreign, even to those quite at home with sixteenth-​century music. In the
present case, newcomers may find it helpful to immerse themselves in this one piece by
repeated listenings, perhaps attending to different features on different hearings.
The original article was included in an issue of Early Music (2003) honouring the
then recently deceased John Stevens and Philip Brett, both of whom devoted much of
their scholarly attention to a musicianly concern not just with issues of general mutual
appropriateness of a particular set of words to its music, but also with details of tailoring
and nuance at the most minute level. Music is necessarily counted, as John Stevens so
eloquently argued in his book on medieval song; it is less widely recognised that verbal
texts for music are counted too. Philip Brett once exhorted musicologists to ‘face the
music’.2 I have chosen Machaut’s Motet 9 to demonstrate an artful combining of words,
music and the relationship between them that I hope both would have enjoyed, and
which I believe responds to the particular relationships they both valued so highly in
different repertories.
—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​

The way we listen to music today is often conditioned by changing technologies and
concert habits. How often, for example, do we approach medieval music by listening or
half-​listening to a dozen motets in succession on a CD or playlist, or to a similar succes-
sion in a concert? The aural experience of music, like the perception of other developed
arts, can lie anywhere on a spectrum from casual hearing to informed engagement. It

1 Some but not all of these features had been addressed in Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’. The present adapta-

tion of Bent, ‘Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9’, Early Music 31 (2003), 363–​88, has been licensed by
Rightslink.
2 Stevens, Words and Music; Brett, ‘Facing the Music’.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0010
172 Machaut

is my purpose here to suggest some ways of arriving at the latter position, using a single
motet by Machaut as an example.
Measured music gives syllables precise values and positions within a single text, or as
sense units or sonic units in relation to other texts. In the fourteenth century the nota-
tion of rhythm took a large step forward, permitting larger-​scale composition and local
detail, along with the precise recovery of these rhythms. Polyphonic settings from this
period can position apparently disparate or incongruous texts in a precise simultaneous
relationship that was unquestionably intended by the composer. A motet can also make
or receive complex textual, musical and intertextual allusions to or from other motets.
Techniques of verbal disposition and recapitulation in motet texts may set them apart
from other literary genres, and make them truly words for music in a way that can only
be fully perceived in relation to their music. Thus understood, some texts that seemed
artless can be seen to be just differently artful. Conversely, the music becomes more pur-
posefully directed, even sometimes depictive, when read in conjunction with the texts.
Motet 9, Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris feritas/​Fera pessima, is one of the most
widely discussed but least performed of Machaut’s motets. Its theology and its music
have been extensively analysed by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, its verse structure by
Georg Reichert, its compositional technique by Sarah Fuller, its historical dating by
Kurt Markstrom, its biblical anchorage by Jacques Boogaart, and its context within
Machaut’s oeuvre and its interpretation by Anne Walters Robertson.3 The complete
motet is given as Example 9.1, in a layout intended to complement this analysis, and
in an adaptation of the original notation that both permits compact graphic presen-
tation and reflects the fewer note symbols used to achieve the rhythms.4 Each system
of the score corresponds to a talea (a term to be explained below); to locate particular
passages, I shall use these talea numbers (roman I–​IX) as well as the bar numbers
(arabic numerals with ‘B’ for breve) that appear above the score. The complete motet
can be heard on sound clip 9.1.
Readers are now invited to view images of Motet 9 in two of the manuscripts in which
Machaut’s complete works were collected.5 In the Machaut manuscripts, the whole piece
is contained, as is normal, on a single opening, so that it can be read by three singers
without page turns. The beginning of each voice-​part is signalled by a large decorated
capital, each voice-​part provided with its own different text. The lengthy triplum occupies
more space than the medium-​length motetus. The gnomically compact tenor occupies
the least space. In performance, however, all three parts have the same duration, since the

3 Eggebrecht, ‘Machauts Motette Nr 9’; Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’; Fuller, ‘Modal Tenors’; Markstrom,

‘Machaut and the Wild Beast’; Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’; Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut.
Published editions of Motet 9: Ludwig, Guillaume de Machaut, iii. 33–​36; PMFC 2, 137–​40; Machaut, The
Motets, ed. Boogaart, which see for an excellent modern-​notation edition and details of manuscript variants.
4 Emendations made to the version preserved in the manuscripts: triplum, B89, 2nd note f is emended to

g. (Thus the leap d–​f for Dolus becomes d–​g, possibly rhyming with sol-​ut. Nowhere else is this leap dissonant
with the tenor, and in all other cases the spondee uses either repeated notes or a leap of a fourth.) In triplum,
B136, note 2 e is emended to d.
5 Instead of the black and white facsimiles which accompanied the original article, I have given references

to online colour images, here for MachautA and Ferrell(Vg); most other Machaut manuscripts are avail-
able on Gallica. For Motet 9, MachautA, ff. 422v–​423 can be viewed at https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​
btv1b8​4490​444/​f866.item, and Ferrell(Vg), ff. 268v–​269 on https://​www.diamm.ac.uk/​sour​ces/​3774/​#/​ima​
ges (images 540–​541). Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, gives a comprehensive guide to the Machaut
manuscripts and their contents. Manuscript variants for all the motets are given in the recent modern edi-
tion: Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart.
 Machaut’s Motet 9 173

tenor notes are slower and are stated three times. The three parts are presented separately,
not aligned in score, so they cannot be read simultaneously by a single musician.
In MachautA, the topmost voice (the triplum) begins in column 1 of the verso (left-​
hand page), continues into column 1 of the recto (right-​hand page), and is completed
in the staves stretching the full width of the recto. The second upper part (motetus)
begins in column 2 of the verso (the columns are parallel and equal), and is completed
in the first staff of column 2 of the recto, where the longer triplum enjoys a customised
ruling to accommodate its extra words and notes. The tenor occupies the second and
third staves of column 2 of the recto. Each part is marked with a large decorative initial.
In Ferrell(Vg), there are no columns: the triplum is on the left-​hand page (f. 268v), the
motetus and tenor on the right (f. 269).
The motet survives in all seven of the main complete-​works Machaut manuscripts,
including the earliest, MachautC, copied by 1350.6 In addition it was one of relatively
few of Machaut’s works that circulated outside those manuscripts, as we know from the
index of the lost Trémoïlle manuscript (Trém); see Chapter 31.7

The Verbal Texts

As is usual in fourteenth-​century motets, the two upper parts have different texts; this
difference extends to length, organisation, metre and rhyme scheme. These texts are
presented simultaneously. The words are locked by the musical rhythmic organisation
into specific positions or durations within each text individually; they are also given
precise placements in relation to the other text. In addition to relating in general terms
what the motet is ‘about’, it appears that individual words were selected for special place-
ment or what we might call musical treatment, perhaps as formal markers, by means of
repetition, rhyme and contrast. Special treatment of words explores sonic qualities of
alliteration and rhyme, illustrative tactics which exploit the contrasts of high and low
words in relation to extremes of musical range.

Triplum Translation
Introitus Fons tocius superbie, Lucifer, source of all pride and
Lucifer, et nequicie all evil, who, having been
Qui, mirabili specie adorned with marvellous beauty
Decoratus,
talea I Eras in summis locatus,   5 and set in the heights [of heaven],
Super thronos sublimatus, raised above the Thrones—​
Draco ferus antiquatus you who are called the old fierce
Qui dicere, dragon—​

6 For the dating and details of all manuscripts, recordings, bibliography, see the indispensable Earp,

Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, and for the most recent assessment see Earp, ‘Introduction’ (in Earp and
Hartt), 27.
7 His motets seem to have had a more limited circulation than the songs. All the Machaut motets known to

have circulated outside the Machaut manuscripts are listed in the Trém index (motets 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 19,
20, 23). Of those nine, only motets 8, 15 and 19 are otherwise known outside the Machaut manuscripts.
174 Machaut

II Ausus es sedem ponere 9 ventured to set up your seat

Aquilone et gerere in the North and
Te similem in opere to model your actions on
Altissimo. those of the Most High;
III Tuo sed est in proximo 13 but your most arrogant pride
Fastui ferocissimo was soon thwarted
A judice justissimo by the Most Just Judge,
Obviatum.
IV Tuum nam auffert primatum; 17 for he deprived you of your primacy;
Ad abyssos cito stratum you saw yourself swiftly hurled down
Te vidisti per peccatum for your sin to the abyss
De supernis. from the heights.
V Ymis nunc regnas infernis; 21 Now you reign over the depths below;
In speluncis et cavernis in caves and pits you lie,
Penis jaces et eternis in torments and everlasting
Agonibus. agonies.
VI Dolus et fraus in actibus 25 Deceit and treachery are in your deeds,
Tuis et bonis omnibus and with your arrows you
Obviare missilibus strive to thwart all good.
Tu niteris;
VII Auges quod nephas sceleris 29 You increase that wicked crime
Adam penis in asperis that kept Adam in the harsh torments
Tenuit Stigos carceris. of his Stygian prison.
Sed Maria But I pray that the Virgin Mary,
VIII Virgo, que, plena gratia, 33 who, full of grace,
Sua per puerperia freed him by her childbearing
Illum ab hac miseria from this misery,
Liberavit,
IX Precor et anguis tedia 37 may both increase the [serpent’s]
Augeat et supplicia sufferings and punishments,
Et nos ducat ad gaudia and lead us, whom she has created,
Quos creavit. to [heavenly] joys.

Motetus Translation
talea I O livoris feritas, O savage envy,
II Que superna rogitas who seek the heights
III Et jaces inferius! but lie in the depths,
IV Cur inter nos habitas? why do you dwell amongst us?
V Tua cum garrulitas 5 While your chattering
VI Nos affatur dulcius, speaks to us very sweetly,
VII Retro pungit sevius, it stings very savagely from behind,
 Machaut’s Motet 9 175

VIII Ut veneno scorpius: as the scorpion does with its poison;

Scariothis falsitas the treachery of Iscariot
Latitat interius.    10 is concealed within.
IX Det mercedes Filius May the Son of God
Dei tibi debitas! give you your due rewards.

Tenor: Fera pessima (Most evil beast)

English translation by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens

Tenor Melody, Borrowed Chant: Color

The musical foundation, the tenor, is taken, again as usual, from liturgical chant, which
provides its pitches (color), but no rhythms. Such excerpts carry with them the verbal
text which was the music’s biblical and liturgical underpinning as well as its musical
scaffolding. Whether or not a tenor’s text appears in a motet manuscript, it can usu-
ally be located in the first instance as scriptural and in the second as having a liturgical
placement. The tenor therefore brings to the motet both an implicit biblical-​exegetical
narrative context and a liturgical-​calendrical context.
In Motet 9 the tenor text consists of just two words: Fera pessima (‘most evil beast’).
These come from the middle of a Matins responsory, Videns Jacob vestimenta Joseph,
for the third Sunday of Lent; indeed, Fera pessima opens Jacob’s direct speech in
responding to the blood-​stained coat of many colours by which he is deceived into
thinking that Joseph is dead.8 Internal portions of chant are often harder to identify
than beginnings; here we are even told (by the motetus text, line 10) that the most
evil beast hides within: latitat interius. Although versions of this melody vary, exact
matches exist in contemporary antiphoners, so it is not necessary to posit any authorial
modifications.9
The primary factor that led a composer to choose a tenor for a motet was to suit the
symbolic, ritual or topical significance of its attached words to the subject of the texts of
the upper parts (whether or not these had already been composed). However, musical
features of the melodic segment should not be underestimated as additional factors in
the choice. Tenor segments nearly always end with a stepwise melodic descent to facili-
tate the tenor’s role in cadencing with the other parts.10
The twelve pitches of Machaut’s chant segment—​one of the shortest of his motet
tenors (M14 has ten notes)—​are given in Example 9.2a (sound clip 9.2). Those

8 The same words and chant open the tenor of a motet by Loyset Compère (c. 1445–​1518), Sola caret, whose

political significance is discussed in Dean, ‘The Occasion’. Compère’s tenor starts at the same music and words,
but uses a longer segment of the chant. Two of the five voices of Compère’s motet present in canon the entire
chant of which Machaut uses the first twelve notes. Fera pessima occurs no fewer than five times in the text of the
three free voices. The second half of the text invokes the Virgin, as does Machaut’s motet, and makes explicit the
deception of Jacob by Joseph’s brothers. Dean unravels the obscure historical allusions in the first half of the text.
9 The tenors and their sources are listed in Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’.
10 Except in Motet 23, whose last two notes rise a step as if anticipating the provision of the lower (essential)

contratenor. The repeated final tenor note in M10 does not affect the cadential descent. A striking example of
a final irregular tenor progression is Dunstaple’s four-​voice motet Veni sancte spiritus (MB 8, no. 32), whose
tenor breaks off with a descending fifth, d–​g, not a cadential progression at this time.
176 Machaut

Ex. 9.2 Structure of the tenor of Motet 9:

(a) the chant segment from which the color is derived, with sound clip 9.2;
(b) tetrad structure of the color, with sound clip 9.3;
(c) symmetries in the color;
(d) the rhythmicised tenor in original notation;
(e) the preceding, aligned in (speeded-​up) modern notation, with sound clip 9.4;
(f) reconfiguration of the color tetrads by the talea, with sound clip 9.5

twelve color pitches are disposed in three groups of four: two identical and one different,
producing the overall form x x y, as shown in Example 9.2b (sound clip 9.3). It even
seems shorter than it is, with its internal repetitions and near-​repetitions, serpentine
coiling and the narrow range of a fourth. Any apparent illustration of verbal sense may
already be present in the pre-​existent chant, though many similar melodies have no ob-
vious verbal explanation. This tenor divides as readily into 2 × 6 as it does into 3 × 4, and
has many internal symmetries and capabilities for retrograde (back-​to-​front) presenta-
tion. Example 9.2c shows just some of these.

• Notes 1–​7 form a palindrome centred on note 4.

• Notes 2–​6, 7–​11 form a sequence.
• The first half of the tenor (notes 1–​6) is stated a step lower in retrograde (notes 7–​12).
• Notes 5–​8, 9–​12 form a transposed retrograde.
• There are also inbuilt inversions (upside-​down segments): notes 1–​3, 3–​5 and
notes 5–​8, 8–​11.

Since the tenor melody is stated continually, six times during the course of the motet,
these patterns wrap around the talea joins and extend into the repetitions (for example,
notes 4–​8 =​ 12–​4).
 Machaut’s Motet 9 177

Rhythmic Disposition by the Composer: Talea

Although the tenor has a borrowed melody (color), its rhythmic pattern (talea) was ap-
plied by Machaut. In Motet 9, three identical eight-​note taleae are superimposed on two
statements of the twelve-​note color to form a complete cycle. Thus, in Example 9.1
each twelve-​note color occupies a system and a half of the score.
Example 9.2d shows this cycle in the original notation. Only one of these cycles is
notated—​two colores on three taleae. The three little rest-​like lines at the end of the tenor
part are repeat signs, indicating that the color cycle is to be stated three times. The three
cycles can be seen spaced out in the lowest voice-​part of the score in Example 9.1,
starting at taleae I, IV, VII. Example 9.2e, aligned with 9.2d, is a version of the same
rhythms in modern notation and speeded-​up note values, applied to the two successive,
rhythmically different, statements of the melody; these are heard on sound clip 9.4
(where drum =​talea, triangle =​color). Example 9.2f (sound clip 9.5) gives the same
notes, without rhythms, grouped into fours, showing the superimposition of two colores
and three taleae, and the resulting x–​y combinations. The way Machaut divided up these
notes discourages the actual singing of the words ‘fera pessima’ (most evil beast), which
remain an unheard but nevertheless participating presence.
The eight-​note talea rhythm is repeated exactly; that is to say, it is strictly iso-
rhythmic. ‘Isorhythm’ (‘equal rhythm’) is a word of twentieth-​century coinage, un-
picked in Chapter 2, that has given its name to a genre: the isorhythmic motet. But the
absence of a medieval word is something we might take more seriously. Rhythmic iden-
tity as the defining feature of a genre has been emphasised at the expense of the many
other strategies that are ingeniously combined in motets. Some of those features cut
across or prevent rhythmic identity, and are much more individual than it. As we shall
see here, a disciplined background (not necessarily ‘isorhythmic’ as the term is strictly
defined and generally understood) may be used to set off and mark out individual or
highlighted moments of musical and textual significance. It is true that many motets
of the early fifteenth century are rhythmically uniform and appear to follow a template,
but to suggest that this is the crowning achievement of a chronological progression to
uniformity easily undervalues the varied techniques that discipline and enliven musical
materials in other ways; fourteenth-​century motets show a great variety of composi-
tional strategies. The term is also often used in connection with motets in which the
same rhythm is repeated faster (i.e. in diminished values, so that they are no longer
‘equal’), but that does not apply here, and in any case, a restatement in reduced values is
not identical.
Example 9.1 sets out the nine rhythmically identical tenor statements—​taleae—​in the
nine roman-​numbered systems; they are preceded by a solo introduction, or introitus.11
Each of these taleae comprises one tenor rhythmic unit of eight notes spanning fifteen
breves. (In Example 9.1 each breve is given the value of one bar.) Machaut plays on

11 On the term ‘introitus’ see Ch. 1; Bent, Q15, i. 151; and Zayaruznaya, ‘[In]troitus’. I shall use it here

for upper-​part introductions before the tenor entry, although its early use may have been more restricted.
The editions of Ludwig and Schrade begin this unit at the full perfect long (three-​bar group) within which
the tenor enters, causing subsequent isorhythmic periods to start as upbeats. As in other cases (for example,
Motet 10) Machaut sets up a long-​term syncopation of the tenor structure in relation to the top parts. It starts
on the final upbeat-​bar of the introduction if arranged by perfect modus.
178 Machaut

both sets of numbers—​notes and durations—​which are not necessarily related; just as in
verbal texts, word-​count and metrical scheme may both be counted but are not mutually
dependent.
There are nine taleae each of eight notes, a total of 72; and six colores each of twelve
notes, also totalling 72. In addition, this total subdivides into three identical 24-​note cycles
starting at systems I, IV, VII, in each of which two colores span three taleae. A total of
3 × 3 =​9 rhythmic statements therefore carry 2 × 3 =​6 melodic statements.
Measured in breves (B), equalling bars, each cycle (of three taleae, two colores) occupies
3 × 15 =​45 breves, and there are three such cycles, 3 × 45 =​135 breves. With the mono-
phonic introduction of 14 breves, which stands outside this structure, the total length of the
motet is 149 breves.
The tenor falls readily into long bars, each equal to a perfect long, containing three
of the shorter top-​voice bars, each equal to a breve. There are thus five perfect longs to
each talea (5 × 3 =​15 breves). The tenor’s prevailing iambic (second-​mode) rhythm
(short–​long) is also prevalent in the motetus, while at the level of the shorter note-​
values, trochaic rhythms (long–​short) predominate. The one-​bar upbeat beginning
each talea completes the two-​bar talea-​ends and coordinates them with subsequent
color statements.

Melodic Affinities with Other Motet Tenors

Machaut seems to have relished the compositional challenges and symmetries of

this austerely conjunct tenor melody. In Motet 4, De bon espoir/​Puis que/​Speravi, he
used a longer but almost identical tenor.12 That tenor, Speravi, ‘I hoped’, comes from
Psalm 12, used as a Pentecost Introit; see Example 9.3 and sound clip 9.6 (where
drum =​ talea, triangle =​color); it embodies (as notes 3–​14) the entire melody used in
Motet 9 (bracketed and labelled Fera pessima), flanked by a few extra notes.13 He also
structured and proportioned it in the same way, this time with two eighteen-​note colores
in the time of three twelve-​note taleae.

Ex. 9.3 The tenor color of Motet 4, and its articulation by talea repetition, with
sound clip 9.6

12 For Motet 4 see Ch. 14 and Ex. 14.1.

13 The tenors of these two motets are independently derived from different chants, in both cases on words
appropriate to the motet. The overlap of melodic content surely cannot be coincidental, and it may reflect
Machaut’s fascination with exploiting this particular sequence of notes. But other cases raise interesting
questions as to when motet tenors may have been derived not directly from chant but from another motet.
The family of motets on the obscure Aptatur tenor is one clear instance of such derivation (for an addition to
this group, see now Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus); another is the unidentified Ruina, common
to Super/​Presidentes in Fauvel and Machaut’s Motet 13. This has been remarked on by Clark: ‘Super omnes
speciosa’, in connection with the shared tenors of Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima and Machaut’s Motet 17 (see Ch. 8).
 Machaut’s Motet 9 179

Machaut’s chant-​based motets with isorhythm have often been segregated from his
song-​tenor motets.14 Song-​forms are characterised by musical repetition in less regular
orderings, but a similar effect is achieved when the music is governed by a straight-​
forwardly repeating tenor, whether the repetitions are due to the song form or are pre-
sent within a chant, or whether they are produced by repetition of a chant fragment.
One such is Motet 16, Lasse/​Se j’aim mon loyal ami/​Pourquoy me bat, whose repetitive,
conjunct and serpentine song tenor is not unlike that of Motet 9; the first portion is
shown in Example 9.4 (sound clip 9.7).15

Ex. 9.4 Opening of tenor of Motet 16, with sound clip 9.7

Motet 9 also has a strong affinity with a motet in the earlier Roman de Fauvel: Tribum/​
Quoniam/​Merito hec patimur (Ch. 4).16 Its mostly conjunct tenor is from another
Matins responsory for the very same day as Fera pessima, the third Sunday of Lent.17
‘Justly we have suffered these things’ is from the same Genesis story about the envy, de-
ceit and unfraternal behaviour of Joseph’s brothers (see Ex. 9.5; sound clip 9.8). All
the vices, and especially envy, deceit and overweening pride before a fall, are prominent
in upper-​voice texts of the Fauvel motets, as they are here.18

Ex. 9.5 Chant tenor of the Fauvel motet Tribum/​Quoniam/​Merito hec patimur, with
sound clip 9.8

Upper Parts: Triplum and Motetus

The solo introduction to Machaut Motet 9, Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris/​Fera

pessima ( Example 9.1) perfectly respects a three-​bar grouping, but does not clearly

14 These are the subject of Clark, ‘Machaut’s Motets on Secular Songs’ and Hartt, ‘The Three Tenors’.
15 This A section ends with an ouvert (first-​time) ending, its restatement (not shown) with a clos (second-​
time ending); that is followed by a different B section, then two more statements of A. Compare also the ser-
pentine tenor of Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores, Ex. 7.1 above.
16 See Ch. 4 and Exx. 4.2–​4.4.
17 Ch. 4. That chapter demonstrates how the musical structure in that case depends on a pre-​existent tenor,

the verbal structure on a pre-​existent textual citation. See also Ch. 3.

18 One Fauvel motet refers to the treachery of Judas, and several have similar beastly and vituperative dic-

tion. Shared words between motets from the Fauvel circle and Machaut’s Motet 9 are shown below in bold.
The motetus of Garrit gallus takes off from the first line of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘In nova fert animus mutatas
dicere formas/​Draco nequam quem olim penitus’. Another motet from this group begins ‘Floret cum vana
gloria/​de adventus nequicia [‘evil’]/​antichristi’. Aman novi deals with superbia (pride) and reversal of for-
tune, a downfall from high to low. The motetus of Orbis orbatus (Vos pastores adulteri) refers to the followers
of Lucifer, ‘successores Luciferi’. The motetus of Tribum que starts ‘Quoniam secta latronum/​spelunca
vispilionum’.
180 Machaut

establish it; the tenor enters in B15, an upbeat whether reckoned by triplum or by talea.19
Fourteenth-​century motets show varying degrees of isorhythmic correspondence in the
upper parts (triplum and motetus), ranging from none to total identity. In this case,
the correspondence is calculatedly partial, and is confined to hocket sections (that is,
passages where the notes are ‘hiccupped’, or punctured, with rests, a pointillist passing
of notes between all three voice-​parts).
Example 9.1 is shaded to show the strictly isorhythmic portions in the upper
voices, beginning and ending two bars earlier in the triplum than in the motetus. Their
phases are thus staggered from each other, and in turn from the tenor; but triplum
and motetus still each have seven identical breves wrapped around the join to the next
talea, leaving eight breves’ worth in the middle (unshaded) that are not fully identical.20
Anne Walters Robertson has drawn attention to other ways in which this motet plays
on aspects of the ambiguous number of vices (seven or eight); here the fifteen breves
of each talea are divided into segments that, although non-​coincident in triplum and
motetus, give each voice seven breves’ worth that are isorhythmic, and eight that are
not. Example 9.1 is also marked to show the ends of poetic lines (|), the conclusions of
stanzas (separated by ||), and the starting points of colores as well as the roman-​numeral
taleae corresponding to systems of the score. B7–​B8 of each tenor talea, rhythmically
free in the texted parts, are often singled out for special music or words.
In fact, there are many more correspondences than those shaded in Example 9.1,
but they are not consistently carried through in all taleae. Some correspondences out-
side the isorhythmic areas occur in the same position in relation to the repeating
rhythm of each talea, and are therefore shown in vertical alignment in Example 9.1,
as at triplum breves 18–​19 and 33–​34; motetus breves 16–​20 and 31–​35 (sound clip
9.9), while others appear displaced obliquely in relation to that alignment (for ex-
ample, triplum breves 63–​65 and 77–​79; motetus breves 65–​67 and 84–​86; triplum
breves 51–​54 and 92–​95; sound clip 9.10), or are repeated at a different pitch (motetus
breves 17–​21 and 137–​40; sound clip 9.11). These displacements by pitch or rhythmic
alignment from one talea to another stand out; some expectation of periodic repetition
has been set up and then avoided by an artful displacement. They also serve to highlight,
support and sometimes link significant words.

Hocket Punctuation

The obsessively conjunct tenor is strikingly punctuated (or ‘punctured’: see pungit,
motetus line 7, ‘stings from behind’) by hockets in the upper parts, which not only frac-
ture the melodic line but deliberately scatter their notes with exposed skips of fourths,
pitch-​leaps which contrast with the serpentine stepwise movement of the tenor. These
leaps clearly herald each new talea. The nine hocket passages bridging the taleae are
shaded on the score, Example 9.1. Sound clip 9.12 gives B25–​B32.1, the triplum
only; sound clip 9.13 brings together the triplum and motetus at the same place;

19 Roman numerals indicate the nine talea periods from where the chant tenor begins, starting after the

introitus.
20 The motetus is not given separately here, but is reproduced in Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’.
 Machaut’s Motet 9 181

finally, sound clip 9.14 adds the tenor, illustrating three corresponding passages in
the motet, bridging taleae I–​II, II–​III, III–​IV (breves 25–​32, 40–​47, 55–​62). The notes
are different but the rhythm in each case is the same (isorhythm, again), and these
rhythms are replicated at all other talea joins, making the identities audible.

Musical Range and Cadence Choices

The tenor range is limited to a fourth, f–​bb. The triplum ranges within the octave above
middle c (c–​c′), with a high c′ for ‘Lucifer’ (B6, touched again at III, B52, for judice
justissimo); there are several occurrences of the lowest notes (middle c, cs) for triplum
words like speluncis in V (B78) and Stigos in VII (B112; caves, pits, and Stygian prisons),
and sometimes to allow the motetus to keep these triplum words down by soaring above
the triplum (as in IX, B135–​B143). The motetus range is mostly a third lower (a–​a′), but
is extended at both ends to the large compass of a twelfth. It matches the top note, c′, of
the triplum (at VI, B97), again rises above the triplum to bb at VIII, B121–​B122, and
descends below the tenor to f s in VI–​VII at B92 and B112. (Sound clip 9.22 gives the
motetus for this passage.)21 The extraordinary compass of this part is masked when the
three-​part texture is heard as a unit.
A cadencing opportunity arises wherever the tenor descends by step without an
intervening rest. ‘Cadences’ here are defined by particular progressions; the arrival
points are not necessarily moments of closure.22 Cadences are largely avoided among
the rests of the hocket sections, but the final cadence of the motet is regular, notwith-
standing the interruption of a tenor rest. In practice, singers might have adjusted this to
make the cadence coincide on B148.23 Despite the non-​coincidence of color and talea,
pitches 3–​4 of each talea are always a–​g (B3–​B5 of each talea), providing a cadencing
opportunity on g at tenor pitch 4 (B5). This opportunity is usually taken (with a normal
6/​3–​8/​5 cadence—​see next paragraph), but in a few cases where the preceding notes
2–​3 are bb–​a, the alternative opportunity to cadence on a is taken instead (in taleae IV,
VI, VII). This is shown in Table 9.1, columns 2 and 3. Note 7 of each talea is always a
(B11). Because of the different permutations of x and y (as in Ex. 9.2f above), notes 6–​7
are bb–​a in taleae I, II, IV, V, VII, VIII.
Most cadences place the tenor at the bottom of a standard progression in which a
major third proceeding to a fifth is superimposed upon a major sixth proceeding to an
octave (6/​3–​8/​5).24 These main forms, onto g and a, are given as Examples 9.6a and 9.6b
(sound clip 9.15). Exceptional cases are noted in Table 9.1. One such, not uncommon

21 Introitus, Lucifer, high c″ B6; and corresponding positions in the following taleae, I, B21–​B22, draco

ferus; III, B50–​B53, ferocissimo a judice justissimo, highest triplum note c″ with lowest tenor note f; V, penis
jaces; VI, obviare missilibus/​affatur, highest motetus note c″ with lowest triplum note c and lowest tenor note f;
VII, unison rhythms on penis in asperis, irregular progression on stigos at B112, with the lowest motetus note f
s on pungit, below the tenor, preceding Sed Maria; VIII, scorpius Scariothis; IX, Filius.
22 I use the term cadence (cadentia) here on the authority of the 14th-​c. theorist Jacobus to mean the dyadic

(two-​part) progression of an imperfect to a perfect interval, usually a third to a fifth or a sixth to an octave, and
with a stepwise descent in one of the parts, usually the lower. For the supporting text and further comment,
see Ch. 1. It is equivalent to the modern term ‘directed progression’, with the caveat that Sarah Fuller, who
introduced the term, also applies it to three-​part progressions (Fuller, ‘Directed Progression’).
23 See Ch. 12, ‘Endings’, for non-​coincident cadences, and Ch. 1.
24 These figures indicate intervals from the lowest note, with no modern connotations of triadic inversion.
182 Machaut

Table 9.1 Cadencing opportunities in Machaut, Motet 9

Bar (breve) and note numbers apply within each talea; regular cadences are in bold. Places
where the tenor does not descend to provide a cadence opportunity are shaded. An asterisk
(*) indicates a cadence opportunity that is not taken. Regular cadence progressions are
in boldface

talea B2–​B3 in each talea B4–​B5 in each B10–​B11 in each talea (tenor
(tenor notes 2–​3 =​bb–​a talea (tenor notes notes 6–​7 =​ bb–a in I, II, IV, V,
in I, III, IV, VI, VII, 3–​4 =​ a–​g in I–​IX) VII, VIII; =​g–​a in III, VI, IX)
IX; =​ g–​a in II, V, VIII)

I * 6/​3–​8/​5 tenor–​motetus 3–​5 (triplum cs)

II 6/​3–​8/​5 tenor–​motetus 6–​8 (triplum e,
irregular approach)
III * tenor–​motetus 6–​8;
triplum irregular
(B48–​9)
IV 6/​3–​8/​5 * 6/​3–​8/​5
V 6/​3–​8/​5 6/​3–​8/​5
VI tenor–​triplum 6–​8 irregular motetus 10–​8
motetus irregular
(below tenor)
VII 6/​3–​8/​5 * triplum 3–​5, motetus 3–​1 (below
tenor), irregular
VIII tenor–​motetus 10–​8 tenor–​triplum 6–​8 6/​3–​8/​5
IX * 6/​3–​8/​5 (triplum irregular; final cadence regular,
below motetus) but with a rest; tenor a–​g, 6/​3–​8/​5

elsewhere but unique in this motet, superimposes a tenth to a twelfth on a sixth to an

octave (10/​6–​12/​8: see Ex. 9.6c; sound clip 9.16). This occurs in talea III, B50–​B52,
where a climactic cadence touching the motet’s extremes of range overleaps a rest be-
tween the tenor’s g and f at the midpoint of the talea.

Ex. 9.6 Standard cadences in Motet 9:

(a) 6/​3–​8/​5 on g;
(b) 6/​3–​8/​5 on a, with sound clip 9.15;
(c) 10/​6–​12/​8 on f, with sound clip 9.16
 Machaut’s Motet 9 183

Although the contrapuntal grammar operates in two parts, cadences between pairs
of parts are often superimposed in music in three or more parts. Sometimes only two
of the three voices cadence together (see also Ch. 29). For example, tenor–​motetus at
I, B25 (Ex. 9.7a) and at II, B39 (Ex. 9.7b) both have an irregular triplum; at VIII, B124
(Ex. 9.7c), there is a triplum–​tenor cadence, with irregular motetus. Sound clip 9.17
illustrates all three moments, giving first the regular two-​voice cadence, then Machaut’s
three-​voice version.

Ex. 9.7 Partial cadences in Motet 9:

(a) B24–​B25, motetus-​tenor, triplum prevents closure;
(b) B39–​B40 motetus-​tenor, triplum approaches 5th irregularly;
(c) B123–​B24, triplum-​tenor, motetus approaches 5th irregularly, with sound clip 9.17

Example 9.8 shows how the basic 6/​3–​8/​5 progression that underlies B47–​B49
(Ex. 9.8a; sound clip 9.18) is resolved in the motetus, but that in Example 9.8b
(a simplified version of the progression in the motet; sound clip 9.19) the triplum
anticipates the resolution to d, preventing closure, and moving on to cadence on f
(as in Ex. 9.6c above).

Ex. 9.8 Displaced cadence in Motet 9, B47–​B49:

(a) basic progression, with sound clip 9.18;
(b) Machaut’s music simplified, with sound clip 9.19

Example 9.9 shows an even more complex cadential displacement for B112–​B115.
Example 9.9a shows what a normal resolution would produce for just the motetus and
tenor; Example 9.9b gives the same two-​voice progression with Machaut’s displace-
ment, this time delaying the progression of the motetus from fs to g; Example 9.9c
gives the normalised three-​voice version of Example 9.9a, still strange because of the
angular parallel progression; and Example 9.9d gives Machaut’s displacement, which
sounds stranger still, but can be logically construed by the stages just illustrated.
184 Machaut

Ex. 9.9 Displaced cadences in Motet 9 in B112–​B15:

(a) motetus and tenor only, expected resolution;
(b) motetus and tenor only, with Machaut’s displacement;
(c) all three parts, expected resolution;
(d) all three parts, with Machaut’s displacement, with sound clip 20

Examples 9.9a–​9.9d can be heard on sound clip 9.20. Other odd-​sounding moments,
notably the one at B68, can be similarly explained as displacements.

Verbal Texts and the Introduction

With both upper-​voice texts in Latin, Motet 9 is in a minority among Machaut’s 23

motets; see Table 9.2. This table also notes the presence or absence of an introitus before

Table 9.2 Machaut motets with one or both texts in Latin (out of a total of 23)

Motet no. Triplum Motetus Introduction No. of

(=​Introitus?) voices

9 Fons tocius O livoris yes—​solo 3

12 Helas! pour quoy Corde mesto no 3
(French)
17 Quant vraie amour O serie no 3
(French)
18 Bone pastor Guillerme Bone pastor qui no 3
19 Martyrum gemma Diligenter yes—​solo 3
inquiramus
21 Christe qui lux Veni creator yes—​solo and duet 4
spiritus
22 Tu qui gregem Plange regni yes—​solo and duet 4
23 Felix virgo Inviolata genitrix yes—​solo and duet 4
 Machaut’s Motet 9 185

the tenor entry. All other motets are French-​texted and none has an introduction outside
the structure. All three four-​voice Latin motets (Motets 21–​23) have a duet introduction
which starts as an extended solo. Motets 9 and 19 are the only three-​voice Latin motets to
have such an introduction, both solo only. Motet 18 is the only three-​voice Latin motet
not to have one. In all other cases the tenor starts with the texted voices at the beginning,
albeit in Motets 13, 15 and 18 with a rest which is integral to the isorhythmic structure.

Distribution of Texts in Relation to Music

The text distribution of the triplum is simple. There are ten stanzas. One is used for the
solo introduction, and the other nine receive a talea each, starting with the hocket just
ahead of each talea join (see Table 9.3). Machaut has here set himself the additional
discipline of not breaking any word with rests, even in the hockets.25 This is success-
fully carried out in the hockets, fully in the triplum’s regularly placed monosyllables and
disyllables (2 +​1 +​2), and with two exceptions in the motetus to the isolated monosyl-
lable at the beginning of each line. This must mean that the text was composed with the
extra discipline of placing monosyllables and disyllables at specific points where the
hockets were intended.26 These are words tailored for music, and music for words, in a
highly specific way that in this case is entirely non-​affective. Motet 9 is not the only one
in which Machaut contrives to avoid breaking words with musical rests: other instances
are given in Chapter 13.
The distribution of the much shorter motetus text is less straightforward. Lines 1–​7
receive one whole talea each. Then talea VIII gets three lines and IX gets two, so that
the last five text-​lines are squeezed into just two taleae. The higher proportion of notes
to syllables in most taleae conspires with a seemingly more arbitrary underlay in the
manuscripts to make it appear less purposeful than the triplum. In each talea the first
motetus note is a semibreve flanked by rests (hocket), and the text has monosyllables at
the beginning of most but not all lines. The manuscript underlay is inconsistent between
rhythmically identical taleae and avoids splitting any of these words. Example 9.1 places
a syllable on each of the isolated notes that opens each talea, in turn providing a spring-
board for the two hocketed triplum monosyllables. Five polysyllables at line beginnings
break this pattern in the verse composition. Three of these are precisely for the lines
(9, 10, 12) that do not begin a talea and are therefore not subject to the prevailing mono­
syllable discipline, and include the polysyllables Scariothis and latitat. Applying this
pattern, the two remaining disyllables at line beginnings are split with hocketing rests;
this has some logic, as they occur in the long sentence about twofold attack and double
treachery that occupies fully half the motetus, the six lines 5–​10. The words tu-​a and
re-​tro pungit (lines 5 and 7) are, in principle, split. In the latter case, the verb pungit
(‘punctures’) in motetus line 7 has already been linked with hockets.

25 On ‘monosyllable discipline’ see Chs. 13, 17, 22, 25.

26 One possible exception to this is the doubtful reading Elanguis at the beginning of stanza 10. The text,
which did not make sense here, has been mended by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens to Et anguis—​independently
of knowing the syllable/​hocket constraint, which is now perfectly observed. Two other text readings were
already corrected by Ludwig, Guillaume de Machaut; all manuscripts have auges que for auges quod (triplum
line 29) and te fuit for tenuit (triplum, line 31).
186 Machaut

Table 9.3 Distribution of text in Machaut, Motet 9

║marks where musical rests do, could or should occur in relation to words,
with monosyllables and disyllables placed so as to leave words intact, except where noted.

Stanza Line Talea Triplum text Rhyme

1 1 Introitus Fons tocius superbie, a

2 Lucifer, et nequicie a
3 Qui, mirabili specie b
4 Decoratus, a

2 5 I Eras ║ in ║ summis ║ locatus, b

6 Super thronos sublimatus, b
7 Draco ferus antiquatus b
8 Qui dicere, ║ c

3 9 II Ausus ║ es ║ sedem ║ ponere c

10 Aquilone et gerere c
11 Te similem in opere c
12 Altissimo. ║ d

4 13 III Tuo ║ sed ║ est in ║ proximo d

14 Fastui ferocissimo d
15 A judice justissimo d
16 Obviatum. ║ e

5 17 IV Tuum ║ nam ║ auffert ║ primatum; e

18 Ad abyssos cito stratum e
19 Te vidisti per peccatum e
20 De supernis. ║ f

6 21 V Ymis ║ nunc ║ regnas ║ infernis; f

22 In speluncis et cavernis f
23 Penis jaces et eternis f
24 Agonibus. ║ g

7 25 VI Dolus ║ et ║ fraus in ║ actibus g

26 Tuis et bonis omnibus g
27 Obviare missilibus h
28 Tu niteris; ║ g

8 29 VII Auges ║ quod ║ nephas ║ sceleris h

30 Adam penis in asperis h
31 Tenuit Stigos carceris. h
32 Sed Maria ║ i

9 33 VIII Virgo, ║ que, ║ plena ║ gratia, i

34 Sua per puerperia i
35 Illum ab hac miseria i
36 Liberavit, ║ k

10 37 IX Precor ║ et ║ anguis ║ tedia i

38 Augeat et supplicia i
39 Et nos ducat ad gaudia i
40 Quos creavit. k
 Machaut’s Motet 9 187

Table 9.3 Continued

Motetus

1 1 I O ║ livoris feritas, x
2 II Que ║ superna rogitas x
3 III Et ║ jaces inferius! y

2 4 IV Cur ║ inter nos habitas? x

5 V Tu -​║-​a cum garrulitas x
6 VI Nos ║ affatur dulcius, y

3 7 VII Re -​║-​tro pungit sevius, y

8 VIII Ut ║ veneno scorpius: y
9 Scariothis falsitas x
4 10 Latitat interius. y
11 IX Det ║ mercedes Filius y
12 Dei tibi debitas! x

Tenor: Fera pessima

The triplum offers the clearest possible evidence that not only the substance
of the text but also the details of its word-​breaks were planned together with the
musical design; this purpose is less clearly transmitted for the motetus. Friedrich
Ludwig’s edition follows the manuscripts in distributing these monosyllables rather
casually, observing the apparently intended word–​rest constraints in the triplum
but not in the motetus. Leo Schrade’s isolates most monosyllables with rests in the
motetus but not in the triplum. The accompanying examples and sound clips thus
correspond to Ludwig’s solution for the triplum and Schrade’s for the motetus;
Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, likewise observes both. This is a case where the
internal evidence of the compositional design of words and music leads to a solu-
tion that is not literally supported by the manuscripts. As with many other editorial
or performative decisions, it is less a question of establishing a composer’s intent
than of being alert to the internal logic and process that the composition retains as
an autonomous work, however much contextual richness may be added by referen-
tial comparisons.

Rhyme-​words at Talea-​ends

In Motet 9, all triplum stanzas have chain rhyme, i.e. the last, short line of each stanza
provides the rhyme for the first three lines of the next one. No rhymes are repeated
except for the last two. This means that the talea end-​words are all different until the
final section, which detaches Sed Maria from stanza 8 and links it to the final rhyming
couplet -​avit:
188 Machaut

Line
4 decoratus
8 dicere
12 altissimo
16 obviatum
20 de supernis
24 agonibus
28 tu niteris
=​=​=​
32 Sed Maria
36 liberavit
40 quos creavit

In the motetus, all six line-​ends in the first half of the text (lines 1–​6) also end taleae;
in the second half, only lines 7, 10 and 12 end taleae in this highly uneven text distribu-
tion, which applies to the verbal declamation an acceleration commonly (though not
here) found in the music of tenor repetitions. Note that the rhymes of stanzas 1 and 2
(-​itas, -​itas, -​ius) are reversed in stanzas 3 and 4 (-​ius, -​ius, -​itas), and that this pattern
is preserved in the lines selected for talea rhymes. The resulting talea rhyme scheme x
x y reflects the musical form of the three-​segment tenor melody (see Ex. 9.2b above).
All stanza ends have one of the two rhymes used in the motetus, a pattern very different
from the triplum (see Fig. 9.1).

Alliteration

In Motet 9 Machaut has arranged many sonic verbal correspondences, some of which
are marked in Fig. 9.2. Fera pessima links alliteratively with fons, the first triplum
word, feritas in motetus line 1, ferus in triplum 7, inferius in motetus 3 (also to
interius, motetus 10), infernis in triplum 21 (also to supernis, triplum 20). Ferocissimo
(triplum 14) also sonically conflates fera with its own superlative pessima, and at this
point (B50–​B53) is bunched with another superlative, justissimo, at the only place in

Fig. 9.1 Motetus rhyme-​words in Machaut, Motet 9

 Machaut’s Motet 9 189

Fig. 9.2 Some verbal correspondences between triplum and motetus in Machaut, Motet 9

the piece to have the musical rhythm fg ggg , and the only time when two tribrachs
come in immediate succession in the symmetrical group fg ggg ggg fg , touching c′,
the highest note in the piece, and linking it to other climaxes where this note is heard,
all the more snakily hissy with soft French ‘s’ sounds. Superlatives are picked up ono-
mato-poeically from fera pessima not only to fastui ferocissimo but also the adjacent
and musically underlined judice justissimo. These sounds are further echoed in abyssos
190 Machaut

and missilibus. Super in triplum line 6 is echoed by superna in motetus 2 and supernis
in triplum 20.
A musical echo creates an arc that spans from jaces in motetus line 3 to jaces in triplum
line 23 (breves 48–​49, 82–​83). From penis in triplum line 23 to penis in triplum line 30
spans another arc (breves 81–​85, 109–​15), which also joins this second jaces (triplum
line 23) to retro pungit in motetus line 7, where, for the only time in the motet, triplum
and motetus unite rhythmically for two bars: fg fg fg fg (B110–​B111). And all this is
without even considering careful contrasts and juxtapositions, such as the pronouns
tu and nos and their corresponding verbs, high words (superna, ymis) and low words
(inferius), a few words for good (bonis, gracia) and many for evil (falsitas, dolus, fraus,
nephas, sceleris, nequicie, peccatum).
The midpoint of the forty-​line triplum text follows line 20, separating supernis from
ymis and infernis, perhaps another reference to the Genesis creation story. This midpoint
emphasises height and depth, musically depicted by striking use of registral extremes
and voice-​crossing, while the midpoint of the motetus text emphasises treachery from
behind: retro pungit is musically reflected in the preselected retrograde capacity of the
tenor melody.
Sed Maria (triplum line 32) initiates a clear shift of gear and subject. Although
this line belongs with the preceding stanza 8, it also links by rhyme to stanza 9 and
announces the change of rhyme pattern for the last two stanzas, which correspond to
the two-​line explicit addressed to Christ that ends the motetus. Like the entire motetus,
these portions in both triplum and motetus parts are confined to two rhymes. To
recognise this division also invites us to observe a chiastic symmetry of poetic lines for
each section of the triplum, divided at 31 +​9 lines. The central line of the first chiasm
is the word obviatum (thwarted), given importance by the underlining of its verbal and
musical recapitulation as obviare (triplum breves 51–​54, 92–​95; see below, and sound
clip 9.10, third example).

Rhythmic Groupings

Musical rhythms in the upper parts of Motet 9 are almost entirely confined to the
groupings listed in Table 9.4. Machaut was already working with a small range of values,
d f g
breve , semibreve and minim , but in this piece he completely avoids short–​long
(iambic) patterns such as gf which feature in a few motets (for example in M15; see
Ch. 10). Once again, the few exceptions to this deliberately restricted background vo-
cabulary are made to stand out as conspicuous. Verbal economy and purposeful reca-
pitulation of chosen words work together with musical means to highlight particular
moments. Composers often limited themselves further within the available options, for
reasons that will be suggested below.
 Machaut’s Motet 9 191

Table 9.4 Rhythmic vocabulary of upper parts in Machaut, Motet 9

Breve units Triplum Motetus Total Comments

d 27 23 50 The rhythmic vocabulary is mostly

restricted to these few patterns, against
which variants stand out and are
reserved for special effect.
ff 28 8 36
ffg 10 10 20
fgfg 29 14 43
ggg f g 4 2 6 The last of these is on the pivotal words
Sed Maria; the first is combined with
one of the unica.
f ggg 1 only Triplum B2, echoing Motet 15.
f g ggg 1 only Two rare usages are combined in
triplum B51–​B52, to the words
ferocissimo a judice justissimo:
fg ggg ggg fg
ÌgÌg fÌg 9 Hockets at talea beginnings occur only
here.

Numbers

In addition to the musical numbers already considered, the verbal text also displays
some interesting patterns, as shown in Table 9.5. In the triplum, 31 lines occur before
the division: there are 28 words from Sed Maria to the end; both are lengths of months
counted in days. Lent, for which the tenor is prescribed, has 40 days. The numbers 7,
12, 52 and 364 may suggest a calendrical plan, perhaps worth exploring in the light of
other speculations about the origins of this motet.

Table 9.5 Calendrical dimensions in Machaut, Motet 9

Triplum Motetus Total

Lines 40 =​31 +​9 12 =​6 +​6 text =​7 +​5 music 52

Syllables 280 =​10 × (8 +​8 +​8 +​4) =​10 × 28 84 =​ 12 × 7 364
Rhymes 10 2 12
Words 124 =​96 +​28 35 =​29 +​6 159
192 Machaut

Two Sample Passages

Two extended passages especially demonstrate the intricate interplay of text and music,
here chosen to counterbalance the frequent claim in older literature that motet word-​
setting was casual or barbaric. It may not conform to our aesthetic, but observable
features invite us to try to understand theirs.
Passage 1. B46–​B83 (mid-​taleae III–​V; sound clip 9.21) span the words jaces (‘you
lie’; motetus line 3) to penis jaces (‘you lie in torments’; triplum line 23). The passage
includes the irregular cadence at B47–​B49 (Ex. 9.8b above) and (as just mentioned)
the unique and symmetrical rhythm fg ggg ggg fg for the adjacent and alliterating
superlatives at ferocissimo/​judice justissimo (B51–​B52), followed by the central triplum
word obviatum.
The triplum touches its topmost c″ in only three places in the motet. One is at Lucifer
at B6; the other two echo this at B52 and B93.
A musical near-​recapitulation of triplum B51–​B54 ‘ferocissimo a judice justissimo
obviatum’ at B92–​B95 as ‘actibus . . . et bonis omnibus obviare’ centres on a musical
rhyme for the central word, obviatum (triplum line 16) with obviare (triplum line 27).
(These two passages can be heard at the end of sound clip 9.10.)
At the low words abyssos (IV, B63–​B65) and speluncis (V, B79–​B80), the triplum
dips below the motetus for two identical passages (triplum, breves 63–​65 =​breves
77–​79; they can be heard at the beginning of sound clip 9.10); the two parts also
cross at III, B47–​B48, for the motetus’s high setting of its ‘low’ word jaces; all three
cases descend to the triplum’s lowest note c (or cs). This audible concentration of ac-
tivity is achieved by verbal and rhythmic highlighting, alliteration, extremes of range
and voice-​crossing.
Passage 2. The passage from B91 to B115 spans talea VI to mid-​talea VII. It is
bounded by the only two places where the motetus dips below the tenor, both with its
lowest note, f (or fs), which is also the lowest tenor note. The motetus thus encompasses
the range of both triplum and tenor, touching both their extremes of range. Such voice-​
crossings may be masked when listening only to the complete three-​voice texture
without seeing (or knowing in advance) how it is scored. Sound clip 9.22 gives the
motetus line (alone) from B91–​B115, showing the wide range and extreme leaps that
are masked by the voice-​crossings. Sound clip 9.23 pinpoints two identical motetus
progressions a full octave apart at breves 100–​102 and 111–​114.1. Sound clip 9.24
sets this passage in its three-​voice polyphonic context (see B91–​B115 of Ex. 9.1).
This passage spans a structural join of both textual and musical importance: the junc-
ture of taleae VI–​VII is exactly two-​thirds of the way through the motet (excluding
the introduction), and it coincides with the third and last cycle of two colores to three
taleae. The unusual distribution of the motetus text, as already noted, confines the entire
second half of that text to the final third of the piece. Thus the second half of the motetus
text is declaimed at double the rate of the first half. This is a textual application of a
device commonly used in motet tenors, where musical acceleration is used for a final
section; in this case the acceleration is in the rate of text declamation, not the speed of
musical notes.
The motetus words that start the second text half, ‘retro pungit’ (stings from behind),
also signal the point from which the rhyme scheme is reversed (i.e. retrograded) in the
 Machaut’s Motet 9 193

second half of the motetus text. In the triplum text the midway point similarly marks
the division from supernis to ymis and infernis; high to low in the triplum, back to front
in the motetus, as stated earlier. Musically, it is not uncommon for structural joins in
motets to be signalled by words signifying cutting, division, direction or measure. Here,
‘retro pungit’ is placed in the repeating tenor at the hinge point of a pattern that is both
inverted and retrogradable (see Ex. 9.10, notes 7–​11 and 12–​14). Pungit is also inter-
rupted by a tenor rest; and pun-​at B110 falls on the centre of a musical palindrome
in the tenor, B105–​B115, in addition to the word-​puncturing and musically graphic
hockets; see Example 9.10, notes 9–​12 and 1–​4. At B112 the syllable -​git joins with stigos
for what sounds to us like a double leading-​note cadence (fs–​g and cs–​d), whose resolu-
tion is strikingly and tortuously delayed.27

Ex. 9.10 Motet 9: inversion (upper brackets) and retrograde (lower brackets) patterns in
the tenor color

At B94–​B102 the motetus (at ‘affatur dulcius’) rises for the only time to its highest
note c′ (it occurs during sound clip 9.22), which is as high as the highest note of
the triplum, a pitch previously heard at triplum B6–​B9 (sound clip 9.25) and in the
passages just mentioned at B52 and B93, touching the same top c for Lucifer flying high
before his descent—​a perfect musical expression of overweening pride. The Lucifer
phrase in turn receives a musical near-​recapitulation in motetus B109–​B111 at ‘retro
pungit’ (sound clip 9.26). An unsettling dissonant moment at the end of the passage
in B112–​B115 has already been discussed (Ex. 9.9 above; sound clip 9.20).

A Parallel with Motet 15

Finally, there is a parallel between the solo opening of Motet 9 and the opening of
Motet 15 (Amours qui ha le povoir/​Faus samblant/​Vidi Dominum). We have also seen
some affinities between tenors of different Machaut motets, but other suggestive mu-
sical relationships between motets in this period are less often recognised. Only three
of Machaut’s motets start with this rhythm; the others are Motet 10 (Ch. 12) and Motet
15 (Ch. 10), closely linked in other ways, which makes an allusive relationship between
them and Motet 9 all the more intriguing. The first few bars of Motet 9 and Motet 15
have an even closer identity than is apparent on paper (see Ex. 9.11, which is laid out to
show further parallels in the continuation; sound clip 9.27); the closeness depends
on both upper parts being heard.

27 See Ch. 29 for a comparable example given by Johannes Boen, the Se grace/​Cum venerint/​Ite missa est of

the Tournai Mass.

194 Machaut

Ex. 9.11 Similarities between openings of Motet 9 and Motet 15:

(a) Motet 15, triplum and motetus, opening;
(b) Motet 9, introitus, B1–​B5, all of whose notes are present in the triplum or motetus of (a);
(c) continuation of the introitus, aligning rhythmic parallels, with sound clip 27

The rhythm fg ggg

occurs only this once in Motet 9 (see Table 9.4 above), and thus
stands out strikingly from the limited rhythmic vocabulary with which Machaut works.
That this is not part of the established vocabulary of Motet 9 might also indicate the di-
rection of the quotation, namely, that Motet 15 antedates it, though other considerations
(the extensive iambic rhythms) suggest a later date for Motet 15. By confining the choice
of rhythmic and melodic patterns within any one piece, any departures can be made to
sound more striking and purposeful—​significant phonemes that stand out from the
background language established for the piece.
Moreover, the tenor of Motet 15 is yet again from a Matins responsory, for the preceding
(second) Sunday in Lent. The text Vidi Dominum is likewise from Genesis: Jacob has
wrestled with the angel and seen the Lord face to face. The motet is Faus samblant; its
subject is deception and duplicity, it uses mirror retrograde, and it has forty tenor notes,
perhaps corresponding to the forty Lenten triplum lines of Motet 9.28

Conclusion

Such things as are pointed out here cannot all be heard in a single performance or by an
unprepared listener. But the experienced listener who, like Boethius’s musicus, ‘exhibits
the faculty of forming judgements according to speculation or reason’, will be drawn
to considerations and reflections outside the time it takes to perform the music, just
as Dante demands longer and more multi-​dimensional reflection than is possible in
the time it takes to recite passages from his Commedia. As with all informed listening,
whether as basic music appreciation or advanced analysis, discovering what subtleties
have been planted by the composer may increase understanding and pleasure when the
piece is heard as an entity. Repeated hearings will yield up many other features than
those singled out here, including overall rhythmic structure and tenor repetitions, sonic

28 See Brownlee, ‘Machaut’s Motet 15’, and Bent, ‘Machaut’s Motet 15’ (=​Ch. 10).
 Machaut’s Motet 9 195

verbal aspects such as alliteration, use of musical ranges and voice-​crossing, hockets
and verbal planning according to musical rests, local rhythms and exceptions to the
basic rhythmic vocabulary, verbal links between triplum and motetus, long-​range
verbal and musical repetitions.
The sound of modern performances and recordings may beckon us into the realm of
early music, but it is only when we recognise performance sound to be a modern con-
struction, however beautiful, that we may penetrate beyond it, to the intrinsic content of
the music independently of performance, and learn new ways of listening to unfamiliar
musical styles. We cannot recover the sounds of medieval music as it was heard then,
but we can recover much of its sense and particularity. Music only happens when it
sounds, but works of music exist independently of individual performances. It is by this
paradox that we are empowered to understand much about medieval music, as we can
of ancient literatures, even lacking any recoverable notion of its original sound. Armed
with a deeper understanding of how the music works, performers of music, as of poetry
and drama, are liberated to communicate that understanding in more fulfilling ways
than simply following instructions or ‘singing the dots’.
 10
Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number
in Machaut’s Motet 15

'The original version of this chapter on M15 (Amours qui a le pouoir/​Faus Samblant
m’a deceü/V ​ idi dominum) was published under the same title, together with, and
designed to complement, a paper on the motet’s texts by Kevin Brownlee, ‘Machaut’s
Motet 15’, in Early Music History (10) 1991, a welcome addition by a leading literary
scholar to then-​current studies that apply literary, textual and historical insights to
fourteenth-​century motets. This pair of articles followed seminar presentations we had
made jointly on several of Machaut’s French-​texted motets. What follows is a slightly
revised version of my contribution to our collaboration on M15. In general, I now draw
back from what was perhaps an earlier overemphasis on the golden section relationship
in textual–​musical construction, but have retained those references here where I think
they do carry some weight.
Motet 15, Amours qui a le pouoir/​Faus Samblant m’a deceü/​Vidi dominum, is given as
Example 10.1 in an annotated copy based on Leo Schrade’s edition.1 One of the striking
features of this motet as printed by Friedrich Ludwig, Schrade and Jacques Boogaart
is the dissonant appoggiatura at the end of the triplum. Although confirmed by all
sources, it is hard to accept, even as a deliberate piece of word-​painting of desconfiture
and nonchaloir, the final triplum and motetus words, when we can point to so few uses
of dissonance that bypass grammatical convention in the service of depiction.2 An al-
ternative ending is provided in Example 10.1, making the last triplum notes in- ggfs
stead of fds . This small violation of the isorhythmic correspondence imposes a choice
between musical conformity and formal congruence, but the final notes of the upper-​
voice isorhythm are truncated anyway. It respects the -​ure feminine rhyme and matches
the corresponding point at the cadential arrival.
M15 is 120 breves long. The tenor consists of one color (melodic iteration) disposed
in four equal taleae (rhythmic iterations) each of ten perfect longs, here numbered Ia,
Ib, IIa, IIb. 10 longs × 3 =​30 breves; 4 taleae × 30 =​120. Peter’s threefold denial and
the 30 pieces of silver paid for Judas’s betrayal have associations of deceit; the choice of
these numbers for a motet about deceit may be far from accidental.3 The tenor has 40
notes, 10 in each talea, 20 in each half. The 10s of the tenor, whether counted as notes or
breves, when multiplied by 12 produce 120.

1 PMFC 2. For a new edition based on MachautA, with excellent commentary and manuscript variants,

see now Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart.

2 Non-​coincident endings are considered in Ch. 1 and Exx. 1.1 and 1.2. See also Ch. 14: desconfiture is also

the final word in M8, but has no such dissonant suspension.

3 For the ‘deceitful’ use of 30 in a Fauvel motet see Arlt, ‘Triginta denariis’, and Ch. 12 n. 18. Johannes Boen’s

Ars [musicae] discusses tenor disposition, taking as his example the number of 30 tenor notes in two motets
on Alma redemptoris mater that have been attributed to Vitry: Impudenter circumivi/​Virtutibus and Apta
caro/​Flos virginum.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0011
198 Machaut

Ex. 10.1 Machaut, Motet 15, Amours qui a le pouoir/​Faus Samblant m’a deceü/​Vidi dominum
 Machaut’s Motet 15 199

Ex. 10.1 Continued

200 Machaut

Ex. 10.1 Continued

 Machaut’s Motet 15 201

Ex. 10.1 Continued

202 Machaut

The Texted Parts

The music of triplum and motetus is disposed in two rhythmically identical taleae each
of 60 breves, each spanning two 30-​breve tenor taleae (Ia +​Ib =​IIa +​IIb); the motet falls
into two rhythmically identical halves. The midpoints of those halves are marked by the
second and fourth tenor taleae (Ib, IIb) and also by the four divisions of the motetus
text. Georg Reichert coined the term Großtalea for where an upper-​voice talea spans
multiple tenor taleae, as in Motets 12, 15 and 21.4 But viewed another way, triplum and
motetus can both be divided into two pairs of varied taleae (Ia =​IIa, Ib =​IIb), coinciding
with the equal taleae of the tenor. In each of these four 30-​breve periods the first three
breves (actually four in the triplum), and the last 15 (the entire second half), are rhyth-
mically identical. (These passages are shaded in Ex. 10.1.) Thus a total of just over 18
bars out of each 30 are rhythmically the same.5 Such large and systematic deviations
within otherwise identical sections in the upper voices may be considered part of the
deceptive programme of the motet.
The texts (see Table 10.1) differ hierarchically in length, as triplum and motetus
normally do, and each is differently patterned. They are distinct as are their subjects,
Amours and Faux Semblant, which Brownlee shows to be presented in an apparent op-
position that is in fact false.6 The triplum text’s 38 lines divide by line count, metrical and
rhyme scheme only at the middle, its 19 +​19 lines matching the two musical periods of
both upper parts. Each half follows the same rhyme scheme but with only the ‘b’ rhyme
(-​ure) maintained throughout both halves. The twelve b-​lines each have six syllables, all
other lines seven:

a7 a7 b6 a7 a7 b6 c7 c7 c7 b6 c7 c7 b6 c7 b6 c7 c7 c7 b6 |

d7 d7 b6 d7 d7 b6 e7 e7 e7 b6 e7 e7 b6 e7 b6 e7 e7 e7 b6 |

The parallel duplication makes regularity out of these two irregular forms. Similarly
irregular but paired stanzas in Machaut’s lais are also subjected to a similar rhyme
discipline.
The motetus text has twelve lines, arranged in four groups of three lines, each of
which has abc rhyme and 7–​8–​7 syllables.

a7 b8 c7 | a7 b8 c7 | a7 b8 c7 | a7 b8 c7

The four three-​line groups correspond to the four taleae of the tenor; they thus en-
courage an interpretation of the upper parts as four taleae with deviations, whereas the
textual structure of the triplum favours a division into only two strictly repeating halves.
Just as false-​seeming may go in either of two directions, so the Faus Samblant motetus

4 Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’, 202. I now prefer to reserve the term talea for iterations that are either exact or

homographic, ‘period’ where there are deviations; further on this and related terms see Ch. 12 n. 17. See also
notes to the table in Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 222–​24; Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’, 30, 37.
5 The golden section of 30 falls at 18.54.
6 Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’, gives valuable analyses of the text forms of Machaut motets; M15 is one of only

eight motets with clear strophic forms (Reichert, p. 202). Motets 4, 7, 8, 9 10, 15 are among those where both
voices have strophe/​talea alignment.
 Machaut’s Motet 15 203

could have adapted its structure either to the four equal musical taleae of the two-​faced
tenor (‘facie ad faciem’) or to the two parallel textual halves of the triplum.7 In fact, the
music of both upper parts does both; they can be interpreted either as two strict or as
four varied taleae. The composer’s duplicitous and ambivalent strategy is reflected in
such a reading.
Counting elided words as two, the triplum’s 83 +​85 words are so arranged that the Et
that begins line 20 just anticipates the musical midpoint; the triplum thus has 84 words
in each musical half of the piece.8 The coincidence of the midpoint of the music with the
midpoint of the triplum word count makes possible a strict correspondence between
word and note in the rhythmic repetitions. Musical overlapping of structural joins is
often found in motets; here we find textual construction following the same procedure
by a slight dislocation of line count and word count.
In similar fashion, and by word count, the first half of the motetus text has 30 words
and the second half 32. The central thirty-​first word is Las!, and there are 31 words
after it, starting with the parallel to line 1. This may be heard as an He-​las spanning
the musical midpoint, with the triplum’s Et that starts line 20, word 84, preceding and
aurally linked to Las! in the motetus.9 The midpoint by word count in both triplum
and motetus thus falls after the first word of the second half of the text as defined by
lines and syllables, again at the musical middle, coinciding in both texts, and joined
together.

The Tenor

The words of the tenor beyond the incipit, Vidi dominum, are not supplied in the
manuscripts but can be reinstated to the slightly varied chant. The notes for the final
anima mea are left off, leaving unstated what it is that is saved. Nine syllables fall in
each half of the motet, with one of the two ‘faces’ mirrored in each half around the
midpoint of both text and music, the second (faciem) following the musical golden
section:

Vidi dominum facie ad |

faciem [et] salva facta est . . .

7 Zayaruznaya, ‘She has a Wheel’, 206–​9, adds some excellent supplementary observations. She is not

quite right to say (p. 208) that M15’s voice-​crossings have never been commented upon: Boogaart is the only
previous analyst to have noted the extent and importance of such crossings. Here, he argues that they depict
the reversals that form the heart of the biblical history of Jacob and Esau: ‘O series summe rata’, 108. When
I wrote the original version of this article on M15 I had not yet given full attention to voice-​crossings as I did
in the study of M9 which is now Ch. 9, aspects of which were to bear fruit in Zayaruznaya’s dissertation and
beyond.
8 The triplum has 268 notes, 38 lines and 168 words (counting elided words, transcribed with

apostrophes, as two words). The motetus has 188 notes, 12 lines and 62 words.
In the following, x +​y means: x is the number of words counting elided words, transcribed with
apostrophes, as single words; y is the number of words with apostrophes; x +​y is the word count reckoning
M’a as two words:
triplum, 78 +​5, 78 +​7 in the two halves (83, 85)
motetus, 27 +​3, 28 +​4 (30, 32).
9 Other striking instances of meaningful verbal play between triplum and motetus include the second

color of Vos/​Gratissima (see Ch. 8).

 204 Machaut

Table 10.1 Texts of Machaut’s Motet 15

Translations are taken from Brownlee, ‘Machaut’s Motet 15’, 3.

Triplum Translation Rhyme Syllables Words

Amours qui a le pouoir Love, who has the power a 7 5

De moy faire recevoir to make me receive a 7 4
Joie ou mort obscure, either joy or dark death, b 6 4
Ne fait par sa grace Avoir does not, through his grace, a 7 6
5 A ma dame tel voloir give my lady the desire a 7 5
Qu’elle m’ait en cure. to care for me. b 6 6
Durer ne puis longuement, I cannot last for long, c 7 4
Car pour amer loiaument because neither from loyal loving, c 7 4
Ne pour servir liement, nor from gracious serving c 7 4
10 Sans penser laidure, (without an ugly thought), b 6 3
Ne pour celer sagement nor from discreet concealing, c 7 4
N’ay confort n’aligement do I have comfort or relief c 7 5
De ma dolour dure; from my harsh pain. b 6 4
Einsois com plus humblement Rather, the more humbly c 7 4
15 La sueffre et endure, I suffer and endure it, b 6 4
De tant est plus durement the more harshly c 7 5
Traitiés mes cuers, que is my heart treated, so that I shall c 7 5
briefment shortly
Morray dolereusement sadly die c 7 2
De dueil et d’ardure, of grief and burning desire, b 6 5/​83
(midpoint)
20 Et tant sui plus eslongiés and the farther I am removed d 7 5
De merci et estraingiés from favour and the more I am distanced d 7 4
De ma dame pure. from my pure lady. b 6 4
Mais aveuc tous ces meschiés But with all these misfortunes, d 7 5
Sueffre Amours qui est mes Love (who is my lord) allows d 7 6 Amours:
chiés, word 103
25 Que Raison, Droiture, Reason, Equity, b 6 3
Douçour, Debonnaireté Sweetness, Good Nature, e 7 2
Franchise, Grace et Pité Openness, Grace and Pity e 7 4
N’ont pouoir à Cruauté, to have no power against Cruelty e 7 5
Ensois regne et dure Instead, there reigns continuously b 6 4
30 En corps d’umblece paré in a body adorned with humility e 7 5
Cuers qui est pleins de durté a Heart which is completely hard e 7 6
Et de couverture, and closed, b 6 3
Refus qui d’espoir osté Refusal who has taken e 7 5
M’a la morriture, the food of hope away from me, b 6 4
35 Et Dangiers qui despité and Resistance who has spurned me e 7 4
M’a sans cause et si grevé without cause and has so injured me e 7 7
Qu’il m’a par desdaing mené that he has led me, through disdain, e 7 7
A desconfiture. to my ruin. b 6 2/​85

Motetus

1 Faus Samblant m’a deceü False Seeming has deceived me a 7 5

Et tenu en esperance and has held out the joyful hope b 8 4
De joie merci avoir; of my obtaining favour. c 7 4
 Machaut’s Motet 15 205

Table 10.1 Continued

Motetus

Et je l’ay com fols creü And I like a fool believed him, a 7 7

5 Et mis toute ma fiancé and put all the trust b 8 5
En li d’amoureus vouloir. of my loving desire in him. c 7 5/​30

Las! or m’a descongneü Alas! now he has undeceived me, a 7 5

Quant de moy faire aligence after having had the time and the b 8 5
Ha heü temps et pooir; power to win my allegiance; c 7 5

10 N’en riens n’a recongneü In no way has he rewarded a 7 6

Ma dolour ne ma grevance, my pain and my suffering, b 8 5
Eins m’a mis en nonchaloir. rather he has treated me badly. c 7 6/​32

As already pointed out, triplum and motetus divide musically at the middle into two rhyth-
mically identical arcs (breves 1–​60 =​61–​120), each of which encompasses two rhyth-
mically identical tenor taleae. This structure perfectly accommodates the triplum text,
whose rhyme structure is suited only to a division at the middle, and is compatible with
the motetus text, which divides into quarters. It is also possible to interpret the triplum
and motetus as constituting four periods with deviation between breves 4 and 15.10 Not
only are the opening rhythms of both triplum and motetus repeated at the beginnings of
the second and fourth tenor taleae (Ib, IIb, bars 31, 91) as well as the first and third (Ia, 1;
IIa, 61); in addition, at the second (Ib, bars 31–​33) both triplum and motetus strikingly
maintain identical pitches for three breves’ duration, so that bars 1–​3 are, quite excep-
tionally, fully identical with bars 31–​33, an added false-​seeming, since not even rhythmic
identity is maintained between the fourth and fifteenth breves. The listener is thereby
deceived into expecting that the triplum and motetus are going to have not two but four
regular taleae, corresponding to the four of the tenor. The deceit is further signalled here
(at the second tenor talea Ib) by the triplum words pour celer saigement, and the motetus’s
et je l’ay com fols creu. Indeed, all four tenor taleae are initiated with words of deceit in
the motetus, the voice of Faux Semblant: in addition to these words at talea 2 (Ib), talea 1
(Ia) starts with deceu, talea 3 (IIa) with descongneu, 4 (IIb) with recongneu. At talea 3 (IIa)
the beginning of the more concealed ‘real’ repeat, it is least conspicuous, indeed, ‘wisely
concealed’, and lasting only one breve. Thus, in the motetus, the two parallel halves of
the music open with the very close textual parallel ‘Faux Semblant has deceived’, ‘he has
undeceived’. The ‘deceitful’ musical repetition occurred in the first half (we were deceived
at Ib); it is not maintained (hence undeceived, descongneu) at talea 3 (IIa, the true repeat),
to which the revelation to Jacob (tenor faciem) is also linked. At talea 4 (IIb, bar 91), the

10 I now reserve the term talea for identity of upper-​part rhythms, though I used it more freely in the

earlier publication of this chapter, as does Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures. See above n. 4, and
Ch. 12 n. 17.
206 Machaut

second ‘deceptive’ repeat, Faux Semblant fails to reward (n’a recongneu); here, moreover,
the triplum figure of the opening (a aga) appears a fifth lower (d dcd), changing places
with the motetus as Jacob had with Esau, in disguise, a further false-​seeming that abases
itself in a downward transposition to the words corps d’umblece. This inverts a formal
device of Machaut’s lais, where the twelfth stanza climactically duplicates the first a fifth
higher. The middles of the middles (the beginnings of taleae 2 and 4, bars 31 and 91) thus
become nodes of deception or ambiguity.
In sense, too, the true middle of the piece is signalled by the self-​conscious measuring
of time and distance. ‘Briefment morray dolereusement de dueil et d’ardure’ brings us to
the middle of the triplum, while the second half starts off by the author measuring his
distance, ‘Et tant sui plus eslongiés’.11
The four motetus groups end respectively with the words avoir, voloir, pooir,
nonchaloir. Three out of these four words are shared in the -​oir rhyme of the triplum
(lines 1, 2, 4, 5): pouoir, recevoir, avoir, voloir; all these triplum words are heard within
the first half of talea Ia, and are then heard, with the order of the pairs reversed, to end
each of the four tenor taleae, thus underscoring, through the only shared rhymes be-
tween the texts, the rhythmic identity of the four musical endings. This could also be
seen as applying a musical conceit to the verbal form.
The first five lines of the triplum form an acrostic: ADINA.12 Adina, in Jewish tra-
dition, is the mother of Rachel and Leah, and David Howlett reminded me that Jacob
and Leah’s youngest daughter was named Dinah (Genesis 30: 21), another Genesis ref-
erence relating to Jacob.13 The first note of the triplum is a, sung to a word beginning
with A; the phrase for the last A of Adina begins and ends on a and the whole five-​line
passage is set off by a rest after the first rhyme, voloir, perhaps confirming that the
b-​rhyme of line 6 belongs in structure, if not in sense, with what follows, as is more
clearly the case after the corresponding line 24. All other major rests in the triplum
follow the b-​rhymes of lines 6, 10, 15 and 19 and fall correspondingly in the second half
of the motet. So the acrostic lines are isolated; their somewhat special treatment might
encourage belief that the acrostic is intentional rather than accidental. Concealment of
various kinds may be signalled by the prominent long note given near the beginning to
obscure (triplum, line 3; bars 7–​9), as well as by the hiding of structural joins by musical
and textual overlapping.
The final lines of the paired poems, in which the speaker bemoans his ruin (triplum)
and bad treatment (motetus) are opposed to Jacob’s wrestling with the angel that lead
to his blessing and re-​naming as Israel, after which he says ‘I have seen the Lord face to
face; and my soul is preserved’ (Genesis 32: 30). Just as the ambiguities of the upper-​
voice texts are presented as two faces or facets of the same tenor foundation, so are they
reconciled in disparity both musically, and with respect to textual form. This supports
Brownlee’s claim that his first opposition, between Amours and Faux Semblant, is in-
deed only apparent.

11 One recalls Gurnemanz’s midday exposition to Parsifal in the middle of Act 1: ‘Zum Raum wird hier

die Zeit’.
12 Although the motet is full of betrayed faith, I hesitate to make too much of the acrostic FEDE that begins

the motetus.
13 Adina also has vowel rhyme with anima, the thing that is saved in the tenor’s full phrase, though the

tenor music stops short of the passage containing that word.

 Machaut’s Motet 15 207

As to the second, ‘true’ opposition, that between ‘the world of human seeming and
the world of divine being’, I suggest that the choice of Jacob’s words for the tenor is less
straightforward than ‘divine being’ implies. The biblical Jacob who utters the tenor
words ‘Vidi Dominum facie ad faciem, et salva facta est anima mea’ is the musical and
symbolic foundation of the motet. The tenor’s facie ad faciem, face to face, advertises
itself (to the initiated) as a two-​faced seeing; the words follow Jacob’s re-​naming as
Israel—​two names. 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 birth-
right and of his father’s blessing), as he was in turn deceived by Laban when he served
seven years for Rachel and was then instead given her sister Leah. The first deception
was promoted by his mother Rebekah, the second by her brother Laban, another sib-
ling relationship in this complex of sibling pairs. 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. The motet’s startling
alignment of the God of Jacob and the god of love is highlighted in the triplum text by
the false-​seeming pun on mischief, meschies, and my lord, mes chies. The tenor is here
being recruited to underscore a double meaning, in both its biblical and liturgical set-
ting; it opposes the god of love (who has deceived the lover) to the God of Jacob, and it
parallels, by simultaneous presentation, the deceptions of which Jacob was perpetrator
and victim with those of Amours and Faux Semblant. Faux Semblant is ‘accepted into
the army of the god of love’; the treacherous Jacob is accepted, renamed Israel, and sees
his God after combat with the angel.
The opening triplum word, Amours, makes one other appearance in that text, in line
23. The twenty-​fourth line is ‘Sueffre Amours qui es mes chies’ (with its critical pun
on mischief and ‘my lord’, the god of love).14 The key word Amours is here preceded by
‘mischief ’ and followed by ‘my lord’, and is thus flanked by the two punned appearances
of mischief in lines 23 and 24. (Machaut’s Motet 10 also includes the line ‘Amours qui est
mes chies’, and precedes Amours symmetrically with meschies: see Ch. 12.) The opening
word Amours recurs as word 103, at the golden section of the triplum’s 168 words;
Amours is not only situated between the bad and good faces of the mischief pun, but
functions as both the herald and the pivot of the entire triplum text to separate bad and
good things in general. Line 24, in turn, directly precedes the musical golden section at
bar 75, a turning-​point that is preceded by bad things and followed by the list of seven
virtues (in lines 25–​27, and with the rhythmic recurrence).15 That the golden section of
triplum text by lines and words just anticipates the musical golden section gives struc-
tural weight to a turning-​point of textual sense. The first-person motetus words ‘moy
faire aligence’ span the mischief pun in the triplum, tying the motetus text to the music
at this point; the golden section word itself is moy, the thirty-​eighth of 62. The tenor
word at this same point is, appropriately, faciem. The je of both upper parts is paralleled
by the first person of the tenor, Vidi, in the voice of Jacob; he has seen the face of God,

14 The 38 lines divide by golden section at 23.48 and 14.52. This line just precedes B74; the 120 breves of

music divide by golden section at 74.16 (i.e. in B75) and 45.84.

15 The seven virtues immediately following the musical golden section are headed by raison; Jeffrey Dean

pointed out in conversation that this also meant a mathematical relation, from ratio, in which sense it is used
in Boethius’s De institutione arithmetica. This could therefore be another instance of a punning word of meas-
urement made to coincide with a significant structural point.
208 Machaut

has loved, deceived and been deceived. Brownlee shows that the je of the triplum has
been moved by love while the je of the motetus has been deceived by Faux Semblant.
The two ‘contrasting self-​presentations’ are here made simultaneous, two-​faced. Faux
Semblant speaks in his own voice in the Roman de la rose; he is introduced into the
poem by the god of love. We might add that Jacob in the tenor speaks in his own voice,
setting up a simultaneous presentation of the Dominus he saw, in the tenor, with the
god of love, ‘Amours qui est mes chies’, in the triplum. In the motetus Brownlee finds
‘a contrastive self-​presentation of the speaking subject as an unwitting victim of Faux
Semblant, who has purposefully and successfully deceived him (by means of his lady’s
appearance) before openly revealing his deception’. The clothing of the lady deceives;
the clothing of the music deceives. ‘Faux Semblant’s clothes and his words deceive qua
signs.’16 Faux Semblant wants to conceal his whereabouts. False-​seeming is, after all,
exactly what Jacob had earlier undertaken by means of clothing in deceiving their blind
father Isaac and stealing Esau’s birthright, even to the extent of changing his exterior by
wearing Esau’s clothes and feigning hairiness with the kid skins that were the byproduct
of his mother Rebekah’s fake venison.
The tenor not only opposes the divine being, represented by liturgical chant, to the
human loving of the upper parts; it itself embodies many layers of duplicity. As well as
being presented simultaneously, the music and text of tenor, triplum and motetus are
in completely parallel symmetry, face to face. Of the two ‘faces’ in the tenor, one falls in
each half of the motet. The two faces of the tenor are matched, feigned or avoided, and
matches in turn are made, feigned or avoided with the upper parts in matters of metrical
and musical structure. Many other promising aspects, such as phonic coordination of
vowel and consonant sounds between the triplum and motetus, and the full extent of
verbal reference between their texts, have not been explored here. This richly suggestive
counterpoint of musical and textual structures and symbolism invites a parallel exami-
nation of other Machaut motets.17

16Brownlee, ‘Machaut’s Motet 15’, 8.

17Since the original published version of this article in 1991, insightful work along these lines includes
Boogaart, ‘Love’s Unstable Balance’; Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’; Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’;
Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart; Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art; and Zayaruznaya, ‘She has a Wheel’.
 11
The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass

At least two studies of the 1990s affirmed the continuing and active reception of
Machaut’s Mass since its composition. Anne Walters Robertson demonstrated from
their epitaph in Reims cathedral that Guillaume de Machaut and his brother Jean, both
canons, had endowed a foundation for a Saturday Lady Mass that was to become a
Requiem after their deaths.1 Despite the unusual provision of a specifically polyphonic
mass in such a bequest, supporting evidence comes from congruence between regional
chant features and Machaut’s cantus firmi, a reconstruction of Machaut’s will, and a new
transcription of the brass epitaph commemorating the brothers. Her essay and subse-
quent book provide a rich context that enhances the Mass’s historical importance well
beyond its significance as a purely musical survival. The other work specifically devoted
to the Mass is Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson’s commentary and edition, which at last made
it readily available to scholars and performers.2 His publishers have allowed him to de-
fend every editorial decision at length, a luxury to be envied by all who have been held
by procrustean editorial policies in past decades to produce—​and to read—​dense and
cryptic commentary. These two publications stand for different ways, neither opposed
nor separable, of approaching a musical work of the past. One anchors the historical,
liturgical and institutional context of the Mass’s creation and early use, and the other
scrutinises the musical text itself for evidence of Machaut’s compositional process and
intentions. Both in principle take account of all evidence that might bear on the fullest
understanding of the work in its historical context. Both are valuable and complemen-
tary, without exhausting all possibilities for furthering such understanding.
In the spirit of dialogue envisaged for the volume in which this essay was first
published, I here set out a view different from Leech-​Wilkinson’s, a view not so much
of the unknowable mysteries of Machaut’s creative process as of their observable
consequences, reciprocally diagnosed against underlying assumptions. I discuss here
the texted body of the Gloria, with a brief glance at the Credo, but excluding the Amens.
The similarities between these two movements have perhaps been stressed more than
the differences; they are superficially alike in their more-​or-​less simultaneous style and
texting, the tenor–​contratenor interludes and sustained-​note passages, the four-​part
texture spiced with Pulcinella-​like ‘wrong notes’ and austere ‘parallel-​leading-​note’
cadences. The melismatic Amens differ from the texted bodies of these movements in
range and disposition of voices. Although observations about the body of the Gloria

This essay was first published in Leach (ed.), Machaut’s Music (2003). This revised version is published with
the permission of the Boydell Press. For a thoughtful critical evaluation of the present proposals, see Maw,
‘Machaut and the “Critical” Phase’, 264–​67.
1 Robertson, ‘The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut’, and subsequently, Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut,

272, suggesting that the brothers made their endowment and probably their wills in the early 1360s.
2 Leech-​Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass. Machaut studies would be much the poorer without Lawrence Earp’s

indispensable vade mecum (Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide), which draws together magisterially a century of
accumulated scholarship. In this case, see 540, 581, 344–​46.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0012
210 Machaut

need adaptation for the different procedure and disposition of the Credo, similar gen­
eral conclusions stand for both movements.3 A starting point for the present investiga-
tion was this challenge, laid down by Leech-​Wilkinson as a central hypothesis:

If the four voices of the Gloria and Credo have consistently independent functions,
if, in other words, the Tenor behaves as a referential line for Triplum, Motetus and
Contratenor, each making correct counterpoint with it (if not necessarily with one an-
other), if the Contratenor behaves as a conventional contratenor, making counterpoint
against the tenor, and so on; then it may be said that the parts could have been written
successively. At least, there is no absolute necessity for them to have been composed
together.
But in the Gloria and Credo the four voices do not consistently have these functions.
Dissonances (most significantly, fourths) occur in every combination of upper and
lower voices.4

Although Leech-​Wilkinson’s goal is to reconstruct compositional procedure rather

than to disqualify historically informed analysis, he here categorically denies that these
movements can be understood in terms of fourteenth-​century counterpoint princi-
ples. While accepting the principle of a cantus–​tenor framework, he repudiates what
he sees as its implications for chronological or conceptual priority.5 But the problem
lies not with the cantus–​tenor model, rather with too simple a view of what that model
implies. While temporal priority unquestionably applies for some pieces that survive in
different states, it is by no means a necessary assumption for what, for want of a better
term, is called ‘successive composition’. Aristotle in Categories, ­chapters 12 and 13, deals
with concepts of non-​temporal priority and non-​temporal simultaneity, models that
fit such musical situations rather well.6 Kevin Moll describes as conceptually or refer-
entially pre-​eminent such a qualitative priority that is not necessarily chronological.7
Whatever we call it, it no more demeans the musicianship or creative capacity of a com-
poser to isolate layered structures than it does to parse the grammar of a literary work.
‘Counterpoint is successive in principle, though a composer could conceive more than
two parts together in such a way that they still reflected an underlying “successive” dy-
adic grammar’,8 and:

It is not a corollary of dyadic procedure that it limits what can be heard or conceived in the
mind. The order of conception is not confined by the grammar. When a native speaker
utters a complex and grammatically correct sentence, he surely did not start by thinking
of it as a simple subject-​verb-​object sentence, only then expanding it, even though the
sentence can be parsed in an order other than that of its devising. Internalised grammar

3 Moll, ‘Structural Determinants’, 345–​46 argues that there could indeed be a chronological separation be-

tween the Gloria and Credo.

4 Leech-​Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass, 56–​57.
5 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Machaut’s Rose, lis’, 11. Bent, ‘Grammar’, develops at greater length some of the princi-

ples applied here, and might usefully be read in conjunction with the present chapter.
6 I am grateful to Myles Burnyeat for locating this passage.
7 Moll, ‘Voice Function’, and ‘Texture and Counterpoint’.
8 Bent, Counterpoint, 56.
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 211

permits correct articulation of a complex thought, whether in words or music, without

violating or necessarily consciously invoking that grammar. As with speech, we need not
assume that musical ideas occurred to a composer in grammatical order. While ‘succes-
sive’ composition should not necessarily be taken to mean that the piece was composed
in that order (although sometimes it almost certainly was), it does mean that the piece
was conceived in such a way that the grammatical skeleton was not violated. Exceptions
and anomalies can then be isolated, will take on greater interest, and lead to extended
formulations of the rules; grammars have irregular verbs or idioms and tolerate exceptions,
and advanced accounts of them take account of such experience in usage. ‘Successive’ in
music should refer to the procedure uncovered by analysis and inherent in its grammar,
and not necessarily to the order of working or compositional process of a native-​speaking
composer. To talk in terms of triadic harmony no more means that we cannot cope with
the five components of a dominant ninth (or the seven or eight of a dominant thirteenth),
than dyadic counterpoint means that medieval composers could not conceive sonorities
of three, four, five parts as extensions of the underlying dyadic grammar. A dyadic basis
doesn’t confine composers to hearing only two parts at a time any more than triadic har-
mony means that its practitioners cannot hear polychords.9

Gilbert Reaney set out in 1953 an eminently sensible account of fourteenth-​century

‘harmony’, the term he used as a modern equivalent to medieval understandings of
‘counterpoint’.10 Although I would now adjust his emphases and make qualifications,
this article importantly delineates some of the background expectations against which
Machaut’s usage is defined. Leech-​Wilkinson is severe in judging that Reaney’s article
‘still deserves admiration for the courage with which it sets out to support a widely held
but hopelessly illogical view’, when his own account fails to define an alternative musical
procedure.11 He reported Richard Crocker as an ‘early challenge’ to Reaney’s position,
apparently without recognising that Crocker staunchly championed the same contra-
puntally based dyadic procedures:

If . . . the two-​part framework was not linear counterpoint in the first place, then the third
voice may not be either. Here we must avoid the false dichotomy between linear coun-
terpoint and (triadic) harmony. . . . If the first step is the composition of a progression of
two-​note chords, then the third voice is added not as a third melody but as an enrichment
of those chords.12

9 Bent, ‘Grammar’, 33. Fuller, ‘Contrapunctus Theory’, 117–​18, strongly criticises my approach. She is not

quite correct to say that I advocate approaching these repertories solely through dyadic counterpoint; I argue
that to understand it as the background grammar to composed music is a necessary prerequisite to analysis,
from which there may be many deviations and extensions in practice. See also Ch. 29.
10 Reaney, ‘Fourteenth-​Century Harmony’, 129 n. 1. Hughes, ‘Some Notes’, supplies further evidence for

the contratenor being added to a prior discant–​tenor duet. ‘Successive’ composition is also presumed by
Aldrich, ‘An Approach’. The suggestion that composers’ capacities are thus limited does sometimes occur in
the older literature, such as Ulrich and Pisk, A History of Music, 79. See also Bent, ‘Notes on the Contratenor’,
and Westerhaus, ‘A Lexicon of Contratenor Behaviour’.
11 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Machaut’s Rose, lis’, 23 n. 2, and Reaney, ‘Fourteenth-​ Century Harmony’. Leech-​
Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, especially chs. 2 and 3, make it clear how his view of
medieval ‘harmony’ has been shaped by the bright, sharp, a cappella sonorities, with simultaneous texting,
cultivated by Christopher Page’s Gothic Voices.
12 Crocker, ‘Discant, Counterpoint, and Harmony’, 12.
212 Machaut

This is surely the view that Leech-​Wilkinson rejects. Crocker went on to unpick an-
other false dichotomy, namely the assumption that ‘if the renaissance bass was “non-​
functional”, then everything over it must be linear’; ‘the medieval sense of function
resides . . . in the progression of concords, especially in the progression sixth-​to-​
octave’.13 Medieval counterpoint was not linear and it was not triadic. If functional
dyadic formulas, when fleshed out, sound to us a bit like the functions of triadic har-
mony, it is because the latter eventually evolved from them, but later, and into some-
thing with a quite different basis of explanation. Pace Leech-​Wilkinson, Crocker is
an unabashed ‘historicist’: ‘For it is the medieval view that we want to understand.
We know how we conceive it. What we want to know is how they conceived it. To do
this, we must take hold of their theory books in both hands and read. . . . The discant
authors from the 13th to the 16th centuries provide a clear, consistent, and pertinent
account of medieval—​and Renaissance—​polyphony.’14
The reasonable quest for appropriate methods of analysis, methods that are neces-
sarily historically informed, is sometimes confused with another related but impossible
enterprise, to which no one to my knowledge now subscribes: a restriction of analysis
to contemporary resources only, in the belief that those resources suffice to provide the
only acceptable reading. The latter straw-​man position is demolished at the outset of
Leech-​Wilkinson’s pioneering and provocative analysis of Rose, lis (R10):

In attempting to talk about medieval music we face, among several ideologically imposed
restrictions, two which are particularly effective in inhibiting attempts to come to grips
with anything more than the surface of the music. The first is the view that the only ac-
ceptable reading (or ‘interpretation’) of a work of music is that current at the time it was
produced. The second is the belief that polyphony was constructed successively, one part
at a time, and that, as a result, vertical relationships within the music are of very much less
significance than is the integrity of horizontal lines.15

His concerns about ‘successive’ composition have been addressed above. For pre-
sent purposes ‘interpretation’ is not at issue, except at the level of establishing text.
Even Putnam Aldrich, to whom a restrictive position has been ascribed, quite rightly
advocated greater use of chronologically appropriate tools to the extent available,
though his proposals for analysis by mode and solmisation now appear incomplete. He
rightly warned against the view that ‘since they sound like chords to us today they can
and should be treated as such in analysis’.16 As I have written:

To prefer contemporaneous terms and concepts where available is not by any means to
exclude useful modern extensions of them. Early theorists have sometimes been set aside
as inconsistent with practice because they have been misread. Increasingly precise under-
standing of how relevant theoretical prescriptions are qualified, or their application con-
fined, brings apparently contradictory theory back into play.17

13 Ibid., 14.
14 Ibid., 2.
15 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Rose, lis Revisited’, 9.
16 Aldrich, ‘An Approach’.
17 Bent, Counterpoint, 3.
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 213

Kevin Moll makes a similar point: ‘the descriptive tools of the period are more ade-
quate to the task of analysis than has often been supposed, and . . . modern criticism
is better served by extending them, wherever possible, than by ignoring or replacing
them’,18 a view which has been well articulated by Roger Bowers with respect to Leech-​
Wilkinson’s hypothesis about the genesis of Machaut’s Gloria, in an otherwise rightly
favourable review of his edition:

The question is that of the identification of a vocabulary of analytical concepts and

terms that is appropriate to the music, in its inalienable and indissoluble context in
time and place. One school of analytical thought would contend that in so far as the
objective of analysis is the revelation of transcendental internal musical processes and
procedures created by, and perceptible by human intuition irrespective of superficial
considerations of mere time and place, then any analytical languages and vocabularies
will do, notwithstanding the boundaries of the contexts they were first coined to serve.
The contrary view would state that any resort to non-​contemporary and anachronistic
vocabulary and concepts is inevitably a debilitating and vitiating solecism, requiring
that analysis of fourteenth-​century music be undertaken only in terms of contempo-
rary values, objectives, concepts and vocabulary.
. . . before we can analyse music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in any depth
and with any validity, we have to devise an appropriate vocabulary from contemporary
writing and from perusal of the music itself. The gratuitous and facile borrowing from
terminologies devised for later periods and alien styles, uncritically applied to features
of earlier music which superficially bear a beguiling but fortuitous and ultimately de-
ceptive similarity, fails to meet legitimate needs.19

These statements are diametrically opposed to this: ‘To suppose that medieval
composers were to a large extent incapable of controlling their material is but one of a
series of absurd consequences of this theory; and it has continued in currency amongst
scholars only because it arises out of the writings of medieval theorists’,20 and to Peter
Schubert’s further conclusion that an analysis might not merely go beyond what can be
historically supported but may legitimately contradict such evidence: ‘Given the limits
of Renaissance treatises, one way to “explain” large-​and small-​scale pitch organization
is through analogy to tonal music. At worst such analyses are inconsistent, inefficient or
unpersuasive, but never a priori wrong. Even if they contradict what historical evidence
we have, they may be intellectually viable.’21
Leech-​Wilkinson now claims that

medieval studies in music . . . are still largely devoted to a belief in the possibility of
recovering the past as it was. Indeed, if anything, attitudes have been hardening recently.
I am thinking particularly of Margaret Bent’s recent article which speaks of ‘valid’ and
‘invalid’ approaches to analysis in a way that clearly shows that for her there are moral

18 Moll, ‘Voice Function’, 26–​27.

19 Review by Roger Bowers, M&L 74 (1993), 54–​59.
20 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Machaut’s Rose, lis’, 10.
21 Schubert, ‘Authentic Analysis’, 17.
214 Machaut

obligations on analysts to work ‘historically’—​‘pre-​conditions’ as she calls them. From this

point of view, abiding by medieval modes of musical thought is an essential qualification
for scholarship in the field.22

This statement involves a fair degree of misreading. In particular, it conflates method-

ological questions with moral prescriptions, whereas the kind of validity and invalidity
at issue is clearly epistemological in nature, not moral, and concerns matters critical,
historical and scholarly. Ironically, the objection to moralising comes from Leech-​
Wilkinson, who himself introduces morality as an issue in taking exception to the ap-
peal to validity and invalidity simply because he finds it somehow morally inappropriate
to invoke these categories.
No one believes, certainly not I, that the past can be recovered ‘wie es eigentlich
gewesen’. The quest to which I and others subscribe reopens an important line of in-
vestigation that has been marginalised in some recent writing. As with ancient litera-
ture and drama, we cannot recover the sounds of medieval music, but we can recover
much of its sense as a text. The word ‘hardening’ might be better applied to the manifest
and repressive hostility towards any scholarly investigation which dares to pursue his-
torical concerns about musical works and repertories rather than, or even alongside,
the sensuous and sounding aspects of modern realisations. I identify not valid or in-
valid analyses, but rather validity in ‘etic’ pre-​analytical assumptions relevant for these
repertories, such as are widely assumed for other and later musics, in uncovering the
grammar and sense of musical and other languages whose literatures have come to us
likewise only in writing. Our frankly modern performance of that music is a different,
vital, but fundamentally related issue; it stands only to gain from deeper understanding
of music’s language-​like features, alongside the many other kinds of skill and knowledge
that inform our re-​creation of old music today. Leech-​Wilkinson makes his choice, a
different one from the earlier Rose, lis article, and different again from his concerns in
Machaut’s Mass:

whatever kind of moral obligation you might feel we should have to the past, the fact
remains that Machaut is dead and has been for over 600 years; we cannot owe him any­
thing anymore. The only issue of any interest is what the music means to us. One can
confine that meaning within a rigorous attempt at a historically constrained view if one
so chooses; but one can choose not to, and there is no way to show that one choice is
right and the other wrong.23

Far be it from us to judge each other’s choices. My identification of analytical

preconditions was directed to understanding the internal workings of Machaut’s mu-
sical language in terms as close as possible to his own, given that the sounds of his
performances are irrecoverable. Those preconditions are not just a matter of piety,

22 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Rose, lis Revisited’, 248–​49. The article of mine referred to is Bent, ‘Grammar’. It

should be clear by now that this is a serious misrepresentation of my position. Similarly, in his The Modern
Invention of Medieval Music, 208–​9, he misunderstands my view of counterpoint as the grammar of medieval
polyphony as ‘rules which composers follow’.
23 ‘Rose, lis Revisited’, 249.
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 215

certainly not of defining a debt, but of wanting to understand what this musical work
had to say to us, being maximally open to its unexpected and foreign content, just as we
may strive to understand the language of Beowulf or Chaucer and fully register its differ-
ence from modern English. Until Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Rose, lis Revisited’, I had assumed
that this was his goal too, even if we agreed to differ about just what that language was
and how it might be defined.24 What this music means to us as scholars is what we imag­
ine it meant to them, as far as we can ascertain that, through empathetic extrapolation
from our research-​based knowledge, in full awareness that the results are provisional
and incomplete. But Leech-​Wilkinson’s new concern with ‘not “what is right?” but
rather “what is interesting?” ’ (p. 249) sets a radically different agenda. To decline to
distinguish sense from nonsense, to deny music’s grammar-​like features, removes any
basis for critical editing, critical listening or analysis, and critical judgement.
There are many different ways of approaching ‘the music itself ’. Instead of consid-
ering aspects of the work that transcend individual performances, Leech-​Wilkinson,
‘Rose, lis Revisited’, analyses one quite widely available commercial recording and a live
performance less widely available. The work as documented in its notated forms has
features and implications that remain constant irrespective of changing performance
preferences, and may be over-​or under-​interpreted in any one performance. Analysis
of modern performance may yield a perfectly interesting and indeed valid approach,
within current interest in the reception of medieval music in the past two centuries,
but it is a different enterprise, neither to be confused with text-​based endeavours nor
to replace them, and certainly not the only valid approach. To hear this music as a suc-
cession of chords composed from the bottom up carries assumptions about bass func-
tion imported from a later period, assumptions which demonstrably do not apply here.
It imposes alien hierarchies while neglecting to recognise others that have long been
accepted and can be clearly determined. All educated listening is in some way hierar-
chical, but some hierarchies are more appropriate than others to the music in question.
In the seventeenth century, the governing relationship may be the treble–​bass polarity
of a continuo work, for a Josquin motet it may be the combination of a sustained cantus
firmus in the middle of the texture with paired duets, while the primary scaffolding
of a Du Fay song will be the underlying dyadic counterpoint of its discant–​tenor re-
lationship, with or without contratenor. None of these hierarchies necessarily implies
temporal priority, though most do not exclude it; none endangers the composer’s imag-
inative status.

Machaut’s Gloria

The texted portion of the Gloria, transcribed as Ex. 11.1, may serve as a test case for the
enterprise of bringing fourteenth-​century music and fourteenth-​century theory into
mutual dialogue.25 It is an inescapable fact that Machaut’s Mass does contain dissonances

24 See, for example, Leech-​Wilkinson and Palmer, Guillaume de Machaut: Le Livre Dou Voir Dit, whose ed-

itorial introduction is largely concerned to anchor the letters of the poem in historical reality.
25 Voice names are given in MachautA, but with Tenor and Contratenor reversed. In Ferrell(Vg) only the

Amen of the Gloria is labelled, correctly.

216 Machaut

Ex. 11.1 Gloria of Machaut’s mass, excluding Amen

 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 217

Ex. 11.1 Continued

218 Machaut

Ex. 11.1 Continued

 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 219

Ex. 11.1 Continued

220 Machaut

forbidden by the rules of counterpoint, fourths, sevenths and ninths. Reaney rightly
observed that some of the ninths are superimposed fifths resulting from two separate
relationships with the tenor. He perhaps goes too far in implying that Machaut nodded,
or that the right hand did not know what the left was doing. Rather than discounting
medieval theory just because it seems not to provide for these dissonances, the attempt
to isolate and account for the extra-​regular features is where the real interest starts. In
Leech-​Wilkinson’s accounts of Machaut’s careful calculation and purposeful intent with
respect to many factors in his compositional process, there is rather less attempt than in
Reaney’s 1953 article to define the harmonic language itself that purportedly underlies
Machaut’s chordal conception, and in terms of which dissonance and voice leading are
evaluated:

the way in which contrapuntal lines are distributed amongst the voice-​parts in the Gloria
and Credo indicates that Machaut began with an approximate mental image of the whole
texture, and then separated its constituent pitches into lines, finalizing details (especially
melodic decorations) as he went. Several criteria governed the allocation of pitches to
voice-​parts, including (a) sonority, especially the desire to avoid the same voice disposition
in repeated chords, (b) the need to nudge singers into producing the desired solmizations
however unconventional the harmonic results, and (c) the traditional virtue of linear con-
tinuity. The part-​writing that results from this technique is often far from conventional,
but so is the harmony. The voices have no fixed functions. Structural consonances (sixth
to octave progressions, for example) and dissonances (fourths and sevenths especially)
are to be found in all possible voice pairings. There is a constant migration of contrapuntal
lines between the notated parts, with the result that progressions may be resolved in voices
other than those in which they began.

and

other late works of Machaut were not composed in a similarly ‘successive’ manner, since if
they were one would expect their lower voices to be more chordal and less linear in char-
acter. This of course reverses common assumptions about the results of composing parts
successively or simultaneously.26

He claims that this was how Machaut conceived the ‘harmony’; that, in the simultane-
ously texted Gloria and Credo, there is evidence of an underlying harmonic conception
that was only later separated out into four parts of undifferentiated function. That is
one version of the creation story, but it is not the only possibility. Despite paying some
lip service to the incontrovertible dyadic contrapuntal basis of medieval polyphony
(‘Machaut’s Rose, lis’, 11), he has waged a sustained campaign against it:

[Related works in the Voir Dit] help us to understand how he conceived a poly-
phonic song, imagining a whole and then working out the details into parts, and this
has implications for the way we hear and study and perform this music. If its vertical

26 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit’, 56–​57; 49. See also Leach, ‘Machaut’s Balades’, 58–​65.
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 221

coherence is fundamental (because it is the first aspect which Machaut designed) and
if its horizontal laying-​out is artificial (a matter of convenience and convention) then
in our performances we should be aiming for coherence of sound, not contrasting in-
strumental colours, and in our listening and our analyses we should be focusing on har-
mony and on harmonic direction, rather than fruitlessly searching for integrity in the
written voice-​parts. La Messe de Nostre Dame and Le Voir Dit show us that the written
parts have no such integrity: they are a set of instructions for performance, not a repre-
sentation of the musical argument.27

Clearly, anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with Machaut’s artfulness
as a composer will wish to rescue him from the trumped-​up charge of being capable
of hearing only two parts at a time. Leech-​Wilkinson’s demonstration that a harmonic
conception preceded distribution into parts seems to have convinced at least Earp but,
as Ernst Apfel noted in 1961, the texted parts of the Gloria and Credo do show clear evi-
dence of the ‘successive’ procedures that Leech-​Wilkinson claims are absent.28
Leech-​Wilkinson claims that the Gloria is loosely based on chant. While it is possible
that this chant was in Machaut’s head and shaped some of the lines, so many cadences
wilfully depart from it that its status as a compositional given cannot be deemed proven.
It is not clear that we or they were meant to recognise it, but the only issue that affects
the present argument is that the chant (if any) is not in the contratenor part that Leech-​
Wilkinson alleges is the foundation of the harmony.29 He finds no distinction of func-
tion between pairs of parts, asserting that they result from distributing a harmonic
conception into separate parts, and that this corresponds to the way Machaut conceived
the texture. This is a bold claim: not only is there no medieval support for such a view
of musical pedagogy, either from theorists or from internal evidence within the music,
but the claim is contrary to what we can and do know about the basic syntax of medieval
composition.
Reductive analysis assists grammatical parsing; the piece is reduced to two parts at
a time, and to note-​against-​note successions. Such reduction does not necessarily re-
construct the compositional process. A first stage is to discount the contratenor, not
because it is musically inessential or insignificant, but because the contrapuntal syntax
can be most simply grasped without it, as the verbal grammar of a sentence may be
stripped of adjectives that nevertheless complete its sense. The tenor–​contratenor rela-
tionship can be evaluated separately. A second stage is to consider each of the remaining
or upper parts alone with the tenor. In a florid piece, a further stage of reduction would
be to identify essential and ornamental notes in the added voice, but this stage hardly
needs to be considered in the largely note-​against-​note movement of Machaut’s Gloria
and Credo.

27 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit’, 64.

28 Earp, review of Leech-​Wilkinson, Machaut’s Mass, in JAMS 46 (1993), 295–​305; Apfel, ‘Über den
vierstimmigen Satz’, translated as ‘Four-​Voice Composition in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in
Moll, Counterpoint and Compositional Process, 257. See also Bent, ‘Grammar’, 47–​48. Leech-​Wilkinson cor-
rectly reports (Machaut’s Mass, 131) that MachautA erroneously reverses the labels for contratenor and tenor
for the Gloria only, but without acknowledging that the correct labels can be diagnosed from voice functions.
29 This was what Besseler claimed for pieces including Du Fay’s Helas ma dame, in Besseler, Bourdon und

Fauxbourdon, 41, ex. 9; Bent, ‘Grammar’, 40–​42.

222 Machaut

Analysis

In the analysis that follows I use modern terms (such as appoggiatura and passing note)
where there seems to be no medieval term for concepts that observably extend the
rudiments of medieval counterpoint teaching. Conversely, medieval terms need to be
used with some care where their modern cognates have different connotations. It is to
be hoped that future work will propose improvements on these default solutions.
In Machaut’s Gloria, the relationship between tenor and triplum is largely conven-
tional in terms of fourteenth-​century note-​against-​note dyadic counterpoint, allowing
for some ornamental turns, passing notes and appoggiaturas, and with the exception
of a few fourths and parallels. There are no sevenths or ninths. Dissonant accented
appoggiaturas occur, for example, on the first beats of bars 26 and 27 and the second
breve beats (at the half-​bar) of bars 6 and 33. There are just five simultaneous fourths
between tenor and triplum, all in passing or auxiliary positions approached and quitted
conjunctly, at bars 10, 32, 76, 81 and 86. All are weak-​beat neighbour-​note coincidences
(i.e. on the second or fourth crotchet—​original semibreve—​of the bar), which, like
those appoggiaturas classified by Leech-​Wilkinson as inessential, are not structural.
The parallel fifths will be discussed below. Of other dissonances, only one (at b. 101) is
so striking as to be a possible candidate for either an extension of the rules or for emen-
dation of the tenor g to f (or even, less likely, to a). This is the only dissonance of its
kind: the manuscripts could well present a reading that would have seemed obviously
in error to those who had a native understanding of Machaut’s contrapuntal prac-
tice. In addition, it makes a fourth with the contratenor, though that is not a primary
disqualification.
Next to be considered is the discant–​tenor relationship between motetus and tenor.
Except for the very first sonority, a simultaneous fourth to which we shall return, the
counterpoint is again entirely regular. There are only five other fourths, all likewise in
passing or auxiliary positions approached and quitted by step, at bars 40, 42, 76, 79 and
91. There are some dissonant accented appoggiaturas (for example at b. 23) and several
weak-​beat passing dissonances (for example at b. 41). The parallel fifths, again, will be
discussed below. The sonority on the first beat of bar 32 is unusual in having a sixth be-
tween tenor and motetus that does not resolve to an octave. Could that motetus d be
intended as c? Even more unusual is the dissonance at bar 39.1, which is not approached
conjunctly. The e might be emended to d; otherwise it must be treated as a dissonant ap-
poggiatura resolving upwards, and not approached by step. However, we have come to
know and maybe to like this dissonance as part of the spicy flavour of this Mass. Those
who hear these movements as assimilated to tonal chordal progressions, unaware of
their internal hierarchies, and without distinguishing the motetus–​tenor relationship
from the general level of undifferentiated dissonance, may not appreciate just how the
unique dissonance stands out at bar 39.1.
The fourth in bar 1 stands out even more acutely from the normative counterpoint
that follows. Why is it followed here by a double bar (representing its separation in the
manuscripts, from what follows, by single bar lines through the staff)? Given the con-
centration of apparent exceptions in such places, it could be that sustained-​note passages
and the untexted interludes may have been open to more or different contrapuntal li-
cence than normal successions. Did the tenor perhaps originally have d, adjusted for
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 223

the sake of sonority after the contratenor was in place, or was this chord—​but only this
chord—​tacked on at the beginning, and indeed conceived as a whole sonority? Leech-​
Wilkinson’s hypothesis of chords-​awaiting-​arrangement also posits the notion of sub-
sequent adjustments, but with such adjustment starting from the chordal conception
as a whole, undifferentiated as to voice functions. For me, the starting point for any
adjustment necessitated by composition is the layers of contrapuntal dyads that are suc-
cessive at least in principle and pre-​eminence, if not in order of conception. For him,
subsequent arrangement can modify what already exists to the point that ‘simultaneous
or successive composition loses all significance’, whereas I would maintain that the un-
derlying dyadic grammar is violated only in particular and exceptional circumstances,
here perhaps only in bar 1. The motetus, on the whole, is placed purposefully in spaces
left by the triplum, and these two parts move in parallel while the tenor moves largely in
contrary motion to them both. The tenor, motetus and triplum at least must have been
written in knowledge or anticipation of each other.
Once ornamental and weak-​beat passing notes have been recognised, other contra-
puntal dissonances between the upper parts themselves (excepting fourths) are min-
imal. This relationship seems to have been managed with some care. The exceptional
dissonances at bars 39 and 101 have already been considered as possible candidates for
emendation. Although the short c/​d dissonance between the triplum and motetus on the
last beat of 88 could similarly have been avoided with a motetus a instead of c, it might
be regarded as a cadential licence in approaching the following long note. Otherwise the
relationships are completely consonant, except for the fourths mentioned above. The
triplum and tenor throughout the Gloria and Credo make near-​perfect discant–​tenor
counterpoint, indeed, each of the two upper parts makes almost completely account-
able dyadic counterpoint with the tenor (allowing for some fourths, appoggiaturas and
parallels) following principles clearly stated in medieval treatises, which can be extended
and qualified by observation. To superimpose these duets, both upper voices relating to
the tenor, yields a smooth, self-​contained three-​part texture that has close counterparts
in several quite unremarkable three-​part fourteenth-​century mass movements in si-
multaneous style, with the tenor at the bottom: what Alejandro Planchart would have
called a ‘mouse-​brown’ piece.

The Role of the Contratenor

It is the contratenor that gives this movement its special harmonic flavour and seems
to set the Machaut Mass apart. Whereas most contratenors in fourteenth-​century
music make their cadences a fifth above the tenor, the contratenor of the Gloria is un-
usual (and different from the Credo) in having a very narrow range and staying close
to the tenor, often cadencing with it from a third to a unison, giving a thick sound at
the bottom of the texture. The closest comparand is probably the Credo ‘Bonbarde’
(Apt 40; CMM 29, 55; PMFC 23B, 51) by Perrinet (Perneth), a four-​part movement
whose contratenor is often dissonant with the upper parts. This contratenor differs
from Machaut’s in being more often above the tenor, thus making it harder to imagine
that it forms a compound functional ‘bass’ with the tenor, such as Leech-​Wilkinson
claims for Machaut’s contratenor. The layered dissonance treatment and hierarchy of
224 Machaut

voices of this movement are discussed in exemplary fashion by Reinhard Strohm.30 The
three-​part Credo by Tailhandier (Apt 44; CMM 29, 51; PMFC 23B, 54) has a detach-
able contratenor that is mostly above the tenor, especially at cadences, where it makes
a fifth with it. Three-​part homophonic movements comparable to the upper parts of
Machaut’s Gloria include the Kyrie of the Barcelona Mass (CMM 29, 19; PMFC 1), the
Graneti Kyrie Summe clementissime (Apt 35; CMM 29, 12; PMFC 23A, 22), the Susay
Gloria (Apt 37; CMM 29, 35; PMFC 23A, 32), all plainer in texture than Machaut, the
Gloria Ivrea 63 (CMM 29, 37; PMFC 23A, 38), with more ornamental embellishment
of the basic structure, and untexted interludes in one or two parts. Machaut’s untexted
bridge passages for tenor and contratenor might argue in favour of a four-​voice (but
not therefore chordal) conception, as in the (evidently earlier) Tournai mass. Although
two-​breve interludes, for the tenor only, punctuate Ciconia’s motets, such solo passages
are rather rare in earlier mass settings. Single-​breve examples occur in Machaut’s Voir
Dit ballades, B32, B33 and B34. A texture like that of the Machaut Gloria invites us
to listen in layers, from the inside out, just as we need to adopt appropriate listening
habits for a fugue subject, a harmonised chorale, a cantus-​firmus mass, to discern serial
procedures, or Haupt-​ and Nebenstimmen. The core of Machaut’s music is audibly and
clearly present in these duos and their superimposed combinations, and partly implies
the full texture. It is the heart of the musical substance, even though the composer must
have had in mind, specifically or generally, what other parts would be doing.

Anomalies and Irregularities

The few emendations tentatively suggested here result not from an attempt to impose
norms, but rather from isolating and evaluating exceptional usage that may either be
retained as such, or normalised. A hierarchical approach, like grammatical parsing,
seeks to make sense of the received text against the background of an appropriate under-
standing, and ends up with a smaller number of specific anomalies, and indeed different
ones, than would be produced by an undifferentiated evaluation of dissonance against
less specific criteria. The irregularities are evaluated in the first instance according to
medieval counterpoint theory and in the second instance by supplementary norms de-
rived from the composition itself. In other words, historically appropriate analysis, as
understood here, has greater explanatory power than approaches that ignore contra-
puntal features peculiar to individual repertories.
Contrary motion is conspicuously cultivated between the tenor and each of the
upper parts, but there are some exceptions, occurring at a few definable points in the
texture that invite unwritten extensions to insufficient statements by contemporary
theorists. The apparent conflict between theoretical prohibitions of parallel perfect
intervals and their plentiful occurrence in fourteenth-​century music has sometimes
been used to discredit the relevance of what little the theorists do say. But as I have
pointed out (in ‘Grammar’), a ready explanation has escaped general notice, namely,
that theorists confine the prohibition to ‘in counterpoint’: the rules of counterpoint
are formulated for two parts at a time and forbid parallel perfect intervals between the

30 Strohm, The Rise, 26–​35; see also Moll, ‘Texture and Counterpoint’, fig. 5.8.
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 225

voices of a contrapuntal pair, and in this case between each upper part and the tenor.
Parallel perfect intervals between the two upper parts may involve ligatures (as at bb.
3–​4), or they may form part of an ornamental figure as at bars 6–​7; they are not strictly
speaking forbidden, as only their respective relationships with the tenor are in the strict
sense contrapuntal. There is patently no objection in practice at this date to parallels
between the ‘added’ voices of notionally successive pairs, in this case the triplum and
motetus. Parallels between triplum and motetus are thus almost a corroboration of un-
derlying successive grammar.31 A distinction needs to be maintained between the status
of parallels in different contexts; as with fourths, the ‘normal’ or acceptable ones may be
classified before unexpected or inexplicable ones are isolated for further consideration
(possibly for emendation, or for an extension of ‘exceptional’ usage).
Parallels between the upper parts are unproblematic, not because the composer could
not hear them but because, not being ‘in counterpoint’ (as defined above), they are not
ungrammatical. Parallels between the tenor and another voice, however, would be ‘in
counterpoint’; the tenor participates in only very few parallels, all of which will extend our
analytical understanding of exceptional usage, as they seem to occur in unusual (and by in-
ference extenuating) circumstances. Where there are octaves with the tenor at bars 14–​15
and 61–​62, the parallel spans two phrases, in each case following a perfect-​interval caden-
tial arrival on a long. We may infer from this, as a provisional extension to the rules, at
least in Machaut’s usage, that a parallel interval with the tenor is somehow annulled by the
occurrence of the cadential articulation. At bars 42–​43, 45–​46, 51–​52, 92–​93 the parallels
occur in transition to or from a long, or within a long-​note passage, suggesting that these
areas too were liable to exemption. Parallel octaves occur fleetingly between all three parts,
tenor and motetus, tenor and discantus, at bars 52–​53, perhaps a solecism, but affecting a
melisma with ligatures, another area where exceptions tend to be concentrated. At bars 68
and 78–​79 the parallels could be considered as arising from accented passing notes. Only
the progression at bar 13 seems to occur outside those areas that have been proposed as
extensions of the rules; here the parallel fifths between triplum and tenor fall between a
weak beat and the next main beat. Maybe only the main breve beats were bound by the pro-
hibition, and some licence was accepted within them?32 Although there is a general avoid-
ance of parallels with the tenor, to find the exceptions thus concentrated in definable places
suggests that long notes and interludes, and junctions with them, may have been construed
less strictly, as if these situations were not bound by the rule. Rather than being too ready to
dismiss theorists as worthless because they failed to make all these provisions themselves,
our first task is to reconstruct those things that theorists did not spell out because they took
them for granted. Observations such as those made here may enable us gradually to build a
collection of provisional extensions and complements to what the theorists say.
Nothing corroborates the primacy of the upper trio more clearly than the distinc-
tion between the grammatical role of the tenor and the role of the lowest voice, in this
case mostly the contratenor. This corresponds to Moll’s distinction between the ref-
erential voice and the referential pitch respectively.33 First to be observed is that the

31 Kevin Moll pointed out to me that such parallels are symptomatic of Apfel’s ‘multiple two-​voice counter-

point’, as are seconds and unisons (even consecutive ones) between the upper parts.
32 Reaney, ‘Fourteenth-​Century Harmony’, 132, explains some parallels in a similar way.
33 Moll, ‘Voice Function’, 53–​57, explains his distinction between the referential voice and the referen-

tial pitch.
226 Machaut

tenor–​contratenor relationship is on the whole unexceptional, apart from some striking

and sustained fourths. We have seen Machaut’s use of mostly off-​beat auxiliary or
passing fourths between members of the other discant–​tenor duets, but the fourths
here are both qualitatively and quantitatively different. Between tenor and contratenor
they are necessarily at the bottom of the texture, often strong and sustained. There are
tenor–​contratenor fourths of a breve or longer at bars 8, 15, 27 (all on e). The fourth
at bar 49 could be corrected (on the first beat, to a, following manuscript MachautE,
thus avoiding not only the dissonance with the f and a of the upper parts in Leech-​
Wilkinson’s reading, but also the fourth between the lower parts, despite the resulting
parallel fifths with the tenor; or even to f (despite the parallel with the triplum). The
contratenor fourths at bars 17 and 78 are slight. We have seen above that bar 101 may
call for emendation on other grounds.
Andrew Hughes (‘Some Notes’) cites the fifteenth-​century theorist Anonymous
XI as evidence that the contratenor was normally composed after the discant and
tenor; he adduces theoretical support for its character as a voice added to a grammat-
ically complete core, even if its presence was musically anticipated by the composer.
But in Machaut’s case, as in some other fourteenth-​century works, the contratenor
must be following different (or at least differently weighted) criteria from those that
govern the tenor’s relationship with the other parts. If we learn to hear tenor–​discant
relationships as central, we must necessarily hear the contratenor as adding a dif-
ferent or even bifocal dimension. If we are to remove the benefit of doubt from a
phenomenon not yet fully understood, Machaut’s competence will be called into
question. Conversely, if we assume that everything in the received version makes
sense, we have removed all criteria for detecting basic transmission errors. Clearly,
neither of these extremes will do; more work is needed. Simultaneous fourths are
irregular in counterpoint, but Machaut’s handling of fourths invites us to classify
some usages to which he subscribed. We clearly cannot claim, for the Gloria and
Credo, that fourths between the lowest parts were outside his vocabulary, but if the
contratenor was indeed the foundation of the ‘harmony’, by what harmonic system
are such chords with fourths at the bottom imagined? Durationally and metrically
strong parallel motion is greatly increased overall by the addition of the lowest voice,
and falls between the contratenor and the upper parts. Often by going in parallel
octaves with the triplum, the contratenor also makes parallel fifths with the motetus.
There are very few tenor–​contratenor parallels, and these occur in bars with other
anomalies at bars 10, 86, 88, and in 49 as emended, and in three places following
interludes: bars 20, 66, 99.
Most of the dissonances other than fourths (i.e. sevenths and ninths) occur be-
tween the contratenor and one of the two upper parts. Apart from readily explainable
appoggiaturas, dissonances are sounded at bars 10, 13, 49, 50, 54, 68, 72, 78, 81, 88, 100.
All of these except bar 49 sound a third below the tenor while an upper part sounds
a fifth above, or a fifth below the tenor while an upper part sounds a third above, or a
fifth below the tenor while an upper part sounds a fifth above. We might call them bi-
focal superimpositions. The tenor is the regulator of all the parts individually and in co-​
ordination, and needs to be heard from the inside out or even bi-​dimensionally. Only
the dissonance at bar 49 does not fit this model; here, the contratenor invites emenda-
tion of g to a in accordance with MachautE, as discussed already.
 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 227

A similar examination of the Credo shows that it and the Gloria, so often linked to-
gether and alike in superficial sound, differ in some striking ways, although many of the
same observations and all the same criteria apply. The Gloria’s contratenor lies closer to
the tenor, making most of its cadences as a third contracting to a unison, rather than by
thirds to fifths as in the Credo. The Gloria therefore has closer spacing at the bottom of
the texture, more thirds and indeed fourths between the lowest parts, and more chords
with sevenths; the sevenths are a consequence of superimposing thirds and fourths. The
Credo is written in a different way. Its contratenor is far more normal by comparison
with the relationship of other fourteenth-​century contratenors to their tenors, with a
wider range, remaining mostly higher than the tenor and having very few of the fourths
that make this part so problematic in the Gloria. Only the motetus at bar 119 (and
briefly at b. 78) has a problematic relationship with the tenor, like the first note of the
Gloria. The Credo is written with two equal top voices, as opposed to the higher triplum
and lower motetus of the Gloria. In the Credo, the upper voices share range and roles
much as they do in a fourteenth-​century Italian motet (Ch. 26).
A different but related issue in the texted movements of Machaut’s Mass concerns
cadentia or cadence, which, as defined by Jacobus, is no more than and no less than the
two-​part progression of an imperfect to a perfect interval, articulated with a semitone
progression above or below.34 Many current performances treat all long notes in the
Gloria and Credo, the chords held for a full long, as if they were points of closure. But
there are clear distinctions between them, which in some cases become all the clearer if
the cadence (or cadentia) is considered without the contratenor. Some of them indeed
conclude a phrase, with an arrival on a perfect interval. But others sustain an imperfect
sonority, usually doubly imperfect, that demands resolution. Sometimes this demand is
satisfied quickly, sometimes it is delayed and sometimes it is even subverted or tempo-
rarily denied before an eventual resolution. These distinctions are indicated on Ex. 11.1
and explained in the commentary.
Not one of the ten or so recordings of the Gloria which I had to hand makes any
distinction in performance between such different qualities of long-​note sonorities; all
are treated as closural, at least in the short term, as if they were respectively the perfect
and imperfect cadences of a later era. This suggests that the modern performance tra-
dition, however varied by individuals or however parasitic on other performances, has
not even considered distinguishing these functions. In turn, the ears of a generation of
listeners have been mistrained to hear imperfect sonorities as legitimate points of rest.
To examine the music in this way reveals a hierarchy of relationships and of disso-
nance, of contrapuntal rules based on dyadic successions and their extensions, and of
yet-​to-​be-​explained contratenor behaviour. Only four possible emendations of pitch
are suggested here, and those are to restore sense inferred from terms suggested by the
music; normative impositions would be much more invasive and would necessitate
second-​guessing Machaut and implying that either he or the scribes were highly in-
competent. Some dissonance can be seen provisionally in our terms (for want of theirs)
as passing or auxiliary, rather than pertaining to the primary contrapuntal relation-
ship. Some of these extra-​regular moments occur in specifically delimited places within

34 Speculum musicae, IV.5, 122–​23. For the authority of this term as a possible alternative to the now widely

used ‘directed progression’, see Chs. 1 and 29.

228 Machaut

the movement (for example at junctions with interludes, or in long-​note passages),

permitting the inference of ‘special licence’ for such passages and an extension to (not
a contradiction of) the theorists’ rules. Some dissonance can be explained as bifocal
collisions between parts that individually go with the tenor. We can learn to hear these
as independent but tolerable, indeed exciting, as the superimposition of apparently in-
compatible cadence formulas may be in later music. They need to be heard from the
inside out rather than from the bottom up, inexorably logical, but moving in different
planes or dimensions. The view presented here is the diametrical opposite of Leech-​
Wilkinson’s belief that Machaut conceived in chords and teased out the parts later;
but he stops short of defining the harmonic language against which we should judge
Machaut’s criteria of consonance and competence. The present study offers one step
towards such a definition.
Out of what first seemed a jungle of arbitrary dissonance, and still seems so even
after Leech-​Wilkinson’s explanation, a diagnostic examination of voice functions has
enabled an entire part to be considered as the cause of irregularities, and a few single
notes to be identified as candidates for emendation. Whether it makes the Mass a better
piece is another matter. It is not the composer’s creative process that is under exam-
ination here, but the musical rudiments common to the training and experience of
composers and singers. What gives these dyadic procedures and dissonances interest
is not the trivial fact of their use, but precisely the ways in which they are extended, dis-
tributed, controlled, or turned aside.

Music Commentary

The musical text printed in Ex. 11.1 largely follows the readings adopted by Leech-​
Wilkinson, except for ficta choices.35 The accidentals proposed here are closer to
those in the edition by Lucy E. Cross (Cross, Messe de Nostre Dame) than to Leech-​
Wilkinson’s. Cross’s explanations are more solmisation-​driven than mine, and though
differently rationalised, there is significant common ground. I believe that inflections
are determined by counterpoint, not by solmisation, and that solmisation is a post facto
pedagogic tool. Boxed notes are discussed in the text. At bars 32, 39, 49 and 101 they
mark notes to be considered for emendation.
Accidentals suggested above the staff have been marked primarily to inflect
imperfect-​to-​perfect progressions between each upper part and the tenor. Accidentals
in parentheses are judged optional—​most involve balancing the choice to inflect a ca-
dence against singing an augmented or other awkward melodic interval, usually when
this takes place within a group of short notes. More accidentals of this kind could be
considered: s signs could be applied to g in the tenor–​contratenor interludes at 19, 47,
65 and 98. Contratenor accidentals take account primarily of the relationship with the
tenor, secondarily to accommodate to the upper parts. But as stated above, this is not as
straightforward a discant–​tenor relationship as the tenor has with the upper parts.
Double bar lines through single staves represent manuscript bar lines. Cadential
arrivals onto long notes are followed in this transcription by a single bar line through

35 See Machaut’s Mass, 131–​36, for his report.

 The ‘Harmony’ of the Machaut Mass 229

the upper three staves after the perfect interval (as at 4, 16, 18, 29, 56, 75, 87, 97 and
104). In some cases (14, 60, 64 and 71) these arrivals are undercut or weakened by the
contratenor. That in bars 60–​61 is weakened anyway by the difficulty of arranging a
semitonal approach. Long notes so marked are arrivals on imperfect sonorities; they
are not completed cadentie and require resolution, the long notes notwithstanding.
These are either resolved directly, satisfying the most obvious expectation (solid hori-
zontal arrow), or after a delay, withholding immediate resolution, or indirectly after an
interruption, detour or denial (dotted arrow for indirect, delayed or diverted resolu-
tion).36 Different degrees of resolution are not distinguished in Ex. 11.1 but are roughly
classified here:

•​ Direct resolution occurs at 12–​13 (Laudamus te—​Benedicimus), 34–​35 (celestis—​

deus), 38–​39 (omnipotens—​domine), 74–​75 (no-​stram), 77–​78 (sedes—​ad), 102–​3
(Gloria—​dei).
•​ Resolution is still straightforward but slightly delayed at 54–​55 (filius—​patris)
and 69–​70 (mundi—​suscipe).
•​ The progression is somewhat irregular at 51–​52 (dei—​filius), which reaches its
true cadence at 56.
•​ Resolution is even more strongly denied or even subverted, by following the mi
with a presumed fa (or a sharp with a natural), before an eventual arrival, at 24–​25
(tibi—​propter), arriving at 29; 80–​81 (patris—​miserere) arriving at 83, and 92–​93
(altissimus || Jesu) arriving at 97.

The last two resolve the same unusual sonority in the same somewhat irregular way, in
both cases with parallel octaves. The notion of arousing expectations and then playing
with, or delaying, their satisfaction, can be amply illustrated from analytical literature
more generally; it is not the fact of such strategies which is singled out here, but the par-
ticular musical norms within which they operate.37

36 For a more permissive view of the status of these imperfect sonorities, see Bain, ‘Theorizing the Cadence’.
37 A classic study, centred on the introduction and prompt denial of e natural in Schubert’s Moment musical
in A flat, Op. 94 No. 6, is Cone, ‘Schubert’s Promissory Note’.
 12
Machaut’s Motet 10 and its Interconnections

'Kevin Brownlee and I gave a joint presentation on M10 (Hareu! hareu! le feu/​
Helas! ou sera pris confors/​Obediens usque ad mortem) in Oxford in 1991 and again in
2001. His contribution addressed not only the verbal intertextuality within the motet
texts, but also its external literary context in the Roman de la Rose and the Ovide
moralisé. It was published in a Festschrift kindly presented to me in 2005, where he
announced my contribution as forthcoming; see Brownlee, ‘Fire, Desire, Duration,
Death’. Mine, lightly edited for this volume, was finally published in 2018.1
Meanwhile, Jacques Boogaart has independently completed a number of highly
perceptive studies of the motets. Some of the present material, drafted long ago,
overlaps with his observations, which I have tried to signal where appropriate; for
M10 see Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, the bibliography there cited, and for
an excellent edition in modern notation with manuscript variants. I am grateful to
Jacques Boogaart, Jared Hartt and Sean Curran for valuable comments on an earlier
draft. Brown, ‘Flos/​Celsa’, makes connections between that motet and M10.

Choice of Tenor

The musical foundation of a motet is a tenor that underpins the structure with a
melody usually taken from chant. The treatise usually attributed to Egidius de
Morino famously prescribes that the tenor should be taken from an antiphon, re-
sponsory or other chant, and that the words should concord with the materia about
which the motet is to be made.2 While the tenor is the musical foundation, it is not
the only building block; the author at least implies that the verbal content of the
upper parts has already been decided in outline, whether or not the texts, or in-
deed any musical features, have been worked out in detail.3 This substance (materia)
precedes and determines the choice of tenor. In nearly all of Machaut’s motets (and
in many by other composers) the words and chant excerpt of the tenor are not those
of the beginning of the chant, often pointing up a deliberate choice to isolate a word
or phrase especially suited to the—​perhaps already planned—​upper-​part texts.4

1 ‘Machaut’s Motet 10 and its Interconnections’, in Hartt (ed.), A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets,

301–​19. Reused here with permission from Boydell.

2 See Ch. 1 for the proposal that the treatise revert to anonymous status; also Ch. 16. Leech-​Wilkinson,

Compositional Techniques, 1, 18–​20, provided a revised version of this text, now in a fuller version in
Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, appendix, 110–​16.
3 See Ch. 4 for the argument that in Tribum/​Quoniam the verbal ‘citations’ are as much building blocks as

is the tenor chosen to go with them. See also Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, 6, 46–​47.
4 Especially in M1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23. M15 is the only one to use a chant begin-

ning, Vidi Dominum. See Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’. Sean Curran (pers. com.) reminds me that tenors

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0013
232 Machaut

This has often made it harder (and sometimes impossible) to identify the source
chant, especially if it is unlabelled.
But it is not only in the disposition of the tenor as a skeleton or ground-​plan for
the motet that the tenor shapes its musical material. Machaut clearly also chose his
chant excerpt for its musical qualities, important among them its potential to serve
as the grammatical foundation for counterpoint; not only would the composer assess
the number of tenor notes for its divisibility into talea units, but also its cadencing
potential at tenor rests or talea divisions, especially at the end, at least in the three-​
part motets.5 Nearly all of Machaut’s three-​part motets end with a stepwise descent
in the tenor, which serves the final cadence. The exceptions are the three whose
tenors are secular melodies (M11, M16 and M20), and whose final discanting ascents
would once have formed counterpoint against the songs’ own stepwise descending
tenors, if any.6
The four four-​part motets are also exceptions to final stepwise tenor descent;
they all share the tenor role with an essential contratenor (and would thus have
been candidates for composition with the aid of a solus tenor).7 M5 and M23 are
the only Machaut motets with (interlocking) coloration in tenor and contratenor.8
The tenor of M21 does make a stepwise cadence, but in M22 and M23 the final
stepwise descents are made not by the tenor, but by the contrapuntally essential
contratenor.9
The extent to which tenor melodic material is integrated into the upper parts of ars
nova motets has been under-​recognised; Machaut’s habitual use of that material must
have influenced him in the choice of a tenor to suit the material of the texts. The dark
textual content of M9, for example, is reflected in the conjunct and serpentine con-
tour of its tenor, and by the use of motives derived from the tenor in the upper parts.10
Conversely, for the uncertainties of Fortune in M8, Machaut chose a tenor with in-
tervallic leaps which are echoed in the upper parts and reinforced with uncertainly
swaying syncopations (see Ch. 14). Such relationships between music and text will be

of early 13th-​c. motets were normally based on a single word from within a chant; the discant sections from
which motets often derive are built on melismas which are usually embedded deep in a chant’s structure.

5 Hartt, ‘Tonal and Structural Implications’, also addresses these questions. See Ch. 10 for more on signifi-

cant 30s.
6 On the song tenors, see now Clark, ‘Machaut’s Motets on Secular Songs’.
7 Essential, in that it underpins otherwise unsupported fourths. See Bent, ‘Some Factors’, updated in Bent,

Counterpoint, 38–​46, and Bent, ‘Notes on the Contratenor’.

8 See Ch. 22 for a special use of interlocking coloration in paired lower parts, and other instances there cited.
9 The lower parts of M5 are extremely problematic, with many dissonances and unsupported fourths. See

Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart. I would suggest emending the worst such solecism, the first coloured tenor
note (b. 9 and corresponding positions) from a to bb, as it appears in MachautC, Ferrell(Vg), MachautB and
MachautE, though in this color statement only. Although the tenor ends with a stepwise descent, it does so
non-​cadentially, and ahead of a final irregular cadence in the contratenor. See Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past
and Present’, 56–​72 (also 23–​26), for extensive discussion of this motet, and passim for the extent of Machaut’s
quotations, especially from trouvère songs. Dunstaple makes an unusual choice in his most famous motet, the
four-​part Veni sancte spiritus/​Veni creator, choosing a tenor excerpt that ends with a falling fifth, producing a
quite exceptional cadence at that time.
10 See Ch. 9 on Motet 9 and the associated music examples. The serpentine character of the tenor of M9 and

the relation of the tenor to upper-​part motives in M4 has also been pointed out in Boogaart, ‘Encompassing
Past and Present’, 9–​10 and 22–​23. See Ch. 14 below.
 Machaut’s Motet 10 233

examined below as they apply to M10; some connections with other motets will also
be noted.
If Machaut had decided in advance to include hockets, as he often does in iso-
rhythmic passages that clearly mark talea joins (M9), or in a final diminution section
(M10), and if he had further decided to adopt the discipline of not breaking words by
rests (as in the hockets of M18 and M9), the texts had to be planned with monosyllables
in positions which made this possible.11
Machaut’s chant tenors are mostly plucked from a liturgical and hence usually also
a biblical context which they implicitly carry with them, all the more strongly if better
known and easily identified. Friedrich Ludwig identified the tenor melody of M10 as
taken from the middle of the Maundy Thursday fifth-​mode Gradual Christus factus
est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis (Philippians 2: 8–​
9: ‘Obedient unto death’).12 Jacques Boogaart reminds me that this chant concludes all
three Tenebrae services, mortem autem crucis being an extension used on Good Friday.
He proposes, rather, an identical antiphon from the same day that is associated with the
liturgical action of extinguishing the fire of the candles.13 Death and loyalty (=​obedi-
ence?) are primary ingredients of this motet, which is transcribed as Example 12.1.14
The texts are transcribed in Table 12.1.15

Table 12.1 Verses lined up with taleae in Machaut, Motet 10

Talea Triplum Rhyme Motetus Rhyme

TI 1 Hareu! hareu! le feu, le feu, le feu a 1 Helas! où sera pris confors a

2 D’ardant desir, qu’ainc si ardant ne fu, a
3 Qu’en mon cuer ha espris et soustenu a 2 Pour moy qui ne vail nès que mors? a
4 Amours, et s’a la joie retenu a
5 D’espoir qui doit attemprer celle ardure. b 3 Quant riens garentir ne me puet b
6 Las! se le feu qui ensement l’art dure, b

(continued)

11 Unsignalled changes of mensuration occur in the motetus of M4 (Ch. 14), and by a different dis-

position within the modus in the second color of M6, whose tenor is written out only once, with repeat
sign. Its concluding rest places the first breve of the second color as an ‘upbeat’ to the perfect modus, thus
requiring different breves to be altered, or not, in the restatement. To a modern reader, this looks like a re-​
rhythmicisation of the color, but it is in fact derived from homographic notation. Boogaart, ‘Encompassing
Past and Present’, 25, ingeniously construes this as overlapping telescoped taleae, removing the need to ac-
cept the fourth ‘fragmentary’ talea of Schrade’s edition. The changes of mensuration in Rondeau 10 (Rose lis)
are also unsignalled.
12 Ludwig, Machaut, 2: *60 and 3: 40 (144). Variant melodies from appropriate liturgical sources are

assembled in Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, 194 and 244.

13 Christus factus est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem. Fer. V in Coena Domini; Fer. VI in Parasceve;

Sabbato Sancto; Invent. S. Crucis; Exalt. S. Crucis. CAO III, nr. 1792; IV, nr. 7983, Cantus ID 830399. Boogaart,
‘O series summe rata’, 242.
14 The motet as it appears in MachautC is provided as ­figure 8.6 in Haines and Udell, ‘Motets, Manuscript

Culture’. The Ferrell(Vg) version is published in Earp, Ferrell-​Vogüé.

15 Italicised here are words associated with love, fire, burning, hope, despair, loyalty, death, desire (Amours,

ardure/​feu, espoir/​desespoir, loyauté, mors, desir). Note how the -​oir rhymes also highlight espoir and desespoir
in non-​rhyming positions. Brownlee, ‘Fire, Desire, Duration, Death’, 81–​82, pointed out the unique triple
statement of le feu in tr line 1, and the emphatic repetition of ardant in line 2.
 234 Machaut

Table 12.1 Continued

Talea Triplum Rhyme Motetus Rhyme

T II 7 Mes cuers sera tous bruis et estains, c 4 Fors ma dame chiere qui vuet b
8 Qui de ce feu est ja nercis et tains, c
9 Pour ce qu’il est fins, loyaus et certains; c 5 Qu’en desespoir muire, sans plus, c
10 Si que j’espoir que deviés y ert, ains c
11 Que bonne Amour de merci l’asseüre b 6 Pour ce que je l’aim plus que nuls, c
12 Par la vertu d’esperance seüre. b

T III 13 Car pour li seul, qui endure mal maint, d 7 Et Souvenir pour enasprir d
14 Pitié deffaut, où toute biauté maint; d
15 Durtés y regne et Dangiers y remaint, d 8 L’ardour de mon triste desir d
16 Desdains y vit et Loyautés s’i faint d
17 Et Amours n’a de li ne de moy cure. b 9 Me moustre adès sa grant bonté e
18 Joie le het, ma dame li est dure, b

Ti 19 Et, pour croistre mes dolereus meschiés, e 10 Et sa fine vraie biauté e

20 Met dedens moy Amours, qui est mes chiés, e 11 Qui doublement me fait ardoir. f

T ii 21 Un desespoir qui si mal entechiés e 12 Einsi sans cuer et sans espoir, f

22 Est que tous biens ha de moy esrachiés, e 13 Ne puis pas vivre longuement, g

T iii 23 Et en tous cas mon corps si desnature b 14 N’en feu cuers humeins nullement g
24 Qu’il me convient morir malgré Nature. b 15 Ne puet longue durée avoir. f

Tenor: Obediens usque ad mortem

Triplum: Help! Help! The fire, the fire, the fire of burning desire, which has never be-
fore been so burning, which Love has in my heart ignited and maintained, and thus
has taken away the joy of Hope which should temper this burning heat. Alas! if the fire
which consumes it completely continues!
Then my heart will be entirely burned up and extinguished; my heart, which is al-
ready blackened and charred by this fire, because it is pure, loyal and faithful; so that
I expect that it will be dead before good Love assures it of Mercy through the power of
reliable Hope.
Because Pity fails only for my heart, which suffers many pains, [Pity] in whom all
Beauty dwells; Harshness rules there and Refusal there remains, Disdain lives there,
and Loyalty grows weak; and Love does not care for my heart or for me; Joy hates it; my
Lady is harsh towards it.
And, to increase my painful sufferings, Love, who is my commander, places within
me a despair which is so ill disposed that it has pillaged all my goods from me; and in
every case it so de-​natures my body that I must die in spite of Nature.

Motetus: Alas! where will comfort be found for me, who am worth no more than if
I were dead? When nothing can protect me except my dear Lady who wants me to die
in despair, nothing more, because I love her more than anyone.
And Memory—​in order to stir up the burning of my sad desire—​shows me contin-
ually her [=​my Lady’s] great goodness and her refined true beauty, which makes me
burn twice as strongly.
 Machaut’s Motet 10 235

Thus, without heart and without hope, I cannot live for long, nor can a human heart
survive for long in fire.16

Tenor: Obedient unto death.

Tenor Disposition

Machaut’s tenor chant excerpts range in length from a color of 10 notes (M14) to 48
(M23). M15 has 40 notes (in a single color); M10 with 30 is close behind, but this is
doubled by color repetition. Its 30-​note chant segment begins and ends on f, and has
the rather narrow compass of a 6th up to d. Example 12.2 numbers the chant notes, and
shows how they are grouped in six rhythmically identical paired taleae or ordines each
of five notes as Ia, Ib; IIa, IIb; IIIa, IIIb into three (10-​note) double taleae, each of which
corresponds to a period of the upper parts, as laid out in Example 12.2.17 It is surely not
accidental that 30 notes from a Holy Week chant suggest the 30 pieces of silver by which
Christ was betrayed ‘usque ad mortem’ (even unto death).18

Ex. 12.2 The tenor of Motet 10

Melodically, this tenor is not as rich in symmetries as some others.19 But segments
Ia and IIIb are close to mirroring each other, and segments IIa and IIb are so nearly
identical as to have caused the omission of IIb (in the first color only) by haplography in
MachautB and MachautE. Each five-​note talea (ordo) is palindromic: , followed dsssd
by a B rest. In the diminution section this becomes fdddf
. This palindromic rhythm
appears with inverted values as fgggf
(Ex. 12.3a and 12.3b), as a dominant rhythm in
the upper parts.

16 Translation by Kevin Brownlee (2005, 88–​ 89), revised incorporating suggestions from Leofranc
Holford-​Strevens (pers. com., 2001) and Jacques Boogaart (pers. com., 2016).
17 The following partially overlaps with what was reported in Ch. 2. This feature is what Reichert, ‘Das

Verhältnis’, 202, called a Großtalea. Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’, 107, refers to it as a ‘supertalea’, a term now
adopted by Zayaruznaya; see Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 81, and more recently Zayaruznaya, Upper-​
Voice Structures, calls them blocks. ‘Double talea’ works well where a pair of identical tenor taleae serve a single
upper-​voice talea, as adopted by Clark, ‘Super omnes speciosa’. Where the rhythmic correspondence is only par-
tial, I prefer the term ‘period’, which avoids the connotations of rhythmic identity carried by talea, though the
partial isorhythm in such periods serves as a powerful articulation. In M10, each pair of tenor taleae corresponds
to a period of the upper parts, as also in M15. This also happens in M8, which has three short (four-​note) taleae,
more like 13th-​c. ordines, in the time of one upper-​voice talea, and four of these short taleae per color.
18 Although M10 is not about deceit it is certainly about what leads to death. M15, however, is about de-

ceit; I suggested that its 30-​breve taleae might also have resonances of Judas’s betrayal; see Ch. 10, and Arlt,
‘Triginta denariis’.
19 As demonstrated in Ch. 9 on Motet 9.
236 Machaut

Ex. 12.3 Prominent motives in Motet 10

In color 1, each double talea occupies 24 breves, in the diminution section, color
2, 12 breves, where the same melody is written out at the next note level down. Both
colores are internally isorhythmic but, because of the reduction, not with each other. The
d sf d
second substitutes for , for , resulting in a 2:1 reduction (per semi, as sometimes
specified for other pieces), as counted out in the minim values of the upper parts. But
although the note values often appear to be straightforwardly halved, the operation of
duple and/​or triple divisions at different mensural levels can make it misleading to de-
scribe an asymmetrical process as a 2:1 reduction; but when only duple mensurations
are affected, the diminution can be so described, and often was by contemporaries. The
new values here are in fact derived by a light but unsignalled mensural transformation
which changes the status of the notes. In the first color, the longs are perfect, with im-
perfect breves and major prolation, and they coincide with the upper-​part breves. In the
diminution section, the perfect longs become perfect breves, but with major semibreves
(which thus do not directly mirror the corresponding imperfect breves of color 1). This
also happens commonly in fourteenth-​century motets by Machaut and others, as in the
reduced sections of M18 and M2.20 The now-​perfect breves of the accelerated tenor un-
dercut the clear duple tempus of the continuing imperfect breves in the upper parts,
setting up an audible tension. The upper parts are in imperfect modus (i.e. with imper-
fect longs), while the first color of the tenor is in perfect modus, syncopated: the opening
breve is not an upbeat but a ‘downbeat’ syncopating agent, made up to a perfection with
the breve and breve rest that end each short talea.21 Within each color the syncopations
wrap around to the next talea d∂ d
|| , but the displacement remains. A literal reading
of the tenor at the final cadence results in a dissonant delay, for which an alternative
solution is suggested in Example 12.1. Anomalous endings occur in several motets,
including five by Machaut; these are discussed in Chapter 1.
Machaut plays with the mensural status of this opening: the opening melody and
rhythm of the triplum (Ex. 12.3a, c c b c a) are echoed at the beginning of double taleae
2 and 3 (respectively a step lower, Ex. 12.3b, b b a b g at B26 and at the opening pitch at
B50), but they are delayed by a breve, emphatically recapitulating the opening motive

20 For M2, see Ch. 13. Up to a point, the diminution in M10 fits the brief prescription of Muris in the

Libellus: ‘Tertio nota, quod quando tenor est de modo perfecto et tempore imperfecto, diminutio etiam fit
directe per medium, sicut pro longa valente tres breves ponitur brevis valens tres semibreves.’ (Third, note
that when the tenor is in perfect modus and imperfect tempus, diminution is also made by halving directly,
so that for a long worth three breves is placed a breve worth three semibreves.) Ars practica mensurabilis, ed.
Berktold, 76–​77. Although Muris has allowed for substitution at all levels (including minim for semibreve),
he does not address the fact that in cases such as this the same relationships of twos and threes do not apply
obliquely at the next level down (prolation); see Bent, ‘The Myth’, 207–​8.
21 This offsetting has since been described by Desmond, Music and the moderni, 232–​34. It is one of the

resources often exploited in motets, also occurring in Vos/​Gratissima (see Ch. 8) and elsewhere.
 Machaut’s Motet 10 237

over the first tenor long rather than the initial breve that syncopates it, creating a playful
ambiguity as to where the talea starts, and whether that breve might after all be an up-
beat. Thus, short passages of upper-​voice isorhythm, even where present, are not al-
ways aligned.22 The first full statement of the opening triplum motive is followed by
the second in displaced isorhythm (B26), which in turn is in aligned identity (pitch
and rhythm) with the third (B50). An expectation is set up at the beginning, and then
the same rhythm, also with similar melody, signals the beginnings of the new taleae,
but a breve later. As here, oblique or displaced rhythmic correspondences create subtle
asymmetries; this displacement pretends to challenge the modus status of the tenor
notes by making the status of the first note ambiguous (as to whether it is an upbeat to
the perfect-​modus tenor or a syncopating agent). Such passages are far from simplistic
views of isorhythm that applaud mechanical and regular repetition as if they embodied
the mature perfection of the motet.23

Motives Derived from the Tenor Integrated into Upper Voices

The extent to which the tenor generates the melodic material of the upper parts varies
between different motets; but this little-​explored use of tenor material, in addition to
the tenor’s well-​known symbolic and structural contributions, provides a musical coun-
terpart to the perhaps more obvious semantic textual relationship between tenor and
upper parts, weaving the sacred melody into the non-​liturgical musical fabric in parallel
to the simultaneous presentation of related sacred and secular texts.24
There is a textual relationship between the ‘death’ and ‘obedience’ of the tenor
(Obediens usque ad mortem) and the upper parts (see Table 12.1 above), notably in
mortem: mors–​muire–​morir, and obediens: loyaus–​Loyautés, though such relationships
are perhaps less abundant in M10 than in some other motets (for instance, M7, M9,
M15). Musically, however, the chosen but pre-​existent pitches of the tenor and its com-
positionally determined rhythms are pervasive in the upper parts of M10.
I have mentioned the inverse derivation from the tenor of the palindromic rhythm
f ggg f (Ex. 12.3a), the opening triplum motive. Its frequent occurrences are always
prominently placed, at significant points on c, nearly always with the same melodic
shape, a falling third at the end. The motive is sometimes shortened to the comple-
mentary forms f ggg(Ex. 12.3c) or ggg f
(Ex. 12.3d), but in all cases the three minims
(which occur twenty-​four times) always have the same melodic shape (Ex. 12.3e).25
These are derived (see the boxed notes in Ex. 12.2 above) from tenor notes 11–​14 cbca,
24–​27 agaf, descending a third; tenor notes 8–​11 dcdc, descending a step. Tenor notes
14–​17, agab, rising at the end, recur in tr B79, B85, B103, mo B88. The first box covers a
fifth note: see Example 12.3 g (and f, transposed).

22 In M17, a brief long-​note isorhythmic passage in the motetus anticipates the subsequent talea joins by a

breve with a similar displacement.

23 In M7, three tenor taleae are imposed on two colores both in the first and the diminution sections. The

second and third taleae in the first section are isorhythmically displaced by a breve from the opening state-
ment, as in M10.
24 For other instances see M9 (Ch. 9), M8 (Ch. 14), and the Fauvel motets Tribum/​Quoniam and Aman/​

Heu: see Chs. 4 and 5.

25 These motives are also set out by Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’, 682.
238 Machaut

The three minims of these figures mostly take a single syllable in color 1, except
where they mark the double talea joins with syllabic setting at B22, B46, B70; in
color 2, due to the more condensed text setting, more of these minims are syllabic.
The duple-​time alternations of the complementary rhythms (Exx. 12.3c and 12.3d:
f ggg and ggg f), subsets of the larger group, coincide with imperfect breve groups
throughout. The consequences of this for the perfect breve groups of the second
color were noted above.
Most of these melodic motives also occur with the rhythm fg fg
. Melodic deriva-
tion from the chant is ubiquitous, though some characteristic intervals in the chant are
not used, notably the rising fourth f–​bb (unless one counts the rising fourth c–​f in mo
B5–​B7).26 However, the motetus descent to its lowest notes in B7–​B11 emphasises the
progression f bb a, and although with a descending fifth—​f is heard in the tenor at this
point—​strongly recalls the f bb a of the tenor notes 22–​24.
The motive c dcd occurs both in the tenor (notes 7–​10) and very conspicuously in
the triplum at B35 around the middle of the first section. The first imitative appear-
ance of ggg fg appears in the motetus on a and, imitating it, in the triplum on d, B34–​
B35: Examples 12.3f and 12.3g. This figure is indeed a Machaut cliché, in rhythm and
melodic shape, but what singles it out in this motet are its particular placements and
derivation from the tenor pitches: see the first boxed group in Example 12.2 above. The
tenor notes 8–​10, dcd, give the same minim figure at mo B8, tr B35 (as d c d), mo B100,
notes 11–​13, cbc (a), at tr B1, B22, B50, B80, B97, B98 (each beginning on c), notes 24–​
26, aga (f), at mo B34, tr B46, mo B64, tr B70, mo B76, tr B91 (each beginning on a). The
figure also occurs on ede (mo B3, B40, tr B103), b a b (tr B26), gfg (tr B79, mo B80, tr
B85, mo B88), and in other rhythms.
The tenor-​note progression cbc or aga followed by a falling third is a frequent fea-
ture of the upper parts: see mo B64, tr B70, and elsewhere, transposed to dcd b at tr
B35. ggg f , cbca (Ex. 12.3d), appears somewhere in each talea, nearly always at the
beginning:

C1: T I tr B1 as cbc a
T II in tenor (and transposed to bab g in tr B26)
T III tr B50 (against Souvenir in mo B50)

C2: t i tr delayed to B80 (density area)

t ii in tenor
t iii tr B97–​B98 (twice with desnature, the first time curtailed to ggg g)

It also occurs at tr B14 and B76 as fg fg

. Given the motet’s emphasis on death, and
the prominent placing of this motive, might we also hear cbca as an allusion to the
Dies irae?
D is the highest note of both the triplum and the tenor, at their respective octaves.
B35 is the first of only two triplum occurrences of this peak note (on fins, loyaus, on the
minim figure d c d, giving emphasis to loyalty =​obedience?) while the motetus at the

26 Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’, 683, sets out the derivation of triplum motives based on the outlined de-

scending fourth of tenor notes 13–​15, 18–​20.

 Machaut’s Motet 10 239

same place has muire, thus linking the death and loyalty of the tenor’s Obediens usque
ad mortem.
The other appearance of the triplum’s top note d is at B62, also on Loyautés. These two
passages are also the only occurrences in the first section of the group ggg fg
(Exx. 12.3f
and 12.3g) outside the talea-​ends, creating particular emphasis. Mors coincides with
the only occurrences of the lowest note of the motetus (B10–​B11). Thus the extremes
of range correspond to key concepts in the tenor (loyalty is high, death is low) and are
emphasised in the upper-​part texts: Obediens usque ad mortem literally runs the gamut.
Voice-​crossing is not as prominent a strategy here as it is in some other motets,
though the extremes of range are cultivated especially within the motetus, which goes
below the tenor at B18 (‘nothing can heal me’).27 It rises briefly above the triplum at B30,
and more significantly at B51 for souvenir (memory), hitting its own highest note, the
triplum pitch c which it recalls with the same motive—​a souvenir.
The tenor notes 3–​6 fgac occur up an octave in tr B5–​B7 and at B79–​B80, the motet’s
principal density point. Subsets occur as ga c in tr B13–​B14, B42–​B43, as the third a c in
tr B33–​B34 and B37, and the rising third emphatically in all three voices (fa, ce, a c) at
the start of the second color, B73–​B75.
What I have just called the main density point (B79–​B83), three-​quarters of the way
through the motet, is marked by the first minim hockets (from tr B78), the coincidence
of tr Amours with mo ardoir (love and burning), on the highest tenor note, d, a direct
verbal and musical cross-​citation with M15 (meschiés: see below), and mo doublement
(doubly) marking the only place in the motet where the three-​minim figure is heard
twice in immediate succession within the same breve (B80 in mo, then tr), one of many
local departures from the isorhythmic ground plan of the second color.
The tenor also contains the sequence of notes abcagf (notes 16–​21 in Ex. 12.2), which
from mo B50 is shadowed in ornamented form: a ga b | c b c b | a b a g | f (Ex. 12.3h) si-
multaneously with the triplum repeat of the opening (i.e. a souvenir). Here at B50 the
motetus rises for the only time to the high c that is next-​but-​one the triplum’s highest
note. The prominent abc motive (tenor notes 16–​18) is picked up in the tr ending a a b
b c (B104–​B106).
The tenor chant segment ends with a repeated f (tenor notes 29–​30, but also 21–​22,
and on c notes 6–​7); this is reflected in the repeated semibreve spondees at B1 (mo), tr
B9, B20, B24, mo B42, tr B44, B48, B68, B72. There are fewer in the second color, except,
conspicuously, at tr B104 and in both parts at B105 (bold =​on f). These include the ends
of each of the first three taleae (their breve numbers are underlined).
Each triplum period spans two tenor taleae. The ends of each of the three periods
in the first color contain both verbal rhyme (-​ure, twice each, lines 5–​6, 11–​12, 17–​18;
see Table 12.1 above) and exact and aligned musical isorhythm (B14–​B24, B38–​B48,
B62–​B72). These serve as clear markers of the talea ends. The motetus is less consist-
ently isorhythmic here, but mo B17–​B23 and B65–​B71, the ends of double taleae 1 and
3, have the same notes and rhythms.28 In some motets (notably M9) the talea endings

27 Notably in M9, Ch. 9. This idea was developed especially in Zayaruznaya’s 2009 article, ‘ “She has a Wheel

that Turns . . . ” ’.
28 Sanders, ‘The Medieval Motet’, demonstrated the counting of periodicity in upper parts between rests.

Such periods sometimes conform to a set of numbers different from the recurring periods themselves, but
they are far from being the only criterion of tidy structure.
240 Machaut

are signalled by hockets: that happens here (but less insistently) in the diminution
section. But in the first color’s three double taleae the structure defined by the tenor
is highlighted by this textual and musical rhyme in the upper parts. All six of the -​ure
feminine rhymes (the only feminine rhyme in both texts) from the first three stanzas
are set to repeated-​note semibreve spondees, which makes the setting of the final -​ure
couplet all the more striking: desnature is broken (‘denatured’) by rests, and the final ca-
dence on ‘malgré Nature’ places the feminine syllable on the final long.29 While there is
strict aligned isorhythm only in the triplum at the end of each of the first three double
taleae, there are many shorter rhythmic correspondences, sometimes between two but
not all three periods, or not in both parts, and there are several lateral displacements,
most strikingly that of the opening triplum phrase in taleae II and III.

Upper-​Voice Rhythm

The twentieth-​century term ‘isorhythm’ has shifted application in the course of the
last century and is now commonly but improperly used to cover identity in both pitch
and rhythm, and diminished or mensurally transformed iterations that are therefore
not ‘equal’, iso (see Ch. 2). We do less than justice to the music by applying ‘isorhythm’
as a monolithic strait-​jacket rather than being open to composers’ inventiveness at
drawing on a wide range of techniques to arouse our expectations and to satisfy or
side-​step them. Repetition is a fundamental, perhaps the most fundamental, musical
form-​building device. But fourteenth-​century composers often chose to exercise sub-
tlety and varietas by avoiding exact and regular repetitions. In motets, as elsewhere,
it behoves us to celebrate diversity of structures and strategies—​with and without
isorhythm—​rather than attempting to force conformity on them.
A full statement of the rhythm of the opening phrase ( f ggg f fg fg fg
| | ) occurs
at tr breves 1–​3, 26–​28, mo breves 8–​10, tr 50–​52; it occurs partially at mo breves 3–​4,
56–​58, tr 80; of these, tr breves 1, 50 and 80 are at the opening pitch on c′. Smaller
fragments of this imitated motive (Ex. 12.3c, f ggg
) are at mo B40, B56, and in the echo
of the opening at pitch at tr B80. After B80 we no longer hear this rhythm in its full
form, but its complement Ex. 12.3d, ggg f(already heard at breves 34, 35, 64, 70, 76),
and in tr B80 the last statement on c of f ggg.
Just as the upper-​part melodic material is disciplined, with significant derivations
from the chant tenor, so too is the rhythmic vocabulary. Each Machaut motet sets up its
own vocabulary of rhythmic norms, exercising restraint even within a palette that is al-
ready quite restricted. A motet might, for example, use trochaic rhythms almost exclu-
sively, with one or two isolated iambs at significant points, such as the pointed iambics
that anticipate the talea joins in M14 and M15, or it might make a feature of iambic
rhythms so that departures from them become significant, as in Vitry’s Petre clemens.
The norms thus set up may then be observed, frustrated, or played with, reserving dif-
ferent rhythmic formulas for special effect or for verbal or structural emphasis.30

29 The striking treatment of feminine rhymes in M10 is reported in Earp, ‘Declamatory Dissonance in

Machaut’, 114–​15 and ex. 9.11.

30 This feature has not been much noted, but see as demonstrated in Ch. 9, Table 9.4.
 Machaut’s Motet 10 241

Text Distribution

Machaut’s motets show a full spectrum from even spacing of the text throughout the
motet, or of stanza–​talea correspondence (for example, the triplum of M9), to regular
but spectacularly uneven spacing (as in the motetus of M9).31 Such spacing is often pur-
posefully contrived to bring about verbal coincidences, such as, here, tr Amour with mo
aim in B42, tr Amours and mo ardoir in B80–​B81, or in order to make a word like sou-
venir in the motetus punningly coincide with a pitch repetition at triplum B50.
The twenty-​four ten-​syllable lines of the triplum fall into four six-​line stanzas with
rhymes aaaabb ccccbb ddddbb eeeebb (Table 12.1 above); the recurrent b-​rhyme is -​ure,
and no rhyme syllables are shared between triplum and motetus. One six-​line stanza is
allocated to each of the first three double taleae, the final stanza to the entire diminu-
tion section; in other words, the last three double taleae have just two lines each, an un-
even distribution. The fifteen eight-​syllable lines of the motetus fall into seven rhymed
couplets, plus a final line. Three lines are allocated to each of the first three double taleae,
two each for the last three. This cuts across the rhyming couplets by assigning three lines
to each of the undiminished double taleae, in a way directly analogous to a three-​on-​
two talea–​color relationship (as in M9 and M4), or as here, the three-​beat perfect breves
of the diminished tenor set against the two-​beat imperfect breves of the upper parts.
Thus the distribution of the text between the two color statements in the triplum is
18:6 (3:1), and in the motetus 9:6 (3:2). For each of the first three double taleae the tr–​
mo distribution is 6 lines to 3, i.e. 2:1, but for the last three double taleae, two lines
each, i.e. equal text distribution in both parts. The second color includes some minim
hocketing, which does not exploit this equal texting between the parts; upper-​part
isorhythm is maintained for only a few breves including this hocket.32 Machaut here
does not embrace the discipline of syllabic hockets without breaking words. The final
‘odd’ line of the motetus repeats the penultimate rhyme -​oir (of the couplet lines 11–​12),
integrating the last three couplets with a rhyme-​scheme of their own (abbccb) which
coincides with the second color. The ratio of lines between tr and mo is 24:15 =​8:5, and
the ratio of syllables 240:120, 2:1 (24 × 10:15 × 8), one of few cases in Machaut of such a
neat proportion.33

Relation to Other Motets

Vitry’s Douce/​Garison has a strong literary connection to M10, and indeed may have
been a model for it. This was demonstrated in a detailed comparison by Boogaart.34

31 Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’, has explored this aspect in some detail for other motets.
32 The equality of text between the upper parts is not exploited as fully for hockets here as in some other
motets, such as Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima.
33 Or nearly so: see M6. M4 (Ch. 14) also has 15 motetus lines. See the 240 +​120 syllables of Apollinis,

discussed in Howlett, ‘Apollinis’, and here Ch. 16.

34 Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 51–​52, who kindly noted that I had pointed out this connec-

tion in an earlier conference paper. Also, Je respons occurs at the junction to Douce/​Garison’s second color,
which, like those of Vitry’s motets Vos/​Gratissima and Adesto/​Firmissime Alleluya, is newly rhythmicised, not
a diminution or homographic transformation of the first. Respons is another instance of signalling a musical
structural point with an appropriate word (cf. souvenir in M4, Ch. 14, simili and vulnere in Vos/​Gratissima, Ch.
8). Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 56–​72, discusses the relation of Vitry’s tenor to Machaut’s M5.
242 Machaut

But apart from a few three-​minim groups, some syllabic, there is little obvious musical
connection between the two motets. Boogaart also pointed out M10’s strong tie with
M4, ‘inspired by Thibaut’s Tout autresi’, and with M1.35 Thomas Brown remarked that
the triplum text of M10 also alludes to a few verses around the mid-​point of the Roman
de la Rose, with significance for its place in the ordering of the motets.36
The strongest links, however, are to M15. Amour is of course not an uncommon word
in these motets, but the way in which it is recapitulated, with a musical allusion and a
direct verbal cross-​reference, suffices to establish a deliberate connection between M10
and M15. Amours, the first word of M15, recurs in line 24 of its triplum. It is the opening
subject of M10, though the word appears there first in triplum line 4, and thereafter
once in each of the four stanzas. In both motets it is placed between meschiés and mes
chiés (‘misfortunes’ and ‘my lord’), recapitulated at the centre of a pun on meschiés:

M15, lines 23–​25:

Mais aveuc tous ces meschiés

Sueffre Amours qui est mes chiés |
Que Raison, Droiture, . . .
(But with all these misfortunes, Love who is my lord allows Reason [=​ratio], Equity,
Sweetness, Good Nature, Openness, Grace and Pity [a list of seven good things] to
have no power against cruelty.)

M10, lines 19–​20:

Et, pour croistre mes dolereus meschiés,

Met dedens moy Amours, qui est mes chiés,
Un desespoir . . .
(And, to increase my painful sufferings, Love, who is my commander, places within me
a despair . . .)

Immediately striking is the musical setting in M10 of this Amours (at B80) to the
same phrase, a third higher, that Amours receives at the beginning of M15 (Ex. 12.4). No
other Machaut motet besides these two starts with this rhythm, let alone with a similar
melodic shape, except M9.37 This motive (M10, B80) refers back to its own full exposi-
tion at the beginning of M10, and to its full recapitulation at B50. As we saw above, there
are several further repetitions at other pitches that are just rhythmic, or partial, but only
these three (B1, B50 and B80) are on c. None is on a, the opening pitch of M15, though
the M10 tenor contains the phrase agaf at notes 24–​27.38

35 Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 52, 55, and Boogaart, ‘Love’s Unstable Balance’, 3, 28–​30.
36 Brown, ‘Another Mirror’. M4 also has a strong link to M9 because the shorter tenor of M9 (Fera pessima,
an evil beast) is in fact identical with notes 3–​14 of the 18 tenor notes of M4 (Speravi, I hoped), although drawn
from within different chants; both are serpentine and completely conjunct, with a range of only a fourth and,
despite their very different textual significance, afford considerable comparative interest for Machaut’s use of
the same melodic material. See Ch. 9 n. 13 and Ch. 14 on Motet 4.
37 See Ch. 9 and Ex. 9.11.
38 M15’s melodic material is less closely related to its tenor than some, but it does several times have the

tenor’s aga.
 Machaut’s Motet 10 243

Ex. 12.4 Openings of Motets 15 and 10 and the ‘Amours’ motive

Recall that this motive, f ggg f

(Ex. 12.3a), is always prominently placed and usually
falls a third. We might identify it as standing for Amours. The other motive, comple-
mentary and of secondary prominence, places the three minims in the rhythmically
inverse position, ggg fg (Ex. 12.3f and 12.3g), sometimes shortened in the color-​2
hockets to ggg g. Its first two occurrences are for the words Las (tr B22) and muire (mo
B34, echoed immediately by tr B35), its last on me convient morir (tr B103); it might
therefore be considered to have at least some rhetorical association with trouble and
death. Its first statement, in the triplum on Las, is at the pitch of the opening Amours
motive (c b c), where it coincides in B1 with the las of the motetus’s opening word
Helas. In addition, another significantly placed word linkage between the two motets
connects Helas, the opening word of the M10 motetus, and the middle words Et and
las of both M15 texts: in M15 the middle words of the triplum (Et, 84th of 168) and
motetus (Las, 31st of 62) respectively are hooked together and exposed so that one
hears Et las (=​ Helas) precisely straddling the mid-​point of the music (the 60th breve of
120). Again, love tends to be higher in pitch than death.
The amour words in the first two stanzas are linked thematically in the first two
double taleae (at B13 and B42), with the phrase c c g a (over tenor c and with a unison
on g). The triplum’s second-​stanza Amours coincides with the only amour word in the
motetus, je l’aim at B42. The third stanza’s Amours at B66 coincides with grant bonté in
the motetus, which is set in long notes to an exact repetition (pitches and rhythms) of
what the motetus had at this point in talea 1. The fourth stanza’s Amours (B80), as we
have seen, alludes to the opening, at pitch, has verbal identity with M15, and presents
the Amours motive that opens M15. An example of deceptive musical non-​repetition in
M15 occurs, appropriately, with Faux Samblant, the opening words of the motetus in
M15, where at the final talea (B91) triplum and motetus usurpingly change places as did
Jacob (the subject of the tenor), false-​seemingly, with Esau.39
Both M15 and M10 are centrally concerned with love and death. The first triplum
line of M15 tells of ‘love who has the power to make me receive joy or death’. The first-​
person emphasis is confirmed by placing moi as the middle word of its motetus. M10
laments the fiery burning, Ardour, of love, Amours (note the assonant punning), which

39 M15; see Ch. 10 for further observations on symbolic and text–​music relationships in M15.
244 Machaut

leads to death, mors. Mors, as noted above, is set to a long on the only appearance of
the motetus’s lowest note, a, which ends its rhythmic echo of the full statement of the
triplum’s opening death motive. To be plunged down into this death can be seen quite
literally as the consequence of the Amours (B12) that enters in punning juxtaposition at
the octave above the sustained mors (B11), whose low a is heard in unison with a tenor
a—​Obediens usque ad mortem.
A further complex of puns is exercised on Ardour and dure, parallel to Amours and
mors. In M15, Ardure ends both the first half of the triplum text and the first half of
the music. The -​ure rhyme that, alone, runs through the whole triplum of M15’s irreg-
ular scheme of 2 × 19 lines is also used as the closing couplet of each triplum stanza in
M10. Both rhymes are extremely prominent in their tripla, and made even more so by
exposed spondaic cadences in their musical settings.
These examples augment an increasing collection of punning words of division,
measurement or proportion occurring at significant structural points, such as ‘beyond
measure’, longue durée etc. Such words in other motets include medio, meta, iterum,
bis, rursus, as well as cutting or ‘hard’ words (here dure, punning on talea =​ taille).
In Musicorum (Ch. 18), bis acuto gladio, incidere (‘twice-​sharp sword’, ‘cut’), and in
Vos (Ch. 8), vulnere, simili (‘wound’, ‘similar’) coincide with structural joins. Words
signifying repetition such as, here, souvenir and doublement are also often found at
talea or color repetitions (see too M4, Ch. 14) as markers of actual verbal and musical
recapitulations. In this case, doublement also comes soon after the color’s doubling of
time (mo B79–​B80).
I have drawn attention to ‘word-​painting’ and intertextuality of a kind little noticed
in this repertory; it is often richer and subtler than the more obvious madrigalisms to
which we are accustomed from later music, and at least as pervasive. Because both the
music and texts of motets are self-​consciously structured in counted or proportioned
ways, they offer opportunities to mark structural points by making them coincide mu-
sically with appropriate words or puns that Machaut has placed with equal deliberation
in the texts. We have seen how the musical material of the tenor can permeate the upper
parts just as their textual material determines the choice and disposition of the tenor
color, and invites an intricate web of musical and textual conjunctions. Text–​music re-
lations in fourteenth-​century motets have not been favourably received, largely because
of the presumed incomprehensibility of simultaneously enunciated texts. But this is not
the only genre which benefits from, and indeed invites, preparation and study. It is time
to rethink that prejudice in the light of these connections, freed from the assumption
that these pieces were designed for instant comprehension by an unprepared passive
audience or, now, that motets are best heard in succession on a CD or playlist rather
than being studied individually through repeated immersion in a single piece. Above
all, these connections demonstrate (in this case as in others) that motet composition
of this sophistication involves very complex planning and interaction between textual
and musical components in individual and original conceptions, a very different pic-
ture from the idea of a rigid isorhythmic blueprint by which the maturity of a motet
is judged according to how closely it conforms. The ‘incomprehensibility’ of simulta-
neously delivered texts has indeed earned motets a bad press; the intricacies of these
compositions demand reflection and attention outside an unprepared hearing.
 13
Motet 18: Bone pastor Guillerme/​Bone pastor,
qui pastores/​Bone pastor

In the original publication of Chapter 9, on Motet 9 (Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris

feritas/​Fera pessima), I included observations on Motet 18, Bone pastor Guillerme/​
Bone pastor, qui pastores/​Bone pastor (henceforth M18), which I have relocated to and
extended in the present chapter in order also to address questions of its context and
dating. The motet is here reproduced as Example 13.1 from the excellent modern-​
notation edition by Jacques Boogaart.1
My observations concerned the careful arrangement of syllables so that no words are
broken by rests. This practice was advocated in the text of the musicians motet Musicalis
scientia (Ch. 17), showing that it was an issue around 1330; but that anonymous composer
gave himself an easy time by making the hockets textless. M9 exemplified the discipline of not
breaking words with hockets, and M18 is the closest comparand in Machaut. Other instances
include the hockets with monosyllables in Vos/​Gratissima (see Ch. 8). All those motets
may date from c. 1330 or earlier. Two later English motets (c. 1400) follow this discipline:
Carbunculus ignitus lilie (OH no. 143, Ch. 25 and Ex. 25.1) is a strictly syllabic setting without
hockets but with carefully placed breaks; and in O amicus/​Precursoris (Ch. 22, Ex. 22.3) the
triplum is syllabic, the motetus only slightly less so, and although there are no hockets as such,
short syllabic, conspicuously rhymed motives are tossed between the two texted parts.2
Of Machaut’s six motets with two Latin texts (listed in Table 9.2 above), M9 and M18
are the only two that follow this discipline, in both cases with syllabic text on the hocketed
notes. Two further motets, also listed there, have a French triplum and a Latin motetus.
One of these, M12 (Helas! pour quoy virent/​Corde mesto cantando/​Libera me), is the only
other Machaut motet with a French triplum and hockets that do not break words, unless
one counts one melismatic continuation of a word over a rest. There are no opportunities
for word-​breaks in the motetus. In any case, as in many of the French-​texted parts, the
syllabification and text setting are looser than in the Latin texts of M9 and M18. The
other of the two, M17 (Quant vraie amour/​O series/​Super omnes speciosa), has no hockets
and (for that and other rhythmic reasons) may be one of Machaut’s earliest motets.

The Texts

For the texts and translations see Table 13.1.3 Note the change of metre for the last four
triplum stanzas and last two motetus stanzas, both coinciding with color 3. A similar
1 Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 148–​53. See ibid., 231–​33 for details of manuscript variants. I am

grateful to Jacques Boogaart and Medieval Institute Publications for permission to use his edition here.
2 This phenomenon in Vos/​Gratissima, and the precepts of Musicalis, were subsequently discussed in

Zayaruznaya, ‘Hockets’, 463–​64.

3 For an extended and illuminating discussion of the texts and the institutional and liturgical context of

Motet 18, see Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut, 53–​68.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0014
246 Machaut

Table 13.1 Texts of Machaut, Motet 18; translations by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens

Colores Triplum Translation

C1 TI Bone pastor Guillerme, 7a Good shepherd Guillaume

Pectus quidem inerme 7a a defenseless breast
Non est tibi datum; 6b was not given to you,
Favente sed Minerva 7c but with the help of Minerva
5 Virtutum est caterva 7c it is strongly armed
Fortiter armatum. 6b with a host of virtues.

T II Portas urbis et postes You guard the gates and doors

Tue munis, ne hostes of your city, lest the enemy
Urbem populentur, destroy the city,
10 Mundus, demon et caro, The world, the devil and the flesh
Morsu quorum amaro with whose bitter bite
Plurimi mordentur. many are bitten.

C2 T III Mitra que caput cingit The mitre that crowns your head
Bino cornu depingit with its two horns signifies
15 Duo testamenta, the two testaments,
Que mitrifer habere which the mitre bearer
Debet tanquam sincere must have as ornaments
Mentis ornamenta. of a pure mind.

T IV Et quoniam imbutus And because you are imbued

20 Et totus involutus and wholly enveloped
Es imprelibatis, in purity,
Ferre mitram est digna Your neck is worthy to bear
Tua cervix, ut signa the mitre, so that the signs
Sint equa signatis. equal what is signified.

C3 Ti 25 Curam gerens populi, 7x In caring for the people,

Vis ut queant singuli 7x you wish that individuals should strive
Vagos proficere 6y to help those that stray,
Prima parte baculi 7x and with the upper part of your staff
Attrahere; 4y to draw them in;

T ii 30 Parte quidem alia, With the other part,

Que est intermedia, which is the middle,
C4 T iii Morbidos regere; you know how to minister to the sick;
Lentos parte tercia with the third part
Scis pungere. you know how to spur on the sluggards.

T iv 35 Oves predicamine You feed your sheep with preaching

Et cum conversamine and with discourse
Pascis laudabili, that is praiseworthy,
Demum erogamine and finally with
Sensibili. observable gifts.

40 Det post hoc exilium After earthly exile

Huic rex actor omnium, may the King, maker of all,
Qui parcit humili, who spares the humble,
Stabile dominium grant a stable dominion
Pro labili. instead of this unstable one.
 Machaut’s Motet 18 247

Table 13.1 Continued

Motetus

Bone pastor, qui pastores 8a Good shepherd, who excels

Ceteros vincis per mores 8a other shepherds in morals
Et per genus 4b and in lineage
T II Et per fructum studiorum 8c and in the fruits of your studies
5 Tollentem mentes ymorum 8c raising the minds of those laid low
Celo tenus, 4b up to heaven.
C2 T III O Guillerme, te decenter O Guillaume, suitably
Ornatum rex, qui potenter adorned, the King who powerfully
Cuncta regit, rules all
T IV 10 Sue domus ad decorem has predestined you
Remensium in pastorem to grace his house as shepherd
Preelegit. of the people of Reims.

C3 T i Elegit te, vas honestum, 8x He has chosen you, an honorable vessel,

(metre change) Vas insigne, 4y a distinguished vessel,
T ii 15 De quo nichil sit egestum 8x let nothing issue from it
Nisi digne. 4y unless it be worthy.
C4 T iii Dedit te, vas speciale He gave you, a special vessel,
Sibi regi; to himself to be ruled,
T iv Dedit te, vas generale He gave you as a general vessel
20 Suo gregi. to his flock.

change, tailored specifically for the accelerated section, is found in the stanzas of M1,
also of Vos/​Gratissima. The significance of this will become clear.

Triplum (44 lines)

Colores 1 and 2: 4 stanzas of 7 7 6 7 7 6 (4 × 40 syllables =​160)
Colores 3 and 4: 4 stanzas of 7 7 6 7 4 (4 × 31 =​124) =​total 284
Motetus (20 lines)
Colores 1 and 2: 2 stanzas of 8 8 4 8 8 4 (2 × 40 syllables =​80, half of the triplum syllables)
Colores 3 and 4: 2 stanzas of 8 4 8 4 (2 × 24 =​48) =​total 128

Like much poetry demonstrably designed for motet composition, indeed for a specific
musical partnership, the motetus has fewer words than the triplum, corresponding to its
fewer notes. In most of Machaut’s motets with stanzaic texts, stanzas and taleae correspond.4
Less common is for the stanzas in both triplum and motetus in a second, musically
reduced section to be shorter than the first section (and differently structured from it)
to fit the new musical constraint, as they are in M18, in Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima, and in

4 Exceptions include the tripla of M2, 3 and 5 and the motetus parts of M19 and 22. Reichert, ‘Das

Verhältnis’, and Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 11–​12.

248 Machaut

the second section of M1 (Quant en moy/​Amour et biauté/​Amara valde).5 Such an ar-

rangement, however, provides further corroboration of closely coordinated planning.
In M1 the textual reduction is particularly striking as the music reduces 3:1: the fully
perfect long (3 × 3 × 3 =​27 minims) is reduced in the second section to a perfect breve
of just nine minims.

Text–​Music Relationship of the Hocket Section

The poems of M18 are intact, purpose-​made for the music, or together with it, and
tightly coordinated: words tailored for music, and music for words, in a highly spe-
cific way. Several of Vitry’s motet texts survive independently of their music, though
in some cases with voice labels signalling their musical status. Of all Machaut’s poetic
works, the motets are the only genre whose texts are not also widely preserved without
music.6 The different poetic form of the last stanzas for the accelerated section, as also
in M1 and Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima, is evidence of words for music already designed for,
or together with, M18’s two pairs of colores of different lengths. The coordination of
textual and musical composition in M18 is virtuosic. Machaut maintains regular verse
structures (changing metre and stanza structure for the reduced section), rhymes, and
syllable count in the poems, while combining them with each other, and with a regu-
larly repeating isorhythmic pattern in the upper parts with coordinated hockets, having
preplanned, hand in hand, the locations of monosyllables in both texts to be flanked by
rests in those isorhythmic hockets.7 There is limited, sporadic isorhythm in the upper
parts of the first section; it is strict and consistent in all voices only in the taleae of the
second section.
The hocket section of M18 is particularly interesting. As in M9, the triplum is
straightforward and regular in talea–​stanza correspondence, and arranges regularly
placed one-​and two-​syllable words between rests. (See Fig. 13.1 and Table 13.2.) The
motetus text is also metrically entirely regular, but here the few monosyllables are reg-
ularly placed in the isorhythmic iterations but not in the poetic structure. Upbeats in
the motetus’s hocket section are displaced in order to avoid breaking words and to
isolate monosyllables (just one in each talea: te, sit, vas, vas), resulting in slightly irreg-
ular numbers of syllables in the groups between rests. This syllable distribution was
contrived to enable one-​syllable anticipations of taleae ii–​iv, and to respect the disci-
pline whereby a note flanked by rests would receive a monosyllable. This must in turn
have been contrived with the predetermined and completely regular musical structure
in mind.

5 Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 200 observed this feature in Machaut M1 and Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima as ‘early’ char-

acteristics. The change of poetic structure in M1 and M18 has no poetic overlap into the new section. In Vos/​
Gratissima, however, the poetic change anticipates the structural join of the music.
6 For one exception, M8, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, 114 and 367, and here Ch. 14. A ma-

jority of the other 14th-​c. motet texts that survive independently have at some time been attributed to Vitry;
see Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’.
7 The hockets exchange between the parts, but are not in rhythmic canon, as they are in Vos/​Gratissima.

They could be thought of as the standard fgfg pattern split between the voices.
Fig. 13.1 Texts with hockets in Machaut, Motet 18. Word breaks coinciding with rests are shown by ||
Fig. 13.1 shows the rhythm of the texts by musical correspondence from b. 97 to the end. These can be heard in sound clips 13.1–​13.3, which illustrate the
triplum (sound clip 13.1); the motetus (sound clip 13.2); all three voices (sound clip 13.3). These were recorded in 2003 by members of Musick’s Feast, a
professional ensemble based in Iowa City: Elizabeth Aubrey, director, Barbara Evans O’Donnell and Marvin Bergman, for which Professor Aubrey has given
permission.
Asterisks (*) are placed in the motetus of Fig. 13.1 to show where a syllable present in talea C3.i is dropped from subsequent taleae to manage the rests and the
syllable count:
De of stanza 3 line 2 ends talea C3.i, making 13 syllables, not 12.
De of stanza 3 line 4 ends talea C3.ii, but the melisma on egestum loses a syllable, making 12 for this talea. It continues with melisma to talea C4.iii.
De of stanza 4 line 2 ends that talea, and again continues with melisma to talea C4.iv, the final talea with 11 syllables. 13 +​12 +​12 +​11 =​48. The
displacements, marked in each case with De, are cunningly arranged around the monosyllables.
 250 Machaut

Table 13.2 The hocket passage laid out by stanzas in Machaut, Motet 18
Monosyllables isolated by rests (||); the number of syllables between rests is indicated.

Motet 18, Triplum Motetus Motetus syllable groupings

final between rests
section

C3.i Curam || gerens populi, || Elegit || te, || vas honestum, 3 +​1 +​8
Vis || ut || queant singuli || Vas insigne, ||
Vagos proficere ||
Prima parte baculi
Attrahere;
De 1 (syllable anticipates new talea)
C3.ii Parte || quidem alia, || quo nichil || sit || egestum 3 +​1 +​7
Que || est || intermedia, || Nisi digne. ||
Morbidos regere; ||
Lentos parte tercia
Scis pungere.
De-​ 1
C4.iii Oves || predicamine || dit te, || vas || speciale 2 +​1 +​8
Et || cum || conversamine || Sibi regi; ||
Pa[s]‌cis laudabili ||
Demum erogamine
Sensibili.
De-​ 1
C4.iv Det post || hoc exilium dit te, || vas || generale 2 +​1 +​8
Huic || rex || actor omnium, || Suo gregi.
Qui parcit humili, || .
Stabile dominium
Pro labili.

Preelegit is the last word (=​line) of stanza 2 (see Fig. 13.1); Machaut presumably
wanted Elegit initiating the new stanza structure to start color 3, not to anticipate
it: Preelegit (‘predestined’) thus provides a kind of anticipatory pun at a structural
join, such as we have noted in other motets. Jacques Boogaart also pointed out that in
the triplum, just before the diminution section, the words ut signa sint equa signatis
(‘so that the signs equal what is signified’) could hold another double meaning,
signalling the diminution, thus further cementing the conceptual unity of the text
with its music.8
The rhythms mainly follow the defaults set out by ars nova theorists that clarify the
stemless semibreves in the Fauvel motets in imperfect tempus. Lawrence Earp posits
the substitution of a pair of minim rests (or what would later be so notated) for an
absent minor semibreve, to apply these defaults even to the hockets: =​ fgÌg fg fg
and gggÌg ggg fg
=​ and so on.9 He suggests that those paired rests were perhaps

8 Email of 27.1.2021.
9 This distinction is finely set out by Earp. I am grateful to him for access to a pre-​publication draft of his
‘Tradition and Innovation’, for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, and for ongoing discussion. Based
on Machaut’s use of default rhythms and use of paired, not single, minim rests, and on other criteria, and
 Machaut’s Motet 18 251

originally indicated by a distinctive minor semibreve rest, though such rests are
consistently notated only in some mid-​fourteenth-​century English sources, as rests
hanging from the line rather than intersecting it. Exceptions to the default rhythms
were gradually introduced by composers from the 1320s onwards, requiring clari-
fication by minim stems, though even after stems came into regular use, the default
rhythms often persisted.
One such exception in M18 is the lone minim rest at triplum bar 100 and
isorhythmically corresponding places ( Ìg ©gg
), which Machaut seems not to have
ç
used again in his motets in imperfect time, major prolation [ ] until M13, and con-
siderably later in M22 (c. 1358–​59), though it appears in other works. Earp is very
reluctant to accept this single rest in M18 at the early date that has been proposed
for it, although he counts fg ©gg
as =​ fg ggg
, a common variant of the default
ggg fg 10
. It is not the rhythmic substitution that troubles him, but the need for a
solitary minim rest. Minim stems were obviously necessary for the hockets, but
although the full and explicit notation of rests may not yet have been in place, a
general-​purpose rest could have served for both the paired minim rests and the oc-
casional single rest. We will return below to short rests, and the role of this rest in
dating the motet.

Relationship of ‘Early’ Motets to the Notation and Dating of Fauvel

Except for some discreet downstems confirming that a note is not short (but not
necessarily longer than it would have been if unstemmed), even the most advanced
motets in Fauvel are notated with unstemmed semibreves, to be evaluated according
to default patterns, as set out in treatises and confirmed by later sources with minim
stems. It had been argued that these motets could be dated from as early as 1314,
when Philip IV was still alive;11 but I later suggested that a complex narrative fiction
places the Marigny motets in or soon after 1317.12 They follow the default patterns,
using no rests shorter than a breve, let alone hockets with minim rests. Extension
beyond the rhythmic defaults was gradual, and stems were in place well before those
patterns receded.
Daniel Leech-​Wilkinson could write in 1995 that Flos/​Celsa, for the canonisation
of St Louis of Toulouse in 1317, and M18 for Guillaume de Trie’s elevation to the
archbishopric of Reims in 1324, were ‘the only reasonably certain dates for motets
between Fauvel and Vitry’s Petre/​Lugentium [1342]’.13 He also discussed the fragmen-
tary Per grama/​Valde honorandus est beatus Johannes, whose tenor for St John and
apparently papal language in the surviving motetus led him to accept the coronation

moving in a tentative chronological order, Earp there places motets 11, 17, 6, 5, 1, 3, and 2 in the 1320s; and
motets 9, 18, 16, 8, 7, 12, 10, and 19 in the 1330s. See below for M2, Ch. 9 for M9, Ch. 12 for M10.

10 Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’, appendix 5.

11 Sanders, ‘Vitry’, 36; he dates Firmissime/​Adesto ‘by mid-​1314’.
12 Bent, ‘Fauvel and Marigny’; here Ch. 3.
13 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars Nova’, 285 n. 3.
252 Machaut

date of Pope John XXII in 1316.14 These two motets, unlike those in Fauvel, required
notated minim stems and some form of notated minim rests. Both have hockets with
paired, but not single minim rests. At that time assuming a slightly earlier date for
Fauvel, the 1316–​17 datings led Leech-​Wilkinson and Karl Kügle to place most of the
early ars nova motet repertory between 1316 and c. 1325.15 This now seems too early,
though the 1324/​5 date for M18 sat quite comfortably in that scenario. It now invites
re-​examination.
The copying window for the completion of Fauvel can be set quite generously be-
tween 1317, the date of the latest datable motets, and the death of Philip V in 1322.
It was probably finished sooner, by c. 1320. And in any case, musical and notational
advances beyond Fauvel, perhaps in early works by Machaut, need not all be later than
the completion of Fauvel. Newer initiatives in practice, especially by younger men
(perhaps including Machaut), could have overlapped the concluding stages of the
Fauvel project. Indeed, innovations beyond Fauvel are attested in Muris’s Notitia (with
Conclusiones) of 1319/​21. Taken together with the dating of the latest Fauvel motets,
and even allowing for the coexistence of different stages and types of notational de-
velopment, the proposed dates for Flos/​Celsa and Per grama stood out as worryingly
precocious, leading to attempts to overturn them or explain them away. Flos/​Celsa is
the easier to deal with; Louis of Toulouse continued to be venerated throughout the
century, and the motet need not be as early as his canonisation. Per grama and its unre-
solved dedicatee and possible datings are discussed in Chapter 30: the motetus acrostic
PETRUS, hitherto assumed to refer to the first pope, St Peter, has been proposed instead
by Anna Zayaruznaya for Pierre Roger, who became Clement VI, a known associate of
Vitry and a patron of the arts.16 This attractive suggestion, however, does not explain the
St John tenor, and at present I see no alternative but to associate it with St Peter and Pope
John XXII, therefore before 1334, the year in which both he and Guillaume de Trie died,
thus presumably a terminal date for compositions addressed to either of them.17 I chal-
lenged the dates of those first two motets, but not that of M18, whose advanced features
now look more exposed, including its use of hockets requiring stems on minims, and
rests which at least by later convention would have been precisely notated as paired or
single minim rests.18

The Dating of Bone pastor (Motet 18)

We know nothing about Machaut’s early years except that he may have been born
in the village of Machault, near Reims, and it is hypothesised that his early educa-
tion could well have been at the cathedral school before his first known employment

14 Ibid., 315, and transcription of the incomplete Per grama, with the suggestion that both are by Vitry. See

here Ch. 30.

15 Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 124.
16 Zayaruznaya, Vitry, and Zayaruznaya, ‘Reworkings’.
17 See the discussion of Per grama in Ch. 30 below, revised from Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’, 10, taking ac-

count of a recent proposal by Zayaruznaya.

18 There is an isolated minim rest in some sources of Apollinis. See Ch. 16 and Appendix; alternative

readings are given for Ex. 16.1, B85.

 Machaut’s Motet 18 253

in the service of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, from 1323.19 Celebrating

‘Guillermus’ as archbishop of Reims, with a text which may imply that it is inau-
gural, M18 has long been dated to the appointment (1324) or investiture (1325) of
Guillaume de Trie, the only archbishop of Reims named ‘Guillaume’ in the fourteenth
century. The later date fits the text better, as the mitre is already on his head (triplum,
line 13). The texts praise Guillaume’s high morals: ‘Oh you, Guillermus, so fittingly
adorned | the King who powerfully | ordains all things | has, especially, chosen you | to
grace his house as shepherd | of the people of Reims’. He is addressed in the vocative,
which probably implies that he is alive. Although Guillaume remained archbishop
until his death in 1334, his relationship with the canons of Reims quickly deteriorated
to such a point that any local celebration of him would be highly unlikely after 1325,
a date that would make M18 Machaut’s earliest datable motet.20 The 1324–​25 date is
most recently accepted by Boogaart.21
Some have long been uneasy about this early date; the motet has some notational
features that are more advanced than anything else securely datable in the 1320s. Even if,
as has been suggested, it was reused for later archbishops of Reims, Guillaume must have
been the first bishop it celebrated, and the name was not changed after his death.22 Earp
(in 1995) accepted the early date, following ‘student works’ but, given that Machaut’s
Reims canonry (expectative from 1333) was not realised until 1338, he placed the motet
outside Reims, in the Paris entourage of Machaut’s then patron, John of Luxembourg,
and the French court, Charles of Valois and his son Philip (the future Philip VI).23 This
overcame both the absence of a direct association of Machaut with Reims in the 1320s,
and the problem of the archbishop’s local troubles with the canons. More recently, Earp
still proposed that M18 was composed in Paris, but now in celebrations which would
have followed Philip VI’s coronation in Reims in 1328 by his former tutor Guillaume
de Trie, by then Archbishop of Reims, an occasion when Machaut’s patron was also
present. Paris celebrations might have taken place at the hôtel de Bohême (formerly
de Nesle) which Philip VI had given to John of Luxembourg.24 In work as yet unpub-
lished, which Earp has generously shared with me, he now argues powerfully for its

19 It has been observed that some of Machaut’s identified motet tenors are from Reims or the surrounding

region, suggesting that he probably encountered these in his early formative years. See Robertson, Guillaume
de Machaut, 4; Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, 27–​34 and ‘Tracing the Tenor’, 66. No exact chant match for
the tenor of M18 has been found, though various similarities have been recorded, including by Robertson,
Guillaume de Machaut, 63. See Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 231, and Cuthbert, ‘Hidden in our
Publications’.
20 The early date was accepted by Fuller, ‘Modal Tenors’, 302, Fuller, ‘On Sonority’; Hartt, ‘Rehearing

Machaut’s Motets’, 197; and Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut, ch. 2, pp. 60–​61, who accepted the possibility
of an early composition date (55, 63–​64) without challenging it on notational grounds, but finds occasions for
the motet’s repeated use in a liturgical and institutional context as admonitory rather than celebratory.
21 Machaut, The Motets, 16, and Boogaart, ‘Sound and Cipher’, 377 n. 2. He notes that, as well as occupying

rhyme position in the text, ‘his name is emphasized by an ascending triad, first right at the beginning in the
triplum (Bone pastor Guillerme), then in talea III (at bar 51) in the motetus (O Guillerme); the motive returns
at the beginning of the diminution section at bar 97 in ascending and descending form in the triplum and
motetus respectively. Even in the fourth section there is some echo of that motif, in descending form.’
22 Leach, Guillaume de Machaut, 28–​29, favours viewing the motet as an admonition for future bishops,

even suggesting a possible composition date after Guillaume de Trie’s death.

23 Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, 9–​11, 296.
24 Earp, ‘Introduction’, in Earp and Hartt (eds.), Poetry, Art, and Music, 34–​36: ‘around 1328, or towards

1332’. It is not clear why the officiant at a coronation would get a commemorative motet without some refer-
ence to the occasion or the king.
254 Machaut

composition in a royal context in Paris in 1332, when Guillaume de Trie presided at

the collège des Pairs assembled at Paris for the trial of Robert III d’Artois.25 In a famous
miniature, Machaut’s patron, John, King of Bohemia, is seated just below Philip VI. This
proposal would remove the anomaly either of a precocious dating of notational features,
or of placing the motet in Reims after the archbishop had fallen from favour there, while
locating it in a context which included Machaut’s patron, who may have awarded him
the expectative Reims canonry in 1333.26
Later datings have recently been proposed for some ars nova theory texts;27
these later dates have since been challenged, restoring them to the early 1320s.28
But practice does not have to wait for theoretical codifications, as in the case of
the stemless but unambiguous semibreves in Fauvel whose default values are
corroborated in subsequent treatises as well as in later stemmed sources. For some
time, it has been clear that Book VII of the Speculum musice of Jacobus need not
antedate the famous bull Docta sanctorum patrum of John XXII of 1324/​5.29 But
recent authors have not foregrounded the well-​known fact that the pope’s mu-
sical advisor complained, in precisely the years in which M18 might have been
composed, that disciples of the new school (novellae scholae discipuli) were con-
cerned with measuring out breves in new notes; that ecclesiastical chants are sung
by the moderns in semibreves and minims, and that everything is struck through
(punctured, percutiuntur) by little notes; that they cut across (intersecant) the
melodies with hockets, they make them slippery with discants, they even stuff the
tripla and moteti with vernacular texts. Although the small notes are not directly
specified as minim hockets, I find it hard to read this passage other than as encour-
aging the belief that such hockets were already cultivated in the early 1320s. The
word percutiuntur is not far from the pungit used so graphically in M9 to puncture
the melodic line with hocket rests, but not to break words; it also appears in M18 as
pungere (triplum, line 34). ‘Scis pungere’ seems punningly to announce: ‘you know
how to hocket’. Such details may further attest tight coordination between texts and
music, precisely this music.
Later stemmed copies of originally unstemmed Fauvel motets attest a lively prac-
tice of notational updating when their copying alongside newer motets requiring rests
and stems made it necessary to avoid ambiguity (see Table 7.2 above). Machaut had
presumably been composing for at least thirty years by the time of his first surviving
compilation in MachautC (c. 1350, when he was about fifty), a period of intense nota-
tional and stylistic evolution. His own notational practices must have evolved over that
period, and it is therefore highly likely that the earliest versions as transmitted reflect

25 Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’. He pointed out (email of 9.12.2020) that the reference in the text

(triplum stanza 2) to defending the city was not an issue until the 1330s, when Robert d’Artois was banished
because of a forged will.
26 On Machaut and Reims see Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut, 3–​ 4 and passim; Bowers, ‘Machaut’,
passim.
27 Desmond, Music and the moderni, and Zayaruznaya, ‘Old, New, and Newer Still’.
28 Witkowska-​Zaremba, ‘Johannes de Muris’s Musica speculativa’, and Bent, ‘Artes novae’.
29 See Bent, Jacobus, 54–​55, and literature there cited (where I wrongly placed it in the first year of John’s

pontificate, correct elsewhere in the book), also 2 n. 5, 14; and here Ch. 30. Zayaruznaya, ‘Old, New, and
Newer Still’, again affirms the disconnection. For different reasons for an early dating, see the works cited in
n. 28 above.
 Machaut’s Motet 18 255

some degree of notational updating and editorial standardisation. Karen Desmond in-
deed proposes that some level of notational revision of Machaut’s earliest works was
likely before their first surviving copy ‘at least a couple of decades’ later.30 So even by
her criteria, we need not assume that, if M18 was composed in 1325, the later notation
in which we have it in MachautC was fully developed by that earlier date. Paris571
contains two Fauvel motets in notation that, apart from some inconsistently applied
stems, is barely updated and did not need to be, either for notational reasons (the music
required no more) or for its demonstrated context.31 Its dating to 1326 does not pre-
clude more notationally advanced compositions by other composers from antedating
it or, as suggested above, even from overlapping with the latest motets in Fauvel before
1320. It is just possible that a precocious Machaut in the, and his, late teens, might for a
while have appeared to experiment more boldly than Vitry, ten years his senior. Many
instances throughout the later Middle Ages attest that different notational states could
be in concurrent use; this is even true within Machaut’s own works, in the very conser-
vative notation of the late David hocket, and where lais in longa notation sit alongside
others in shorter values.
While I find Earp’s case for a 1332 dating of M18 persuasive, in terms of Machaut’s
patronage at the time, some arguments in favour of the earlier dating remain, and I do
not entirely exclude it on notational grounds. Musical and notational developments
rarely proceed in a single linear progression, and should not be presumed to do
so. While there are clear connections and responses between motets by Vitry and
Machaut, for example, highly individual motets by them or anyone else cannot nec-
essarily be reliably arranged, either in combination or separately, on an amalgamated
line of development, solely on grounds of a chronology of notational usage in the
often later sources which transmit them. An early date for a particular notational
usage by Machaut should not be ruled out because it was not immediately picked up
in other compositions. And if he indeed had juvenile associations with Reims cathe-
dral, he might just possibly have been asked to compose an inaugural motet for the
new archbishop.
In a recent study, Desmond accepts that the motet text must indeed be for
Guillaume de Trie between 1324 and 1334, but her late dating of the ars nova
treatises leads her to reject the possibility of an early dating of the diminution sec-
tion of M18. She has focused on that section’s notational features that were known
to and castigated by Jacobus, whether or not he knew this motet, but dates Book
VII of the Speculum musice in the 1330s or later.32 More recent work points to its
completion in the 1320s, thus attesting theoretical recognition of those practices
well before 1330.33 They include remote imperfection of the duplex long by one or
two breves, the duplex long in ligature with a breve, and the simultaneous operation

30 ‘Traces of Revision’, 428.

31 Wathey, ‘The Marriage’. The upstems in Paris571 are erratic and inconsistent; groups of four ‘minims’ do
not necessarily imply minor prolation, as sometimes in the same part major prolation is made explicit with
up-​and downstems.
32 Desmond’s first thoughts on M18 were presented in a paper which I heard at the Medieval and

Renaissance music conference in Maynooth in July 2018. I am grateful to her for sharing this paper prior to its
publication as Desmond, ‘Traces of Revision’.
33 See n. 28 above. This approximately restores Michels’s dating, but for different reasons.
256 Machaut

of imperfect modus in the upper parts against perfect modus in the tenor.34 As for
a possible terminus post quem, Desmond finds some of the notational practices
of M18 uncommon before c. 1350 or later, especially remote imperfection of the
long by semibreves in its diminution section. Imperfection of both long and breve
by a minim occurs in Apollinis, which must be dated around 1330 (see Ch. 16),
though Desmond now seems to favour a dating of this motet towards 1350.35 But
such remote imperfection is already permitted in the fourth and fifth Conclusiones
to Muris’s Notitia of 1321 and, as David Maw has pointed out, a duplex long
imperfected by a breve in ligature is used in a rondeau by Adam de la Halle (Or est
baiars) in a manuscript dated to the early 1290s.36 Simultaneous use of imperfect
and perfect mensurations at the modus level occurs in a number of early motets, but
of imperfect and perfect tempus in fewer, besides M18 including Tuba/​In arboris
and Machaut’s M5 and M10, all of which have been judged relatively early works.
This usage does not necessarily argue against an early dating for M18, as different
simultaneous mensurations in motets that may date from c. 1320 now include si-
multaneous perfect and imperfect tempus in the texted upper parts of the afore-
mentioned fragmentary motet on f. 79v of Paris934.37
However, as with all motets of the period, the tenor of the diminution section of M18
is written out in full, in this case with two pairs of colores (each pair with repeat signs),
each of two taleae in each of the motet’s two sections. The tenor for the second section
is in strict diminution (i.e. all note values are substituted at the next level down), which
means it could have been (and arguably was, in its originally conceived form) derived
from the first section without the need for renotation or renaming of the shorter note-​
values, and it is those which Desmond finds problematic for remote imperfection at the
early date.38
But what gives Earp most serious pause about the early dating of M18 are the
minim hockets in the second section, especially the use of a single minim rest.
I suggested above that short rests may have been present but perhaps graphically un-
differentiated in the 1320s. Earp indeed cites the interesting case of O/​Nostris lumen
in Br19606, which has undifferentiated rests, some of which must stand for a minor
semibreve equivalent to two minims, and some for a major semibreve, worth three.
This notation in Br19606 surely reflects an earlier (or much more conservative) nota-
tional stage than the most recent dating of this rotulus to 1335.39 Encouraged by this

34 Speculum musicae, Book VII, chs. 25, 28. I cannot agree that the phenomenon she identifies in the first

section of M18 can count as semibreve hockets, nor with her proposal that, despite their current notation, the
upper voices of the first section were originally conceived in perfect modus to align with the tenor.
35 Desmond, Music and the moderni, 4 n. 7.
36 Desmond, Music and the moderni, 34, 157, 238 for the Conclusiones, which she places in the later 1320s

or 1330s. See now Bent, ‘Artes novae’, and Maw, review of Music and the moderni, p. 499.
37 Dated thus by Earp, in Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars nova Motets. They argue that this motet may be

Vitry’s Thoma tibi, cited in ars nova treatises for the features this motet exhibits.
38 The tenors of Machaut’s motets with diminution are written out in full in the surviving manuscripts,

but all could have been conceived homographically, the reduced section to be derived by diminution or
mensurally from a single notated form. The notation in full may have been an editorial decision taken for the
complete-​works manuscripts by Machaut or his compilers, as for all works of the period where the notation
may have been updated in later manuscripts.
39 Kügle, ‘Two Abbots and a Rotulus’, 151.
 Machaut’s Motet 18 257

Fig. 13.2 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 146, Lescurel, f. 58r: rests in Belle com
loiaus. © BnF

usage, Earp suggested (above) that what were later notated as paired minim rests may
earlier have been distinguished as minor semibreve rests, or by some kind of undif-
ferentiated short rest. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 30, although Fauvel motets use no
rests shorter than the breve, the ballade En chantant (ff. 23v–​24, p.mus. 56) has short
rests that sit on the line and have the value of a semibreve.40 A few instances in the
songs of Lescurel in Paris146 have short rests: Amours que vous, f. 57v, has a hanging
fƒ
semibreve rest ( ); and Belle com loiaus on f. 58r has several instances of a semibreve
followed by a rest, indiscriminately hanging or sitting ( fƒ. f©
), as in Fig. 13.2, where
both must be major semibreve rests. And if such rests were imprecisely notated at this
stage for paired minims, why not also for the occasional single minim? Could it not
be that Machaut, faced with the need in M18 to accommodate an extra syllable in his
complex and craftily contrived musico-​textual conception, was here driven to find an
ad hoc solution within the syllable-​rest discipline he had set himself ( ©gg
instead of
the more usual Ìg
)?
Practice usually precedes theory, and the use of such a rest did not necessarily re-
quire prior formulation in a treatise. The minim rest is however attested in the early
1320s. Doubt has been cast on the illustration of short rests in Muris’s Notitia because
they seem precocious, and the sources containing them are later. However, single
minim rests are clearly illustrated in the Tractatus of Petrus de Sancto Dionysio,
written apparently not long after the Notitia, which Petrus cites and critiques ex-
tensively. He gives an explicit form for the single minim rest, simplifying short rests
from what he sees as Muris’s over-​complicated and unpractical gradations, and thus
corroborating their authentic presence in the Notitia.41 With the restoration of dates
in the early 1320s for treatises that attest minim rests, I still think a 1325 dating pos-
sible for M18 on notational grounds; there are arguments for and against both a 1325
and a 1332 dating.

40 Signalled by Earp (email of 8.2.21). Early motets outside Fauvel that also have rests shorter than a

breve include Karlsruhe82 recto, where the S rests in fa fa mi fa are suspended between the staff lines; in
Troyes1949 S rests preceding or following a S are written interchangeably as hanging or sitting (on ff. A and
B, and strip br).
41 CSM 17, 147–​ 66, p. 39 for dating, 156–​68 for minim rests. Cook, ‘Theoretical Treatments of the
Semiminim’, 314–​16.
258 Machaut

A Proposal for Revision

Anna Zayaruznaya has drawn attention to a very interesting case of hocket revision
in Vitry’s Cum statua/​Hugo, from semibreve hockets in Ivrea to minim hockets in
Ca1328, but this does not affect the overall structure of the motet.42 Variant versions of
the introitus to O Philippe/​O bone dux stand outside the structured part of that motet.
Her proposals that hocket sections were added to other motets by Vitry remain hypo-
thetical; but none of her instances are as radical as the recomposition now proposed by
Desmond for M18.
Desmond finds a disjunction between the first and the accelerated sections of M18.
She is prepared to accept the 1325 date for the first section of the motet, but finds it too
early for the second section, on account of its various notational features—​remote im-
perfection of the long (reduced from the maxima of the first section), simultaneous use
of perfect and imperfect tempus (both allowed in the Conclusiones of Muris’s Notitia
in 1321 and found in some early ars nova motets), and its minim hockets, all features
which she finds theorised mainly in the 1340s or later.43 She observes that complete
isorhythm as found in the accelerated section of M18 is unusual before 1350.44 But
Vos/​Gratissima, with its similarly syllabic isorhythmic hockets in the accelerated sec-
tion, has been dated to the early 1330s by Desmond (in my view it dates from the mid
to late 1320s: see Ch. 8), and Musicalis, certainly of the early 1330s, has relentlessly
isorhythmic hockets, though without a reduced section. (Some have even placed
Musicalis earlier than Apollinis, but this cannot be so: see Ch. 17.) It has semibreve
hockets and Ìgbut no single minim rests. Desmond proposes that M18 was revised
at a date commensurate with her late dating of ars nova treatises, but offers no con-
vincing occasion for such a revision. She proposes either an original setting of the
first section only, or that what we now have is an ingenious adaptation which retains
the original verbal text but replaces an older second section with the present hocket
section. The tenor of this older section might have been newly rhythmicised (I avoid
the term pseudo-​diminution), as in Vitry’s motets Firmissime/​Adesto, Douce/​Garison
and Vos/​Gratissima; though the last of these has minim hockets which would fall out-
side her dating. She rejects my claims that the music and text demand consideration
as a single conception, and that the shorter texts for the second pair of colores, with
monosyllables for hockets, were specifically tailored to the plan for the musically ac-
celerated section.45 I argued that the poems are intimately associated with specifically
this musical setting, and reject her proposal of either a truncated or an alternative ver-
sion. In further support of the unity of the poems, I would claim that the number and
sequence of monosyllables in any case almost prescribes isorhythmic hockets, just as
the reduced stanzas of the poetic structures prescribe an accelerated second section.
Rhythms for this diminution section and its isorhythmic hockets could indeed be
composed from the carefully calculated syllabic text of the triplum alone, with very

42 Zayaruznaya, ‘Reworkings’. See Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai, vol. 1, 80f; vol. 2, 129–​36 (No. 16).
43 Desmond, ‘Traces of Revision’, 413.
44 Citing Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’, 30–​31. Desmond’s late datings are governed by the chro-

nology and late treatise datings set out in Music and the moderni. Motet 18, and others like it, must date from
well before 1350 to have been included in MachautC.
45 Desmond, ‘Traces of Revision’, 427.
 Machaut’s Motet 18 259

slight adjustments in the motetus. This argues against these texts ever being designed
or set without hockets, these hockets. And against the idea that these stanzas could
have been added later are the way the last words of the first section seem to point for-
ward. Given the frequent verbal signalling in motets of musical structural joins (see
Ch. 18, Musicorum; Ch. 8, Vos; Ch. 14, M4; and many other places), the last words of
the first section may be significant: the triplum’s ‘Scis pungere’ might be construed as
announcing the ensuing hocket section (as noted above), and Preelegit as anticipating
(‘pre-​’) the next word, Elegit.
There is no direct evidence here or in any fourteenth-​century motet for such major
sectional replacement as Desmond proposes, as she herself admits.46 It is a central
premiss of the present book that at least the most sophisticated motets are finished and
rounded constructions of text and music, often with the mutually reinforcing integ-
rity of a Chinese puzzle or a crossword, leaving no room for addition, subtraction or
substitution, as attested by densely packed structural, numerical, melodic, rhythmic,
citational and symbolic text–​music relationships.47 There is no evidence of any such
revisions in Machaut’s motets. Added voices, usually contratenors, or (in the case of
Apollinis) additional triplum parts, occur in other fourteenth-​century motets, but these
do not affect the overall durations and structures of the body of the motet, or its text–​
music relationships.
Contrafaction is rare, and it can be discounted in this case. Two documented
instances are both later fourteenth-​century English adaptations in Latin of French
motets.48 There are very occasional name replacements (Ludowice in Paris571 for
Fauvel’s O Philippe), but here Guillermus in rhyme position makes a name replace-
ment unlikely. And in any case, textual alteration would work the wrong way round.
The name of the discredited Guillaume should have been replaced by a successor, but
it is Guillermus’s name alone that appears in the earliest transmission of the motet in
MachautC together with the allegedly revised hocket section. The suggestion of a re-
vision still does not explain why Machaut would have retained a text with inaugural or
current connotations for an archbishop who would have been out of favour or dead by
the time of those revisions, and indeed is no easier to explain than a later dating of the
whole motet. Why would anyone want to revise M18 musically and not change the ded-
icatee? Indeed, the index of MachautA emphasises the dedicatee by citing this motet,
exceptionally, by its triplum: Bone pastor Guillerme.49

46 Indeed, Desmond admits that ‘In the case of Bone pastor, there really is not much of this sort of evidence

in the manuscript sources. The hypothesis here relies on the stylistic incongruity of the two sections, the
likely updating of the upper voices in the integer valor section into imperfect modus, and the assemblage of
advanced notational and technical features that cluster in the diminution section’ (p. 430). In fact, there is no
such evidence or incongruity; this change of pace and texture is normal in motets with a second section with
tenor reduction and hockets, as in Vos/​Gratissima.
47 A view also subscribed to by Machaut; The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 8. But Zayaruznaya, ‘Reworkings’, has

challenged the stability of motet transmission.

48 Se päour/​Diex tan desir becomes, in Ox7, Domine quis habitabit/​De veri cordis (PMFC 5, nos. 16b and

16a). Are post libamina, OH no. 146, is a self-​declared contrafact. Other unica in Durham20 and Ox7 could
also be contrafacta of French motets.
49 As a counter-​example, it could be pointed out that Ciconia’s motets for long-​dead doges and bishops

(Ch. 28) were recopied two decades after his death with added contratenors (musical updating) but no change
of name. But these are not authorial changes. For Earp’s later dating of M18, see above, and his ‘Tradition and
Innovation’.
260 Machaut

Postscript on the Tenor of Motet 2,

Tous corps/​De souspirant cuer/​Suspiro

Much has been written about the sighing announced in the tenor and motetus
of M2 and its onomatopoeic representation in all voices in rests of varying length.
The lover must ‘interrupt and syncopate his words by deep sighs, making him mute
and silent’.50 The text setting is almost the opposite of M18, in that words seem to
be broken to achieve precisely that effect. Another instance of a word of division or
puncture is the triplum’s Souffre la | morsure (suffer the bite) at the junction to color
2, and of word-​painting, a notated gs in the motetus against gn in the tenor at male
pointure (with a malicious sting). Fourteenth-​century tenors with diminution, in-
cluding Machaut’s, are written out in full, even if the diminution could in all cases
have been derived without renotation. The second color of M2 looks like a straightfor-
ward diminution section, the notes of the first color being substituted by those of the
next level down.
There are no instructions, but the tenor’s mensuration and coordination are clear
empirically. The first color is in perfect modus. Ludwig and Schrade transcribed the
second color in perfect tempus, as would be expected in a straightforward diminu-
tion, but requiring an awkward imperfection and an anomalous rest. Boogaart rightly
recognised that the second color must be construed in imperfect tempus, not only a
much more elegant solution, but notationally more correct: perfect long rests in the first
section become imperfect breve rests in the second. So this is not simple diminution,
but an early instance of mensurally transformed reduction.51
There is one irregularity in the notation as written; the penultimate note of
each talea is a breve in both statements. In the first color, this has to be altered be-
fore the maxima, irregularly, because the maxima is not the next note-​level up. In
the second statement in imperfect tempus, this note is a straightforward imperfect
breve preceding a long. There is no reason to presume perfect modus, and that breve
could not in any case be altered if the modus is imperfect. Rather than treating the
irregularly altered breve before a maxima in the first, undiminished section as a no-
tational licence, I suggest that it was originally conceived as a long, imperfected by
the preceding breve and legitimately preceding the maxima. There would then be no
need to assume any irregularity when that long is notated as a breve in the written-​
out diminution. See Fig. 13.3. This is actually the opposite of Boogaart’s diagnosis,
which was that Machaut compromised the diminution. He assumed that in a true
diminution from perfect modus to perfect tempus, the penultimate note ought to be
an altered semibreve, corresponding to the altered breve of the first section. But as he
recognised, the second color is not in perfect tempus, so alteration is neither possible
nor called for. The penultimate note of the second color is correctly notated as an im-
perfect breve. It is the penultimate note of each talea of the first color that ought to be

50 Boogaart, ‘Folie couvient avoir’, 23–​31. This section was drafted in response to Boogaart’s reading of the

tenor of this motet in Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart. Desmond, ‘Traces of Revision’ (on M18) includes a
short section agreeing with Boogaart’s solution to M2.
51 Boogaart, in Machaut, The Motets, 191, says that ‘the second color is diminished partly to one-​half, partly

to one-​third’; this is too complicated a way of expressing it; ‘diminution with mensural change to imperfect
tempus’ obviates the need to posit variable reduction.
 Machaut’s Motet 18 261

Fig. 13.3 Proposed original notation of the tenor of Machaut, Motet 2

a long imperfected by the breve that precedes it. Then the notation of the two colores
would correspond exactly, increasing the elegance of the mensural transformation
and enabling them to have been derived from a single notated form. This restoration
of an original homographic form of the tenor weighs for me more heavily than the
irregular—​but not unprecedented—​alteration of a breve before a maxima, but both
anomalies are resolved by the solution proposed here. About half of the Fauvel motets
with exactly repeating color (eight motets) notate the tenor only once, and in all but
one of those cases (Ihesu, tu dator/​Zelus familie, f. 44) with a repeat sign (‘&c’).52 All of
Machaut’s diminishing tenors could (and surely therefore must) have been conceived
homographically, although they are fully written out in their earliest transmission
in MachautC, as with all other motets of the period. An interesting case is M6, S’il
estoit nulz/​S’Amours/​Et gaudebit cor vestrum, where the tenor is notated only once,
with repeat signs, but where the second color is differently rhythmicised because the
altered breves fall at different places in the perfection due to an initial rest.53 That is
the only Machaut motet where the second color requires different rhythmicisation but
is not written out. That tenor is (correctly) neutrally notated without dots of division
in MachautC and MachautA, but in Ferrell(Vg), a dot of division has been added at
the end of the third perfection for each of the first-​color taleae, but this is incorrect
for the second color to be read from the same notation.54 The present proposal for M2
removes what may be a rare anomaly in Machaut’s otherwise elegant dual-​purpose
tenor notations, even if in editing them for MachautC (as noted above) most tenors
were written out in full, and to remove ambiguity by (in this case) compromising the
homographic status. Dots of division are in most cases accidental (i.e. helpful but op-
tional); in Fig. 13.3, the clarifying dot I have added in brackets could not be notated
in a homographic presentation, because it would have been misleading in the second
color to be derived from the same notation, as it would then appear as an unwanted
dot of augmentation in imperfect mensuration.55
For the notation as it stands, a similar irregular alteration is in Musicalis, where a
breve is preceded by a pair of minims, the second of which has to be altered (see Ch. 17).
Another instance where alteration is required other than before the next higher adja-
cent value occurs in the tenor of Garrit gallus, where a breve is altered before a coloured
breve (see Ch. 4). In that case, there is a dot, occasionally at this period causing alter-
ation. By the later part of the century, good notational practice did not allow dots to
cause alteration; the only criterion was that the note to be altered should precede a note

52 Ludowice in Paris571 also notes the tenor just once.

53 Perhaps embodying Franco’s statement: ‘Et nota pausationes mirabilem habere potestatem; nam per
ipsas modi adinvicem transmutantur’ (CSM 18, 55). Rerhythmicisation without renotation also occurs in the
Super omnes speciosa tenor of Paris934, f. 79r.
54 MachautC, ff. 210v–​211, MachautA ff. 419v–​420, Ferrell(Vg), ff. 265v–​266.
55 A similar adjustment of dots for mensurally changed diminution in perfect and imperfect mensurations

is found in Alma polis, Ch. 19.

262 Machaut

or rest of the next note-​level up. In all three of these motets, Musicalis, Garrit gallus and
Machaut’s M2, the anomaly is repeated in each talea.56
This postscript is included here because the tenors of both M18 and M2 could have
been notated only once, the diminutions read from the notation of the first section. Both
tenors, I believe, were conceived in a single notated form, even if written out ad longum.
In the case of M18, an earlier notation of the tenor color only in the longer values of its
first statement would overcome Desmond’s objection that remote imperfection is not
documented for the lower level of note-​values, because the reader would be thinking in
the larger values, but accelerated. Moreover, in the case of M2, the removal of an irreg-
ular alteration enables both statements, including the mensurally altered diminution, to
be read from the same notation in the form in which Machaut conceived it.

56 Admittedly, there are occasional irregularities. Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’, 306, discusses irregular instances

of alteration other than before the next value up. In an email of 21.3.22 he notes the alteration of a breve before
a duplex long in the tenor of Mo, 8.332, f. 380 (Je cuidoie/​Se j’ai/​Solem). The anonymous author of De musica
mensurabili (CSM 13, formerly known as Theodoricus de Campo) disapproves of breve alteration before the
duplex longa in the tenor of the Fauvel motet [Super]/​Presidentes, and of semibreve alteration before a long.
In the present case, this irregularity is the only impediment to a homographic notation that would serve both
statements of the color. For documentation of remote imperfection already in Muris’s Conclusiones (1321),
see n. 36 above.
 14
Text–​Music Relationships in Motets 4 and 8

'This chapter has its origins in seminars on Motets 4, 7 and 8 given jointly with Kevin
Brownlee in Oxford in the early 1990s at All Souls College, and in presentations for in-
terdisciplinary audiences on verbal and musical polyphony.1 My challenge to Brownlee
was to a reader highly alert to intertextuality who had read every word of poetry written
by Machaut except the motets: what did he make of the unique form of intertextu-
ality offered by the simultaneously presented texts of the motets, with words and even
syllables precisely placed in relation to each other? He rose splendidly to the challenge,
and we concentrated on motets whose literary texts invited reading against each other
and particularly in dialogue with the Remede de Fortune, in addition to the ubiquitous
influence of the Roman de la Rose. This was all before the appearance of Lawrence Earp’s
Guide in 1995, Anne Walters Robertson’s Guillaume de Machaut in 2002 and the se-
ries of important studies by Jacques Boogaart (from 1993, and particularly from 2001
onwards).2 While both motets have since received many insightful comments within
broader studies, few or no studies have been devoted principally to them.

Motet 4. De Bon Espoir/​Puis que la douce/​Speravi

For the music, see Example 14.1 and for the texts and translation see Table 14.1.

Tenor

The slow-​moving tenor, the bottom line of the score ( Ex. 14.1), is the founda-
tion of the musical structure, though it was chosen to fit the previously established
materia of the motet, as prescribed in the treatise De modo componendi tenores
motettorum (usually attributed to Egidius de Morino, but see Chs. 1 and 16), in
one of the very few motet procedures attested by a contemporary theorist. In this

1 Brownlee, ‘Textual Polyphony in Machaut’s Motets 8 and 4’ was his contribution to a Study Session which

I convened at the 1992 annual meeting of the International Musicological Society in Madrid. See also his ‘La
Polyphonie textuelle dans le Motet 7’. The present section on M4 was the basis for a paper I gave at Kalamazoo
in 2005. Images of these two motets can be seen as follows: MachautA https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​
btv1b8​4490​444.image, M4, ff. 417v–​418; M8, ff. 421v–​422. Ferrell(Vg) https://​www.diamm.ac.uk/​sour​ces/​
3774/​#/​ima​ges, M4, ff. 263v–​264; M8, ff. 267v–​268. For an excellent modern edition and full listing of variants,
see Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 195–​98.
2 For M4 see, among others, Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 19–​23, 33–​35; Boogaart, ‘O se-

ries summe rata’, 391–​419; Hartt, ‘Rehearing Machaut’s Motets’; Fast, ‘God, Desire, and Musical Narrative’.
For M8 see Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’, 132–​37, within a chapter on the related aspects of Motets 8, 12,
14, and 15, including a shared talea rhythm (pp. 636–​37), and three dealing with Fortune. Boogaart, ‘Sound
and Cipher’, discusses symbolism in both Motets 4 and 8. M8 has received scrutiny from Clark, ‘Machaut
Reading Machaut’; Earp, ‘ “The spirit moves me” ’, 284–​88. See Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, for excel-
lent editions of both motets in modern notation with full details of manuscript variants.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0015
264 Machaut

Table 14.1 Texts and translation of Machaut, Motet 4

Talea Triplum Motetus

C1, I 1 De Bon Espoir, de tres Dous Souvenir 1 Puis qu’en la douce rousee
2 Et de tres Dous Penser contre Desir
3 M’a bonne Amour maintes fois secouru 2 D’umblesse ne vuet florir
4 Quant il m’a plus aigrement sus couru,
5 Car quant Desirs plus fort me destreingnoit, 3 Pitez, tant que meüree
6 Moult doucement Espoirs m’asseüroit
II 7 Et Souvenirs me moustroit la biaute, 4 Soit mercis que tant desir,
8 Le scens, l’onneur, le pris et la bonte
9 De celle dont li amoureus penser 5 Je ne puis avoir duree,
C2 10 Mon dolent cuer venoient conforter.
11 Las! or m’assaut Desirs plus qu’il ne suet. 6 Car en moy s’est engendree,
12 Mais durement endurer le m’estuet,
III 13 Car je sui pres de perdre le confort 7 Par un amoureus desir,
14 De Bon Espoir dont je me desconfort;
15 Et Souvenirs me fait toudis penser 8 Une ardeur desmesuree
16 Pour mon las cuer faire desesperer,
17 Car Grace, Amour, Franchise, Loyaute, 9 Qu’Amours, par son dous plaisir,
18 Pite, Doctrine et Debonnairete
C3, i 19 Sont pour moy seul si forment endormi 10 Et ma dame desiree,
20 Que Dangiers est souvereins de Merci
21 Et que ma dame, a qui je sui rendus, 11 Par sa biaute coulouree,
ii 22 Croit a Durte et orguilleus Refus, 12 De grace y ont fait venir,
23 Pour ce, sans plus, que m’amour ne mon cuer
C4 24 N’en vueil ne puis departir a nul fuer. 13 Mais puis qu’einsi leur agree,
iii 25 Mais puis qu’estre ne puet ore autrement, 14 Je vueil humblement souffrir
26 Face de moy tout son commandement,
27 Car maugre li l’ameray loyaument. 15 Leur voloir jusqu’au morir.

Tenor: Speravi

Triplum: With Good Hope, with Very-​Sweet Memory and with Very-​Sweet Thought,
good Love has many times helped me against Desire, when it has most sharply
pricked me; for when Desire held me most tightly, Hope very sweetly reassured
me, and Memory showed me the beauty, the sense, the honour, the value and the
goodness of her from whom the amorous thoughts came to comfort my piteous
heart. Alas! now Desire attacks me more than it used to. But I must firmly [harshly]
endure it, for I am ready to lose the comfort of Good Hope, which discourages me;
and Memory continuously makes me think [of it] in order to make my weary heart
despair, for Grace, Love, Honesty, Loyalty, Pity, Doctrine and Elegance are for me
alone so deeply asleep that Resistance rules over [is the lord of] Mercy and my lady,
to whom I belong, believes in Harshness and prideful Refusal, so that she does not
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 265

want my love or my heart nor can I leave at any price. But because it can now not
be otherwise may her entire commandment be done to me, for in spite of her I will
love her loyally.

Motetus: Because in the sweet dew of humility Pity does not want to flower, until
mercy (which I desire very much) be ripened, I am not able to last, for within me is
engendered by an amorous desire, an excessive ardour which Love, through his sweet
pleasure, and my desired lady, through her ruddy beauty, have mercifully made to
come here. But because this situation pleases them, I want humbly to endure their
wishes until my death.

Tenor: I hoped.

case the tenor is the Introit usually assigned to the first Sunday after Pentecost,
Speravi, ‘I have hoped’, thus linking it firmly with Espoir, hope.3 The text is from
Psalm 12: 6: ‘ego autem in misericordia tua speravi: exultabit cor meum in salutari
tuo . . . et psallam nomini Domini altissimi’ (But I have hoped in thy mercy; my heart
shall rejoice in thy salvation, and I will praise the name of the Lord most high). The
Introit antiphon, however, uses the past tense, exultavit cor meum, parallel to the
tenor’s speravi, instead of the future exultabit of the psalm. The tenor Speravi is thus
a first-​person authorial comment on the triplum and motetus treatments of Espoir.
The tenor is also authoritative and fundamental, providing, as it does, biblical au-
thority for the text and, via the liturgical chant, the raw material for the music of the
entire motet, including some of the melodic material for the upper parts. (Other
motets where this happens include M8, this chapter; Tribum, Ch. 4, also Chs. 9,
12 and elsewhere.) In this way, as Brownlee signalled, it undergirds the corrective
overwriting of courtly Espoir by spiritual Hope (spes, speravi) by using French and
Latin words respectively.4 These tenor melodic motives are made prominent in the
upper parts with long notes, or with distinctive rhythms ( ggg fg
), on key words
such as douce, Amours, dame, the emphatic first person je, and even for the impor-
tant and repeated conjunction car, just as the musical structural joins are clearly
pointed. Even the rhythmicisation of the tenor also provides, in much longer values
(sss and as ddd
, sd
and ) the rhythms ggg fg
and prominent in the upper parts;
a projection of the (prior) tenor rhythms into those of the upper parts. Similar cases
have been pointed out, as for example in M10 (Ch. 12).
As is often the case, Machaut has selected his tenor not from the beginning of
the chant, but within it, in order to link its keyword Speravi directly to the opening
De Bon Espoir of the triplum. He must also have chosen this excerpt for its musical
properties, which he exploits both contrapuntally and in deriving material from it for
the upper parts. The version used by Machaut differs in one small detail from most
of the melodies for this Introit; he fills in the leap of a third (between notes 4 and 6,

3 Identified in Ludwig, Guillaume de Machaut, ii. 60*; this Introit is sometimes assigned to a later Sunday

after Pentecost. Melodies assembled in Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, 189.

4 See Leach, Guillaume de Machaut, ch. 4, for the central role of Hope as a creative force in Machaut’s

works, especially in the Remede de Fortune.

266 Machaut

bb–​g) to achieve an entirely conjunct melody.5 It is serpentine, like the tenor of M9

(Ch. 9), with a range of only a fourth. The shorter tenor of M9 (Fera pessima) is from a
different chant, but in fact its twelve notes are precisely and entirely embodied in the
tenor of M4; they are identical with notes 3–​14 of its eighteen notes, creating a bond
of shared material between the two motets. Example 14.2 shows how the notes of the
tenor of M9 recur here (cf. Ex. 9.3), and how in M4 the two melodic statements are
superimposed on the three rhythmic statements (or, vice versa), creating different in-
tertextual permutations at a musical level.6 The conjunct-​motion tenor (like that of
M9) is very rich in melodic palindromic material and symmetries, both within one
color statement and taken together with its link to the next iteration. Face de moy at
B143 enters on the end of one of these large palindromes. Note the number of words
marking negatives or opposites: destreingnoit, desmesuree, desesperer, desconforter.
Some opposites are signalled by contre.

Ex. 14.2 The tenor color of Motet 4, showing its overlap with that of Motet 9 (Fera pessima)
and its articulation by talea repetition

The phrase from which the Introit chant tenor comes, In tua misericordia speravi,
links it further with Merci (=​ misericordia). The tenor Speravi is a first-​person authorial
comment on the—​likewise first-​person—​triplum and motetus treatments of Espoir
(=​hope). However much the choice of tenor was conditioned by verbal considerations
and liturgical context, Machaut also cared about the pliability and character of the mu-
sical material, in this case its conjunct serpentine quality.

Tenor Disposition, Notation and Upper-​Voice Structures

In the first color, the maximodus is wonderfully ambiguous ( Ex. 14.1). The 34
breves of each talea divide neither by four nor by six. The tenor starts with three clear
perfect maximodus groups, 3 × 3 =​9L, through B18. Another count of three could
take us up to B24; thereafter the tenor can be counted in twos, though it dissolves
into syncopation. The tenor modus is also unambiguously imperfect up to B18, but
the syncopations thereafter bring strong coincidences with the upper parts which
destabilise regular groupings. The upper parts are in imperfect tempus and major

5 Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, and ‘Tracing the Tenor’, 66; she also notes the possibility that Machaut

made this slight alteration. Many of Machaut’s tenor chants seem to have originated in or near Reims: see
Ch. 13 n. 19.
6 The phenomenon of shared or borrowed tenors between different motets is reviewed in Clark, ‘Machaut

Reading Machaut’.
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 267

prolation throughout; modus is imperfect, at least to start with. The triplum remains
in imperfect modus; not so the motetus. It starts off in unmistakable duple modus
groupings, appearing to follow the tenor’s imperfect modus through B16; but then
we are taken by surprise by the unsignalled need to alter B17 before the single dotted
long at B19. The dot, by hindsight, is therefore not a dot of addition, but confirms
its perfect status. An unsignalled shift to perfect modus, in the motetus alone, must
start in B16, and therefore by further hindsight from B13, whose rest coincides with
a strong tenor maxima. Motetus B23 likewise must be altered before the long at B25;
but from B25–​B34 the motetus falls into groupings of two breves to the long, setting
up a tension with the syncopated tenor notes of its modus and maximodus, ambig-
uous at this point. This is repeated at the corresponding places in the other taleae
of color 1, where the upper parts are partially but not wholly isorhythmic. Because
of these ambiguities, some places in Example 14.1 have been non-​committally
barred. The altered breves are marked in Example 14.1 by swallowtails. Like many
notational ambiguities and unsignalled changes, this one has to be construed empiri-
cally. Under-​prescriptive notation is not necessarily faulty notation. There is no com-
parable shift in the fully isorhythmic diminished section, though the now short-​term
syncopations are heard as playful complements to the hockets that occupy the second
half of each talea.
The tenor is stated twice, each statement embodying two colores (C1–​2, C3–​
4), the second time in written-​out diminution at the next note-​level down, which
in imperfect modus and tempus results in 2:1 proportion. Each of the motet’s
two sections contains three tenor taleae which overlap with the two differently
rhythmicised color statements (C1–​2, C3–​4). Because the recurring pitches in C2
and C4 are attached to different rhythms, these statements differ in length from
C1 and C3. The motet is 153 breves long; the first two tenor colores total 102 breves
(53 +​49), the second two 51 breves (26½ +​24½).7 The talea length is 34 breves in
section I, 17 breves in diminution. Thus the tenor has altogether four melodic color
statements asymmetrically mapped onto six rhythmic talea statements (three un-
diminished, three diminished), which avoids simple coincidence of the same notes
with the same rhythms.
The ending is anomalous, as in several motets by Machaut and others, discussed in
Chapter 1. The end of each undiminished tenor talea of M4 is as∂
, which in regular
written-​out diminution is sdƒ
as in Ferrell(Vg) and MachautG, arriving a semibreve
later than the upper parts, as in Example 1.1b above. But MachautA and MachautE have
(irregularly) ddƒ for the final two tenor notes of the diminished color, thus arriving at
the final cadence a semibreve ahead of the upper parts (as in Ex. 14.1, B151–​B53).8
An alternative ending is provided in Ex. 14.1 to align the cadential arrival. Other
motets with non-​coincident endings as notated are M10 (Ch. 12 and Ex. 1.1c), M17,
M9 (Ch. 9, Ex. 9.1), where the tenor arrives later, and M15 (Ch. 10 and Ex. 1.1d),

7 The strikingly unmusical number of 153 (a multiple of 17) is the number of the miraculous draft of fishes

(John 21: 1–​14), and the length in breves of a perhaps surprising number of motets: Sub Arturo, Ch. 20; Floret,
Ch. 6, Dunstaple’s motet 28, Gaude virgo salutata, and the Cyprus motet 28 (O rex), Ch. 32. It is more common
for motets to use numbers like 120 or 144, so it is surprising that several use 153.
8 This may indicate some editorial initiative to rectify the cadence. The Ferrara Ensemble recording

elongates the upper parts in order to end with the ‘late’ tenor ending (see Ch. 1 n. 14).
268 Machaut

where the triplum is delayed.9 In these cases, the tenors could have been conceived and
notated homographically, perhaps with the intention that an adjusted ending would be
provided in performance, but which was not among any editorial adjustments made to
Machaut’s copies for their first surviving transmission in MachautC, and thence to the
other complete-​works manuscripts. The misaligned endings appear to be prescriptive
because the diminutions are fully and mechanically written out; however, derivation by
performers from a single notated form might have carried a common-​sense expectation
of adjustment.

Use of Chant in Upper Voices

The peak notes of the chant, a bb a, occur eight times in the tenor: twice in each tenor
color, at breves 9 and 22, and their subsequent restatements. This peak also occurs three
times in the motetus, an octave higher, in long notes; the bb is made very prominent, au-
dibly and structurally, as the highest motetus note, occurring only in long notes, at B53–​
B58, punning, on the word duree, at the join of the first two color statements (C2), then
at the melodically corresponding position B104–​B6 and the rhythmically corresponding
B121–​B23 on De grace, each time crossing over and rising above the triplum. The a bb a
figure occurs once in the triplum, at B72, with the triplum’s only notated bb coinciding
with a tenor bb. Such integration of the chant melody into newly composed upper voices
is more often cultivated than has usually been noticed, and confirms tenor priority in re-
lation to the melodic composition of the upper parts.10 The highest triplum note d is at
amoureus penser, B49–​B50, on a descending scale down a fifth, as for the opening Espoir.
There is considerable play with voice-crossing, and with calculated use of the extremes
of the ranges, though it is rather more understated here than, for example, in M9 (Ch. 9),
where the depths are literally plumbed and the parts depictively crossed for cavernis and
speluncis (caverns and pits). At B24–​B25 of M4, to the triplum words in line 4, ‘Il m’a sus
couru’ (‘he runs above me’), the motetus goes above the triplum.11

Texts

Table 14.1 above shows how the verbal texts are distributed between the twice three talea
statements for triplum and motetus. Unlike the striking case of M9 (Ch. 9), the text distri-
bution is here fairly even, with two triplum lines to every one of the motetus in colores 1
and 2, and three triplum lines to every two of the motetus in the shorter colores 3 and 4. In
colores 1 and 2, each talea takes six triplum and three motetus lines; in colores 3 and 4, three

9 See especially Ch. 1; also Ch. 12, ‘Endings’, for discussion of whether these dissonant endings should

be observed; Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 15; and Ch. 12 n. 11 for the tenor of M6, whose differently
rhythmicised second color is marked for repetition but not written out. It has no diminution, but the talea
overlaps the join in such a way that the notes of the second color fall on different parts of the perfection,
resulting in different application of imperfection and alteration. See Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars nova
Motets, for a comparable instance there on f. 79r of Paris934. An instance where an adjusted ending seems to
be prescribed is in O amicus, Ch. 22.
10 It is a prominent feature of Tribum, Ch. 4.
11 See more recently Zayaruznaya, ‘She Has a Wheel’.
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 269

triplum and two motetus lines. 3:2 is also fundamental to the musical structure; each of the
two sections contains two colores to three taleae.
The tenor, Speravi, was chosen to go with De Bon Espoir, combining Latin and French,
sacred and secular hope. All three texts use the first-​person singular pronouns (moy
and je); the registers of the texts complement and reinforce each other. The contrastive
challenges of the genre are instead fulfilled in other ways. Motetus texts are nearly always
shorter and their music sparer than in the triplum; but here the line-​lengths are also dif-
ferent (decasyllables, heptasyllables), as are the rhyme schemes, thirteen different couplets
in the triplum, just two alternating rhyme syllables in the motetus.12
The 27:15 lines easily fall into 24 +​3: 12 +​3, i.e. a 2:1 ratio of lines (24:12) plus an envoi
of three lines in each text. That this is the intended structure is confirmed by each envoi
starting with the same words: Mais puis que . . ., which signal and initiate, in the triplum,
the last talea, and in the motetus, the last color. This is followed by, respectively, moy and je,
then love and death, knitting the texts together. Puis que recapitulates the opening of the
motetus text.
Jacques Boogaart has noted several aspects of these texts in relation to a chanson by the
trouvère Thibaut de Champagne, Tout autresi con l’ente fet venir/​Li arrousers de l’eve qui
chiet jus. Not only does Machaut’s motetus start with the nature topos, fairly common in
trouvère poetry, but it also has the unique conceit of bringing forth fresh growth by sprin-
kling water on a tree graft (enté: a striking reference also to the procedure of the motet
enté), an image which Machaut uses to express the rejuvenation of his love: umblesse, the
stance of the lady towards the aspiring lover, is compared to the dew which should bring
forth the flower of Pity and the fruits of Mercy. Machaut knew the song, whose imagery is
paraphrased in the second and third strophes of his Lay de Plour.13 Boogaart demonstrates
the detailed relationship between Thibaut’s text and M4. The abag motive (tenor notes 3–​
6), so prominent in M9 (Ch. 9), is shown by Boogaart to allude also to Thibaut’s song.14 In
the motetus this motive sounds three times in long note values (breves 53–​58, 104–​6 and
121–​23). In the triplum it appears once, in shorter note values, at B73 (in TIII), at ‘perdre le
confort’, but in this voice the b sign is conspicuous because used only here.
Love and desire are threaded through both texts. The triplum alternates Desir,
Amour, Desir, amoureus, Desir, then three forms of Amour in the second half of the text.
In the motetus, Desir, amoureus, desir, Amours, desiree. Grace, pite, merci also occur in
both texts. The motetus is chiastically structured at a literal level around the central line
8, une ardeur desmesuree, whose prolonged punning measuring significance we will see
below. Musically the phrase spans B82–​B94 and is flanked by Amour, amoureus, amo-
rous desire in various combinations.
Whereas in some motets (M9 triplum, M8) the apportionment of text to music is
evenly distributed, regular and predictable,15 here there is some slight but purposeful
local displacement, allowing different nodal points to be ingeniously brought together,
perhaps to ensure that amoureus desir, motetus line 7, just before the midpoint of the

12 The text forms are analysed exhaustively from this aspect, as for other motets, in Reichert, ‘Das

Verhältnis’.
13 Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 19–​23.
14 Ibid.: ‘The motif also appears in the Lay de plour at a textually significant place, although not corre-

sponding with the same words as in Thibaut’s chanson.’

15 See also Reichert, ‘Das Verhältnis’.
270 Machaut

text, is prolonged over the middle of the music from B71–​B80. The crucial word desir is
extended (the desire prolonged) over five breves (76–​80) and given prominence, with
no audible competition; indeed, the de of desir coincides with the de of the triplum’s
desconfort (a ‘word chord’). Desir is nearly aligned across the first three taleae; triplum
B8–​B9, motetus B43–​B46 and B76–​B80. It is also contrived that the important word
Amours, that follows the textual midpoint in the motetus, coincides with triplum Amour
at B95, the golden section of the music.16
The midpoint of the music, centred around B77, is not the main structural join, which
because of the diminution of C2 occurs at the two-​thirds point, at C3, breve 103 of 153.
Although it does not coincide with a talea/​color shift or a musical structural point of any
kind, this midpoint is marked by verbal and musical density. It is flanked by the reca-
pitulation in the triplum of the opening words De Bon Espoir at the middle triplum line
14, B74, to their opening rhythm ( f f fg fg
), just anticipating the midpoint of the music
(B77). That triplum opening rhythm ( f f fg fg
) occurs twice in succession in the first
four bars, for De Bon Espoir and de tres Dous Souvenir; it is used in turn for the repeat
of the word Souvenirs at B80–​B82, a ‘reminder’, in case we missed the verbal recapitula-
tion. Here at B80, instead of the opening c c cbag f, Souvenirs inverts the opening down-
ward scale to a rising scale, g g fgab c.
The triad of words Espoir, Souvenir, Penser, comes three times, always in the same
order, with Souvenir as the central term, in triplum lines 1–​2, then at 6–​9, where Souvenir
punningly initiates the second talea, TII, B35, again, as if to nudge: ‘remember?’, also
with fg fg ; and thirdly at lines 14–​15, B80, around the musical and textual midpoint,
as just noted. Et souvenirs me, plus a verb, begins lines 7 and 15, and line 1’s De Bon
Espoir is recapitulated at the middle line (14). Both textual and musical markers guide
the ear to the formal layout by verbal and musical recapitulations. Note the play of dif-
ferent combinations of adjectives with these nouns—​amoureus penser, amoureus desir,
tresdous penser, tresdous souvenir, bon espoir, bonne amour—​and of the interplay of the
numerous first-​person words.
Meanwhile in the motetus, the moisture and the heat identified as crucial by Brownlee
(rousee, dew, and ardeur, heat), appear in lines 1 and 8, 8 being the middle line and ardeur
the central word. ‘Ardeur desmesuree’ (beyond measure) invites and gets a multiple pun-
ning position, from its measured location and long notes B85–​B93, a passage within the
unsignalled switch to perfect modus. The corresponding passage in talea 2 also puns on
measure: ‘Je ne puis avoir duree’ (B48–​B60). The motetus words ‘Une ardeur desmesuree’
are introduced, in the triplum B80–​B81 on the word ‘Souvenirs’ (memories), by the re-
capitulation of the opening triplum rhythm for ‘De bon espoir’, |f f fg fg f
, but with
the syllables slightly realigned. Occupying B82–​B94, ‘Une ardeur desmesuree’ fills the
space between the midpoint of the music at B77 and the main structural join of the motet
at B103, contributing to the audible density there, with desmesuree (excessive, beyond
measure) punningly marking the shift to perfect modus on this talea, showing once
again a close connection in the micro-​planning of music–​text relationships.17

16 Instances of significant words calculated to coincide are ubiquitous. Examples are given for Vos/​

Gratissima in Ch. 8.
17 In M1, ‘Mais elle attent trop longuement’ (But she waits too long) begins the diminution section,

signalling the now speeded-​up tenor.

 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 271

The twelve-​bar duration of the unsignalled switch to perfect modus in the motetus
(B13–​B24 and corresponding places)18 coincides with Je ne puis avoir duree (I’m unable
to last) in talea II B47—​, and Une ardeur desmesuree (heat beyond measure) in talea
III B81—​, puns on duration. As noted for M10 in Chapter 12, and elsewhere, words
for wounding and cutting, measurement and proportion and similar, are common-
place puns for structural joins in motets; not only does the music underline the text but
the text also underlines the musical structure in mutual reinforcement. Memory (sou-
venir), also contributes to that function in M4. The motetus metre shifts back just before
B95, where it is contrived that the important word Amours, immediately following the
midpoint of the motetus text, coincides with triplum Amour, a point of dense activity
marked by a list of seven virtues. The list shows a striking similarity to M15 (Ch. 10),
where there is a marked switch from bad things to good, starting with a similar and sim-
ilarly placed list of seven virtues, with four in common between the two lists, starting in
M15 with raison (=​ ratio =​proportion):

M4: Car Grace, Amour, Franchise, Loyauté, Pité, Doctrine et Debonnaireté;

M15: Que Raison, Droiture, Doucure, Debonnairete, Franchise, Grace et Pite.

D’umblesse is the seventh word from the beginning (in motetus line 2), and
humblement the seventh from the end (in the penultimate line); both occurrences of
these words get the motetus’s lowest note, c, which points up the symmetry as well
as depicting the abasement of their ‘low’ sense.19 At triplum B9, the words are contre
desir; to the equivalent of an interrupted cadence, frustrating the ‘desired’ resolu-
tion; and literally ‘against desire’, we hear in motetus B9–​B11 a phrase that recurs
at the same point in the following two taleae, identical in both notes and music,
though over different tenor notes, both of them together with the word desir in
the motetus. This is emphasised too by the distinctive and sparingly used rhythm
fg ggg and its more frequent inverse, ggg fg
, which stand out against the predom-
inant rhythms creating the neutral background of and ff fg fg
. We might call this
the ‘desire motive’; it occurs also at B27, literally ‘contre pité’, to the same rhythm
fg ggg f e d ede f: here too the word desir is in the triplum, but the motive is set
to pité in the motetus. (Desir is also set to | dg fgfg d
| , e d edec d at motetus
B109–​B10.) Desire is emphasised in the texts, but musical reinforcing devices here
draw attention to words or concepts, to place them significantly against words
in other parts, and to imply them musically even in the absence of the word, like
Leitmotive. Similarly, a tenor tag can imply more tenor text than is stated in the man-
uscript or even more than is used in the given segment of chant. The technique is
both affective and structural.
The opening notes and rhythm of the motetus (B1–​B3), f fefg a | | d fgfg d
are identical with, and possibly an allusion to, the opening of the motetus of Vitry’s

18 It is not until the need to alter the breve at 17, 51 and 85 that perfect modus is confirmed, but the three-​

breve grouping is then projected back to B13, B47 and B81.

19 Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, 19–​23, also notes the symmetrical placement of umblesse

and humblement: the lady’s dew of umblesse enables the graft of Pity to flower, and then at the end, the lover
subjects himself humblement to her will.
272 Machaut

Garrit gallus/​In nova, a passage also quoted in the related Marigny motet Tribum/​
Quoniam (Ch. 4 and Ex. 4.6). In color 1, the upper parts, especially the triplum, de-
viate from strict isorhythm, especially at the beginnings and last breve of the first three
taleae. Both upper parts are strictly isorhythmic in the three taleae of the second section.
It is striking that the sixth breve of the motetus in all six taleae has the rhythm . ggg fg
It also occurs at corresponding places in motetus B48 and B82, B61 and B95, but its
only occurrence in the triplum is at B34, linking the end of TI to TII.
The following passages have the same pitches and rhythms in the motetus at the fol-
lowing places aligned in Example 14.1: B39–​B40 =​B73–​B74, B57–​B61 =​B91–​B95;
and B103–​B9 =​B120–​B26. In both upper parts B112–​B13 =​B129–​B30 except for the g
minim pitch in B129, which could be emended to f.

Dating, and Absence from MachautC

There has been considerable debate about the absence of M4 from the earliest Machaut
MS, MachautC, which otherwise presents the first twenty motets in what remained
their standard order. Earp put this down to a codicological accident when recopying
of the first six motets (by the same scribe) was necessary to integrate it with some later,
less orderly additions but has more recently conceded that the motet could post-​date
that compilation.20 Jared Hartt has recently summarised the dating considerations
and makes the case for a later composition date on grounds of sonority, suggesting, on
grounds of several appearances of her name (bon, bonne) in the text, that it could have
been a memorial to Bonne of Luxembourg.21

Motet 8. Qui es promesses/​Ha! Fortune/​Et non est qui adjuvat

For the music see Example 14.3 and for the texts and translation Table 14.2.
Motet 8 is one of the few motets that circulated outside the complete-​works
manuscripts, in Ca1328, Ivrea and Trém, and is the most widely transmitted of all
Machaut’s motets.22 It was known to Chaucer, who paraphrases the triplum text in the
Book of the Duchess. It is the only Machaut motet whose text is also preserved without
music, in Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS V.u.22, f. 138v.23 It is cited for imper-
fect time and prolation in the Paris14741 version of the Ars nova treatise, interest-
ingly by its triplum text, not by the more usual motetus as in the Trém index.

20 Earp, ‘Scribal Practice, Manuscript Production’, 140–​42. For a later concession, see Earp, ‘Isorhythm’, 100

n. 78. On the copying of the motets, see also Smilansky, ‘Creating MS C’, 288–​92.
21 Hartt, ‘Approaching the Motets’, 369–​75.

22 The accompanying transcription, Ex. 14.3, mainly follows MachautA and Ferrell(Vg). For an excel-
lent modern edition and full listing of variants, see Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 208–​11.
23 The Chaucer and text manuscript references are reported in Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, 367.

See also Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, commentary to M9, 211; Chaucer mentions the scorpion present
in that motet, which was also in Trém.
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 273

Table 14.2 Texts and translation of Machaut, Motet 8

Taleae Line Triplum Line Motetus

PI C1 1 Qui es promesses de Fortune se fie 1 Ha! Fortune trop SUI mis loing de port,
2 Et es richesses de ses dons s’asseüre,
3 Ou cils qui croit qu’elle soit tant s’amie
4 Que pour li soit en riens ferme ou seüre, 2 Quant en la mer M’AS mis sans aviron
5 Il est trop fols, car elle est non seüre 3 En un batel petit, plat et sans bort,
PII 6 Sans foy, sans loy, sans droit et sans mesure, 4 Foible, pourri, sans voile; et environ
7 C’est fiens couvers de riche couverture,
C2 8 Qui dehors luist et dedens est ordure.
9 Une ydole est de fausse pourtraiture, 5 Sont tuit li vent contraire pour MA mort,
10 Ou nuls ne doit croire ne mettre cure: 6 Si qu’il n’i a confort ne garison,
PIII 11 Sa convenance en vertu pas ne dure, 7 Merci n’espoir, ne d’eschaper ressort,
12 Car c’est tous vens, ne riens qu’elle figure
13 Ne puet estre fors de fausse figure
C3 14 Et li siens sont toudis en aventure 8 Ne riens de bien pour MOY, car sans raison
15 De trebuchier; car par droite nature, 9 JE voy venir la mort amere a tort
PIV 16 La desloyal renoïe, parjure, 10 Preste de MOY mettre a destruction;
17 Fausse, traïtre, perverse et mere sure
18 Oint et puis point de si mortel pointure
19 Que ceaus qui sont fait de sa nourriture 11 Mais celle mort reçoy JE par ton sort,
20 En traïson met a desconfiture. 12 Fausse Fortune et par ta traïson.

Tenor: Et non est qui adjuvat

P =​upper-​part periods, each comprising three tenor taleae. The tenor’s C3 starts during the lines marked, not at their begin-
ning. Verbal relationships are typographically distinguished by boldface, italics and underlining.

Triplum: He who trusts Fortune’s promises and counts on the riches of her gifts, or he who thinks
that she might be his friend, that for him she might be stable or secure in anything, he is quite mad,
for Fortune is uncertain, without faith, without law, without right, without decorum [mesure: but
also moderation or ‘measure’]. She is excrement covered with a rich covering, which shines on
the outside and inside is trash. She is an idol deceitfully shaped in which no one should believe or
trust; her compact with virtue does not last, for it’s all wind, and nothing it [=​her countenance; or
perhaps Fortune herself] represents can be anything except counterfeit signs [false figures]; and
her followers are always at risk of stumbling; for according to [her] true nature, the disloyal one
disavows and perjures; false, treacherous, mother of bitter milk, she anoints and then pricks with
such a fatal prick that those whom she has raised she treacherously undoes.

Motetus: Ah! Fortune, I put myself too far from port when you put me into the sea oarless in a
small boat, flat and without board, weak, rotten and without sail. And around me all the winds
blow unfavourably [contraire] for my death, so that there is no comfort or healing, no mercy
or hope, no way to escape, nor anything good for me, for unjustly I see bitter death advance
wrongly, ready to destroy me, but I receive this death by your decision, false Fortune, and by your
treachery.

Tenor: And there is no one who helps.

274 Machaut

Tenor

Et non est qui adiuvet is from the Verse of the Responsory Circumdederunt me for
Passion Sunday (CAO 4:6287); it is also sometimes specified for other Lenten occasions.
The biblical source is Psalm 21: 12: ‘quoniam tribulatio proxima est, quoniam non
est qui adiuvet’. All the Machaut MSS have adiuvat (who helps), except Ferrell(Vg),
where adiuvet has been changed from adiuvat by erasure, to conform with the liturgical
sources. Trém and Ivrea have adiuvet.24
The relation between the tenors of Motets 9 and 4 has been discussed, above and in
Chapter 9. The tenor of M8 is a short segment from the end of the much longer chant
used as the tenor of the longer and later M21. The relationship is fully discussed by Alice
Clark, who also enumerates other cases of shared tenors, within and outside Machaut’s
own corpus, and offers interesting comparisons between the two motets. Earp has
analysed the tonal implications of the tenor and commented on ways in which the insta-
bility of Fortune is emphasised.25

Tenor and Structure

The tenor color consists of 16 notes of the chant, stated three times, without diminution.
Modus and maximodus are both perfect, tempus and prolation imperfect. There are 12
very short tenor taleae of four notes, each consisting of three perfect longs (=​9 imperfect
breves): ds∂bs , thus falling into perfect maximodus as well as perfect modus. At a total
of 106 fully imperfect breves, it is one of the shortest motets. The tenor color occupies
four of these taleae, 36 breves for each of the three tenor color statements. But these
colores do not coincide with the three-​talea periods of the upper parts. Example 14.3
aligns not the three tenor colores, but four periods governed by the upper parts that
have some rhythmic correspondences but not complete isorhythm. (The tenor colores
could have been aligned instead, but this would have obscured the correspondences of
the upper-​voice taleae.) Three of the short tenor taleae make up one of these periods,
as I shall call them, marked I abc, II abc, III abc, IV abc. The four aligned 27-​breve
periods are superimposed on the three tenor colores (4 × 3) each of 36 breves. These
upper-​part periods have been called ‘Großtalea’ (Reichert) and ‘supertalea’ (Boogaart).
Anna Zayaruznaya prefers the neutral ‘block’ to designate spans of music that are artic-
ulated by, but not fully made up of, taleae’.26 Since the upper-​voice periods may be only

24 Boogaart notes (email of 7.2.2021) that Ferrell(Vg) made the change after MachautB had copied it, and

MachautE copied adjuvat from MachautB, whereas the other later versions have the e. For the copying relation-
ship between these manuscripts see Bent, ‘The Machaut Manuscripts Vg, B and E’ and Earp, Ferrell-​Vogüé, 44–​46.
25 Earp, ‘Declamatory Dissonance in Machaut’. Earp, ‘ “The spirit moves me”, 284–​88, explores the tonal

implications of the tenor in relation to unstable Fortuna. Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’, 134, and Boogaart,
‘Sound and Cipher’, 389–​90, suggest that cadences occurring at an earlier point in each color reflect the con-
trary motion of Fortune’s double wheel, the fickleness of Fortuna being the subject of the motet.
26 See Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, for a recent highlighting of the phenomenon of upper-​

voice taleae. A number of the motets in which she identifies this phenomenon are discussed in the present
book: Tribum/​Quoniam (Ch. 4) as well as Machaut M15—​all managed in a slightly different way from M8. See
Ch. 4 on the term ‘block’, which I used for Tribum for the 2 × 3 blocks of music identical in pitch and rhythm
in all parts, and which also works well for M20, where irregularly placed isorhythmic blocks of 3–​4 breves
in both upper parts only are irregularly spaced over differing tenor notes. The term is less well suited to M8,
where there is partial isorhythm—​hence ‘periods’. ‘Double talea’ accurately describes a pair of identical tenor
taleae that is spanned by a single upper-​part talea.
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 275

partly isorhythmic, as here, I prefer to avoid the term talea, which has connotations of
rhythmic identity, and will call them periods.
Both upper parts are strictly isorhythmic for just the last four perfect L of each pe-
riod (L6–​L9, B16–​B27 and aligned corresponding places), starting with the striking
syncopes of B16–​B24 and corresponding places. While caution is in order about
identifying word-​painting or symbolism in an aesthetic and affective world so different
from ours, there can be little doubt here that they represent the rocking of the rotten
leaky boat and the instability of Fortune, built in the longer term on the shifting sands
of a color staggered asymmetrically against non-​coincident upper-​voice periods. The
duple time and prolation of the upper parts which constitute the audible surface of the
motet are particularly well suited to this effect. Triplum and motetus come together in
equality and in number of notes and syllables for these sections, accounting for the un-
even distribution of text between triplum and motetus. In period I, triplum lines 4–​5
align with motetus lines 2–​3, and similarly in periods II–​IV, while motetus lines 1, 4,
7 and 10 each stretch over three triplum lines for the first half of each period. Similar
equality of notes and texts, especially at talea ends, is often achieved in other motets
with hockets; here, instead, the choice of syncopes is particularly well suited to imper-
fect time and prolation as well as to reflecting the text.
For the first five perfect longs of each section, the triplum has much more isorhythmic
correspondence than the motetus; see the aligned beginnings of periods II, III and IV,
but not I. Brownlee defined the third-​person triplum text as being concerned with log-
ical proof, a clerkly warning of the nature of Fortune and the consequences of that nature.
The motetus is a lament addressed to Fortune. He showed it to be contrastively rhetorical,
which may be consistent with its lower incidence of isorhythm. Its emphatic first-​person
forms are distinguished in Table 14.2 by small capitals. The different registers he identified
in the texts, more strongly so than in M4, are vividly reflected in the musical setting within
a very tightly unified whole. Musically, the triplum register or range is literally narrower
(a seventh), perhaps a function of its clerkly voice, while the motetus (range of a tenth)
plays around it, appearing much less tightly disciplined in pitch and rhythm.27 The voice-​
crossings (discussed above for M4, and for M9 in Ch. 9) cannot easily be heard from out-
side, because the wide range of the motetus is masked by its simultaneity with the triplum,
which cancels out these extremes of range. But it is only by considering the qualities of
each musical part separately, as also for the verbal texts, that these differences become
apparent. There are very few rests in the upper parts. Apart from a minim rest in each to
create the semibreve syncopations, both have a breve rest only at the end of each period;
the rest in the triplum in each case precedes an identical refrain-​like upbeat bridge to the
next talea: four minims a g f e at the end of each system in Example 14.3.

Derivation of Upper Parts from the Tenor

The melodic material of the upper parts is—​yet again—​derived closely from the tenor,
with its conjunct motives, rising fourths, and especially the falling fifths. The whole
motet is an essay in tightly disciplined permutations: the same pitches are placed over

27 Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 9–​10, remarks that the less ‘disciplined’ and unruly nature of motetus

parts is what makes them so interesting.

276 Machaut

different tenor notes, different pitches over the same tenor notes. The top parts often
work out in micro-​motives the note-​successions of the tenor’s melodic content, here in
forward, inverted and retrograde versions. Example 14.4 shows how many of the four-​
note minim formulas of the top parts are derived from the chant and used at various
pitches. The most obvious ones are those marked x and y in Example 14.4. Both are used
directly and in retrograde and inversion, and the last four tenor notes are y in retro-
grade. The retrograde of x is the inversion of y, and the retrograde of y is the inversion of
x. Motive x, a g a b (tr B3), recurs at a different pitch in breves 31, 35, 57, 85, but then at
the same pitch only in B61, followed by three statements in close succession at different
pitches. Other combinations derived from the chant tenor are ubiquitous.

Ex. 14.4 Tenor of Motet 8, showing leaps of 4ths and 5ths, the x and y motives and their
retrogrades and inversions, and the derivation of four-​note minim formulas of the top parts
from the chant

A different motive a g g f at triplum B4, for Fortune, recurs in the motetus for Fausse
Fortune at B102, four breves from the end, where it rises above (‘usurping’) the triplum
to the motetus’s highest pitch a. The only other motetus occurrences of this motive are
in the parallel places in periods 2 and 3.

Words for Music

The occurrences of Fortune in both texts at the beginning announce the theme un-
mistakably and make the word coincide musically at B4; the midpoint (end of system
2) brings together the synonymous words garison and cure; traison is nearly aligned in
both the last lines, in close proximity to Fausse Fortune (bold in Table 14.2 above), finally
conjoined at the end of the motetus as a culmination of several separate occurrences of
Fausse and Fortune. Contraire and sans raison both have unusual octave leaps; compa-
rable depictive musical responses to musically pregnant terminology can be multiplied
in Machaut’s motets. The opposites that characterised M4 have their counterparts in M8
in the strong use of contraire and the repeated use of sans, with their musical leaps.
Boogaart refers to the famous contrary wheels of Fortune, which I also invoked in
Chapter 3 (especially there n. 26), in demonstrating the contrary motion of the double
agenda of Fauvel. He points out that the estimated proportions of those wheels have been
shown to give Fortune a mechanical advance of approximately 4:3; this is precisely the
relationship between the tenor color (of four tenor taleae) to the upper-​voice periods (of
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 277

three tenor taleae).28 Even the tenor has a negative: Et non est. The linking of Merci and
n’espoir in M8 reflects two central words of M4. Fortune gets the only perfect long in the
upper parts, motetus B7–​B9, immediately followed, perhaps punningly, by ‘trop . . . loing
de port’ at B10–​B13, which also gets the lowest point of the motetus (‘too far from port’).
The triplum words of the first syncope passage emphasise instability: ‘en riens ferme
ou seüre, Il est trop fols, car elle est non seüre’ (spanning lines 4–​5). The threefold
sans that ends motetus lines 2, 3, 4 (‘sans aviron’, ‘sans bort’, ‘sans voile’) immediately
preceded the most negative triplum line 6 (‘Sans foy, sans loy, sans droit et sans mesure’)
spanning periods I and II. There is much play between the voices with alliteration and
assonance: Que/​quant at B15, Foy/​foible at B28, pour/​pour at B46, riens/​sien/​bien at B70.
The words are exploited for such sound qualities, perhaps even chosen for them. The
distribution and spacing of key words in the texts is telling; they are used musically as
sonic objects (in such alliterations) as well as for their meaning. Key words are so quali-
fied by their frequency of occurrence or prominence of appearance, or both, and also by
providing links between the two texts. Here they include Fortune, fausse, mort, traison,
vens/​vent—​and the negative sans, typographically distinguished above in Table 14.2.
Fausse at triplum B45 has a notated ‘fictive’ f s (punning on musica falsa) against the
tenor color’s one notated f s.

The Midpoint

One emendation requires comment. The motetus at B55 has a in all the main
manuscripts, emended in MachautE to g, and by Friedrich Ludwig and Leo Schrade to
b, which creates a strikingly high note on Merci at the midpoint, but takes the motetus
outside its range. I adopt an emendation to f(s).29 Most manuscripts have a clef change
at this point which arguably leaves the pitch of this note as a or f ambiguous. But this so-
lution creates unmitigated parallel fifths with the tenor, otherwise absent in this motet
(though narrowly avoided at B100–​B1). Neither f nor b is an ideal solution.
The area around the midpoint of a motet is often a centre of gravity or density. There
is intense activity around B61–​B67, just following the textual and musical midpoint
(indeed, between the midpoint and the musical golden section of the motet, some-
times a significant node). Three bars, B61, B62, B64, all have four minims in both upper
parts together; only otherwise at the beginning does this happen in two consecutive
bars. The motetus motive f e d e at B61 otherwise occurs exclusively in the triplum.
The motetus at B62–​B65 is an almost exact recapitulation of its music for Fortune at
B4–​B7: Fortune is the present but unspoken sequel to the negative Merci n’espoir. This
passage has a strong resonance with the melody used for love =​fire =​death in M10, as
shown in Example 14.5. It also marks the junction between the two demonstrations
about Fortune, an intense moment, bridged by fausse figure into the syncope section.
The first triplum appearance of Fortune at B4 gets exactly the same notes in the motetus
Fortune in B102, another recapitulation. None of this is simple motivic equation, but the
music does serve to underpin many verbal subtleties in such ways.

28 Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, 209; see also Zayaruznaya, ‘She has a Wheel’.
29 As proposed by Leach, Guillaume de Machaut, 213 n. 32.
278 Machaut

Ex. 14.5 Similar phrases leading to death in Motet 10 and Motet 8

Relationship to Other Motets

The relationship between M8 and M21 (including their tenors) has been well expounded
by Alice Clark.30 The tripla of M8 and M15 both end with the same word, desconfiture,
and on the same progression.31 In M15 it receives a suspended dissonant appoggiatura
at the final cadence which, if thought too ‘discomforting’, might have to be emended
against the testimony of the manuscripts (see Chs. 1, 10 and 12). There is no such disso-
nant suspension on this final word in M8.
The motetus of Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna in Fauvel is also a first-​person reproach to
Fortune, who has betrayed the speaker and caused his death, in both cases with wa-
tery metaphors for Fortune’s instability—​the leaky boat in M8 and, in Aman, ‘sunk in
the lake of tears’, a watery end like that of Phaeton and Icarus in the triplum. In the
motetus of each motet, the Latin Heu Fortuna in Aman is mirrored here by the French
Ha Fortune. In Fauvel, the motet is introduced like a set piece, an aria within the narra-
tive. The words of the motetus are put in Fauvel’s mouth—​‘ha fait le motet qui s’ensuit’—​
while the triplum is in a different, mostly more impersonal, narrative register and fulfils
a different role in the context of the Fauvel story (see Ch. 4).
This chapter has drawn attention particularly to further aspects of musical struc-
ture and detail with depictive text–​music relationships, signalling structural points
(mesure), low pitch for low words, contrary motion for contrary textual syncopes for
the rocking instability of Fortune. The upper parts here, as elsewhere, are suffused with
melodic and rhythmic ingredients drawn from the tenor—​a pre-​existent segment of
melody chosen for its key word(s), and often its suitability to the prior concept of the
materia, as expressed in the texts, corroborating yet again the tenor’s musical priority
over the organisation of the upper parts. The chapters of Part III have drawn together
aspects of Machaut’s motet composition in different ways, together with the Gloria

30 Clark, ‘Machaut Reading Machaut’.

31 Boogaart, ‘O series summe rata’, devoted a chapter (with examples III 4–​5, pp. 636–​37) to the relation-
ship of M8, 12, 14 and 15; they share the same talea rhythm (in M12 with a little variation) and three deal with
Fortune, M15 with False seeming, which is comparable to Fortune’s falsity.
 Machaut’s Motets 4 and 8 279

of the Mass, for different readerships (pedagogical and advanced) and with different
concerns (contrapuntal, notational, rhythmic organisation). Above all I have attempted
to show different ways in which text and music work together with musical structuring
devices within each of the motets discussed, and in many instances between motets,
to create rich compositions densely laden with meaning—​literal, depictive, referential,
symbolic and numerical.
 PART IV
M U SIC ORUM C OLLE G IUM :
T HE MU SIC IA N MOT ET S
282 The Musician Motets

The motets discussed here celebrate music and musicians of the fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries. The five complete motets have long been recognised as a group,
though their composition dates spread over more than half a century. They have in
common the listing of musicians’ names in the triplum, and are related to each other in
various ways by ingenious musico-​poetic construction and citation. They stand apart as
a group both from earlier and later motets that name musicians. The purpose of Part IV
is to investigate the sources, texts and music of each motet in turn, the possible identities
of the musicians named, and to uncover some of the interrelationships, allusions and
citations between the motets that demonstrate their membership of a subgenre with its
own conventions, and that their composers, in contributing to it over a remarkably long
time-​span, were fully aware of the antecedents.
 15
Apollinis eclipsatur, its Progeny and
their Sources

The triplum voices of four late thirteenth-​century French-​texted motets recorded

in fascicles 7 and 8 of the Montpellier codex (Mo) open by listing the names of mu-
sical companions. Entre Adan et Hanikel and Entre Jehan et Philippet are closely related
texts describing the drunken musical activities of four young friends.1 Entre Copin et
Bourgeois identifies five student companions in Paris, and at least two of these characters
reappear in the text A maistre Jehan Lardier,2 which addresses eleven individuals by
name in addition to other ‘bons compaignons’ within a Parisian community, possibly
a confraternity.3 Like the fourteenth-​century motets, their tradition is interconnected
and cross-​referential, apparently stemming from one widely disseminated piece (Entre
Adan et Hanikel), and the composers sign the texts. In the fifteenth century, Du Fay’s
rondeau He compaignons (CMM 1/​6, no. 49) celebrates his colleagues in similar vein,
greeting them informally by their familiar names. He drinks to ‘Huchon, Ernoul,
Humblot, Henry, Jean, Francois, Hugues, Thierry et Godefrin’, in a register similar to
those of the thirteenth-​century motets. In both cases these are very different from the
more elevated intellectual tone, the mostly formal naming, Latin texts, and absence of
drink in the fourteenth-​century musician motets. Jacopo da Bologna twice set the text of
Oseletto selvaggio (various spellings), as a madrigal and as a canonic madrigal or caccia.
The third terzina appears thus in the edition of Giuseppe Corsi: ‘Pochi l’hano e tuti se
fa magistri, | fa ballate, matrical e muteti, | tut’èn Fioràn, Filipoti e Marcheti’, and in an
alternative version: ‘Pochi l’hanno e tutti si fan maestri, | fan ballate, madriali e mottetti,
| fansi Fioràn, Filippotti e Marchetti.’4 The named composers of ballate, madrigals and
motets, with whom modern imitators are unfavourably compared, are assumed to be
Floriano da Rimini, Philippe de Vitry, and Marchettus de Padua. Some ballades and
other non-​motet forms that deal with music, but do not list named musicians, are listed
in Chapter 21. Binchois’s Nove cantum melodie enjoins named colleagues to celebrate
the baptism of Philip the Good’s son Anthony, Count of Charolais in 1431; Romanorum
Rex, by Johannes de Sarto, lists colleagues who are to mourn the death of King Albrecht

1 On the relationship between these texts and the possible importance of Adam de la Halle in instigating

an ‘Entre’ motet tradition, see Bradley, Authorship and Identity, ch.3. I am grateful to Catherine Bradley for
access to her work before publication, and for a discussion of these texts. Most of the ‘followers’, as with the
14th-​c. musician motets, are unica.
2 On the identification of these names, see Ludwig, Repertorium, i/​2, p. 599.
3 See Everist, ‘Montpellier 8’, 24–​28. Also commented by Gómez, ‘Une Version à cinq voix du Motet
Apollinis’, 13–​15, treating the Mo motets as antecedents for the 14th-​c. group.
4 See Poesie musicali, ed. Corsi, 42–​43. The first version uses the reading of Fp26 and Lo29987; the second

is collated with other manuscripts. Corsi rejects the majority manuscript reading for both the madrigal and
the canonic madrigal, ‘Tuttenfioran’ for ‘Tutti infioran’, as adopted by Li Gotti and Trucchi, avoiding the per-
sonal name.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0016
284 The Musician Motets

II in 1439; Compère’s celebratory Omnium bonorum plena probably of the 1470s

includes a famous enumeration of ‘greats’, and Josquin’s Nymphes des bois lists those
solemnly enjoined to mourn the death of Ockeghem. All four works follow the pattern of
listing colleagues in the second half of the motet, and in all those cases, those listed are
known or assumed to be living at the time. The fourteenth-​century group thus differs
in tone and register from its predecessors and successors, with which there seems to
be no direct connective tradition. Those motets celebrate musicians, sometimes over
a long chronological spread, and not necessarily personally known to each other. For a
start, they are in Latin, celebratory and formal in tone, ostentatiously, self-​consciously
clever constructions of text and music with citation and reference between them. They
name a striking total of over sixty mostly unknown musicians within their texts—​
singers, theorists and composers, including authorial signatures—​against a background
of almost entirely anonymous manuscript transmission in that century, Machaut’s self-​
promotion being the notable exception.5 The subtle and abstruse interconnections be-
tween the motets suggest a competitive culture. Since three of the five are unica, more
compositions from this nexus may have been lost.
Four of the motets had been published in PMFC 5 (1968) and a fifth, from an English
source, in PMFC 15 (1980). The five were published together in a Oiseau-​Lyre reprint of
1986, with an introduction and tables listing the musicians referred to in motets already
available in PMFC 5 and 15.6 Further possible candidates for inclusion in this group in-
clude two incomplete motets and one or more fragments, or titles of non-​extant motets,
though none of these have lists of names in the surviving portions (see Ch. 21). Ursula
Günther had pointed out connections between Apollinis, Alma polis and Sub Arturo in
her edition of the latter two motets.7
Attention was earlier drawn to two of the motets by Brian Trowell’s ingenious
unmasking in 1957 of the Latinised names of fourteen English musicians in the
triplum of Sub Arturo plebs.8 Trowell’s article antedated both Günther’s (1965) and
Frank Ll. Harrison’s (1968) editions of that motet;9 indeed, the only other motet in
this group that Trowell had access to was Apollinis eclipsatur, which he judged to be
a response to Sub Arturo and not the other way round, as must be the case.10 At the
time Trowell wrote, almost none of the relevant repertory was available, and his early
dating now needs to be revised. The order in which Harrison reprinted the motets in
1986 does not take account of the chronology suggested by their interrelationships,
the order in which they are considered here, nor of the influences which constitute a
network of compositions responding to and playing off each other. Harrison already

5 Exceptions in the preceding century are the monophonic songs of troubadours and trouvères,

culminating in the ascribed polyphonic rondeaux of Adam de la Halle.

6 Harrison, Musicorum collegio, observes that in Musicorum and Sub Arturo the composers explicitly

praise their fellow choir members; he goes on to list the musicians named in the other motets.
7 CMM 39, pp. lii–​liv and xlv–​xlvi, enumerate connections and give chant identifications and comparisons

(see further below).

8 Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​Century Ceremonial Motet’.
9 CMM 39 (1965), PMFC 5 (1968). The five motets were reproduced from PMFC 5 and 15 with an intro-

duction in Frank Ll. Harrison, Musicorum collegio: Fourteenth-​century Musicians’ Motets (Monaco, 1986).
10 Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​Century Ceremonial Motet’, writes of ‘average’ dates, but it must be the latest date

that determines the date of the composition. It quickly becomes obvious that while a particular occasion may
have prompted the composition in each case, some of the motets, and especially Sub Arturo, are extensively
retrospective. Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 285

knew and published (as PMFC 5, no. 9a) the five-​part expansion of Apollinis in Stras
as transcribed by Coussemaker, with an additional texted triplum Pantheon abluitur
and a textless fifth voice labelled ‘Quadruplum sive triplum de Apollinis’. Although
his edition of the base motet used Barc853, he made no mention of its additional
voice(s), already known to Besseler, although he could not have anticipated the sub-
sequent discovery of further sources, including LoTNA. In a valuable biographical
study, Richard Hoppin and Suzanne Clercx treated Musicalis sciencia, with its twenty
named musicians, as the primary composition, recognising the considerable overlap
of names with the twelve of Apollinis.11 Because of this overlap, these two motets must
be closer in date to each other than to the other motets, but as Günther showed, though
for different reasons, and quite apart from its wide circulation, Apollinis must come
first. This is evident in a number of exchanges, citations or borrowings involving other
motets in the group, notably Sub Arturo plebs and Alma polis, some already pointed out
by Günther. Apollinis, Musicalis and Musicorum probably date in that order, between
the 1330s and 1350s, Alma polis and Sub Arturo from the years on either side of c. 1400,
when the added voices to Apollinis can probably also be dated. Support for these ap-
proximate datings will be offered in the chapters of Part IV. What is clear is that all the
motets took Apollinis as their starting point, and that, despite the evidently narrower
circulation of subsequent compositions, the composers knew and responded to the
motets that preceded their own works. With fifteen musical attestations and at least
four mentions in theoretical treatises, Apollinis with fifteen sources is by some dis-
tance the most widely circulated fourteenth-​century motet, and over a long period well
into the fifteenth century. Sub Arturo has three sources, but the other three (Musicalis,
Musicorum, Alma polis) are all unica.
The motets which form this interrelated subgenre have lacked a full study hitherto.
Work on them has received inspirational input from David Howlett and his readings
of the texts. His imaginative counting of verbal dimensions had implications for the
counting that is intrinsic to musical analysis, and the combined power of words and
music emerges as much richer as a result. We worked fruitfully together on the motets
and presented the results in seminars in Princeton, Oxford and elsewhere in the late
1980s and early 1990s. Because it proved hard to coordinate differing views on the
lengths to which we were each prepared to take number symbolism, gematria and pro-
portional counting, that work has not reached print, except in Howlett’s brilliant con-
tribution to a Festschrift offered to me in 2005.12 He plans to explore in a separate
publication the triple mythological bases for these compositions, a fusion of Classical
legend with Christian symbolism from Plato, the Bible, and Boethius, together with
a study and analysis of the verbal texts, with special attention to their ingenious nu-
merical constructions (including letter counts), gematria, symmetries, chiasmi
and anagrams. Some of the more striking cases are reported and credited here, and
I remain grateful to him not only for the use of his text editions, but for the stimulus
which has enriched my own work. More colleagues are thanked in the Preface and
Acknowledgements.

11 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’.

12 Howlett, ‘Apollinis eclipsatur’.
286 The Musician Motets

Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​In omnem terram

and Related Motets

The progenitor of the group of musician motets is Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​

In omnem terram.13 It is not only the first, the oldest technically and notationally of this
group, the only one to have been present in both Ivrea and Trém, and the only one to
have attracted the composition of additional parts in at least three of its later sources, but
also more widely disseminated and cited than any other fourteenth-​century motet. It
occurs or is attested in no fewer than fifteen mostly fragmentary musical sources, from
Spain, France, England, Italy, Germany and eastern Europe. In addition there are at least
four citations in theory treatises, some of which overlap or are mutually dependent. Sub
Arturo is known from three sources, one treatise citation and one archival mention, but
the other three motets are unica and not otherwise attested. One continental and two
English fragments, all unique, discussed in Chapter 21, appear to have come from fur-
ther musical motets, with elements that relate to others of this group, though none list
musicians’ names in the surviving portions, and their status remains provisional. Given
the unique or limited transmission of most of the motets later than Apollinis, others
could very well have existed.
The only other contemporary motets whose circulation comes close to that of
Apollinis are Impudenter circumivi/​Virtutibus laudabilis in eleven sources, Colla
iugo/​Bona condit in nine, Flos ortus/​Celsa cedrus/​Quam magnus pontifex in eight,
Apta caro/​Flos virginum, Degentis vita/​Cum vix artidici/​Vera pudicitia and Rex
Karole/​Leticie pacis each in seven. All of these except Degentis vita and Colla iugo are
in SL2211. Colla iugo and Apollinis were adjacent in Tarragona2 and were also the
first two pieces in Trém (see Ch. 31). Of that ‘liber motetorum’ only the outer bifolio
of the first gathering survives, with an extensive list of contents, divided into motets
and ‘balades et rondeaus’; the bifolio contains music for four motets including Colla
iugo.14 Several of these have been attributed to Vitry with varying degrees of confi-
dence. The wide circulation of these few motets is also reflected in the recurrence
of many of them in treatise citations. For example, Johannes Boen’s Ars of the mid-​
century cites Impudenter/​Virtutibus, O canenda/​Rex quem metrorum, Tuba sacre/​In
arboris, Apta/​Flos (probably all by Vitry) but not Apollinis; his Musica refers to spe-
cific places in Floret/​Florens, Se grace/​Cum venerint (see here Ch. 29) and (again) O
canenda/​Rex quem metrorum. An appendix to the Ars of later but uncertain date in
the late fifteenth-​century manuscript Venice24 also names Rex Karole/​Leticie by its
triplum incipit (those in the body of the treatise are cited by motetus, as normal in the
fourteenth century). Its dedicatee, Charles V, did not come to the throne until 1364,
and Boen died in 1367, which further confirms this as a later addition.15 Apta and

13 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, treated Musicalis as primary, perhaps because it named more

musicians.
14 Although Machaut’s songs had quite wide circulation in the anthology manuscripts, very few of his

motets are found outside the complete-​works manuscripts, and those are mainly in Ivrea, Ca1328 and Trém.
15 See Boen, Ars. Venice24 also contains a version of Boen’s Musica with the music examples that are

lacking in the older MS Paris14741. Rex Karole is also cited in Ars cantus mensurabilis, ed. Balensuela, where
the author erroneously refers to Rex Karole to demonstrate the process of diminution, which does not occur in
this motet. See Hamilton, ‘Philippe de Vitry in England’, 35–​36.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 287

Tribum are cited by their tripla in the late fourteenth-​century Tractatus figurarum.16
Other treatise mentions of Apollinis are noted above.
One of the two youngest of the musician motets, Sub Arturo, is now known from
three sources, one of them English (Yox), where it is also a near neighbour of the inter-
nationally widely distributed motet Degentis vita; both flank the very clever (unique)
motet on John the Baptist, O amicus/​Precursoris (Ch. 22). The other three complete
musician motets are also unica, Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili in Pic, Musicorum
collegio/​In templo Dei posita in Durham20, Alma polis religio/​Axe poli in Chantilly; the
two fragments are each known from a single source only. Most are the only ones of the
series in their (often fragmentary) source(s), but Chantilly contains both Sub Arturo
and Alma polis, and LoTNA preserves in fragmentary form both Apollinis/​Psallentes/​
Zodiacum and Arta/​Musicus (Ch. 21).

Relationships between the Motets

Because of the interrelationships between the motets and the way they play off
each other, this must have been a mutually engaging or even a competitive genre.
Subsequent poet-​composers variously attached their works to Apollinis as well as
to one or more of the other companion pieces, by numbers (of text lines, syllables,
breves, musicians, etc), recurring vocabulary, and citations or partial citations
of various combinations of text, melody and rhythm, usually with two of those
elements but not all three, and sometimes with slight variations that might escape
digital searching. Apollinis is the source of quotations and other forms of reference
in the later motets, and there is evidence of interplay between the later compositions.
Apollinis is not only the oldest of the motets, but it had an exceptionally long shelf
life into the fifteenth century, perhaps because of its iconic and self-​fulfilling status
in theoretical as well as practical sources. It is the only one of the musician motets
to have acquired additional composed voices, and it stands alone among widely
disseminated fourteenth-​century motets in having attracted so many independ-
ently added parts; these include tripla rather than (as in most other cases of added
voices) being restricted to contratenors. Although other motets have alternative
contratenors, only one other motet from the period has a version with five voices: OH
gives an additional textless fifth voice for Are post libamina (see Ch. 24). Yet Apollinis
ranks low on a mapping of less to more upper-​voice isorhythm. We should not be
too ready to see this ancestral composition as less developed only because, by evolu-
tionary standards hitherto applied, it seemed to be more free. The wide dissemina-
tion in music manuscripts and treatises, and the discovery of so many allusions to it
in later motets in this group, challenge an older evolutionary view of the fourteenth-​
century motet that sees greater skill and later dating in more exact repetition, and
immaturity in greater freedom. Ways in which later motets acknowledge the earlier
one(s) will be addressed as they arise.

16 Apta is judged to be more subtle than the older Tribum. See Desmond, Music and the moderni, ch. 2; and

Bent, ‘Artes novae’.

288 The Musician Motets

Anonymity and Authorial Signatures

Most fourteenth-​century music has come down to us anonymously in the manuscripts

that preserve it. The towering exception is Machaut, who oversaw the assembly of his
poetical and musical output in complete-​works manuscripts. A very few attributions
were made by theorists, and a few more on circumstantial and stylistic evidence by
modern scholars, mostly to Vitry. All the more precious, therefore, are the names of
over sixty-​five musicians (including composer signatures) recorded in these motets,
many of whom we have never heard of, or names which lack any other attestation
of musical activity. It is reassuring that some of those known to us as important for
musical practice and theory are prominent: Johannes de Muris, Philippe de Vitry
and Guillaume de Machaut. But what of the others? Whether the named musicians
were singers, instrumentalists, theorists or composers is not usually specified, ex-
cept to some extent in Sub Arturo. But at least three of the motet texts (most explic-
itly Apollinis, Alma polis, Sub Arturo) carry composer signatures, self-​promotions with
similar formulations, all with mock modesty, or what is now called humblebragging.
In Apollinis, the author B. de Cluny names himself at the beginning of the second
half of the motetus: ‘shining with practical and theoretical art he commends him-
self to all’: recommendans se subdit omnibus. He is referred to in modern studies as
Bernard but, although his twelfth-​century namesake makes that a likely choice for
a man from Cluny, there is no confirmation that he was Bernard rather than, say,
Bertrand or Bartolomeus. In Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20) J. Alanus appends himself as
the last and least on his list of ‘greats’ at the end of the motetus: ‘Illis licet infimus |
J. Alanus minimus | sese recommendat’. At the midpoint of the motetus of Alma polis/​
Axe poli (Ch. 19) the composer is identified as Egidius de Aurolia (Giles of Orleans),
the poet as J. de Porta: ‘Egidii de Aurolia, | manant a quo cantamina | pariter cum
hac musica. | Carmineus J. de Porta | se commendat per omnia.’ The anonymous au-
thor of Musicorum (Ch. 18) subjects himself to the service of all: ‘obsequium | actoris,
qui seruicio | se totum subdit omnium’, but this time in the triplum. The mysterious
Leouns, at the end of the motetus of the incomplete Arta/​Musicus (Ch. 21), may also
be its composer. The shared diction in these formulations is obvious. None of these
is otherwise known as a composer, despite claims that J. Alanus was the singer who
bequeathed a roll of polyphonic music to St George’s Windsor in 1373; his candidacy
will be evaluated below. An Alanus (without initial) was the author of four songs in
Stras; the OH composer was probably a W. Aleyn. None of these works has anything to
connect them to Sub Arturo plebs except a very common name with no initial J.
These are not the only fourteenth-​century composers to identify themselves in
the texts of their motets. Marchetto da Padova’s Ave regina celorum/​Mater innocencie
has the explicitly authorial motetus acrostic Marcum Paduanum, which may be the
earliest such authorial signature; most acrostics in fourteenth-​century motets are for
dedicatees.17 Composer signatures become habitual in the Italian tradition; we find ‘me

17 For Marchetto’s motet see Ch. 26. The author of the Speculum musicae names himself as Jacobus in an

authorial acrostic. The 15th-​c. Polish composer Petrus Wilhelmi signed the texts of all his compositions with
an authorial acrostic; they all begin with P. See Gancarczyk, ‘Petrus Wilhelmi’.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 289

franciscum’ in Landini’s incomplete motet Principum nobilissime in Pad1106, and ‘tua

ciconia’ or ‘me ciconiam’ at the end of five motet texts by Ciconia. Vitry signs himself in
Cum statua/​Hugo with ‘hec concino Philippus publice’, possibly also as Phi millies in the
triplum of that motet, and perhaps as (Petrarch’s) ‘Gallus’ in Garrit gallus and Tribum.18
Although it had been doubted that Gratiosus, the first word of the motet Gratiosus
fervidus, signalled the Paduan composer Gratiosus, as composer signatures do not usu-
ally occur at the beginning of a text, much speaks in favour of it being an authorial
signature.19 Manon Louviot’s stunning discovery and decoding of a motet signed and
dated in an acrostic has recently been brought to light, and David Catalunya has re-
ported another signed composition, neither of these by composers otherwise known.20
Machaut’s motets are never signed in this way. Just about the only other composers’
names we have for French or English fourteenth-​century motets are those named in
these musician motets, where we are dealing with musicians, most of whose names
would not otherwise be known at all because of the almost entire absence of composer
ascriptions in contemporary music manuscripts. Compositions by Machaut preserved
in the so-​called repertory manuscripts are often recorded there anonymously,21 only
known to be his from their inclusion in the composer’s complete-​works manuscripts;
and works which may be by Vitry are attributed to him by contemporary theorists or
modern scholars on a variety of grounds other than manuscript ascriptions. The group
of musician motets, therefore, greatly extends the repertory of named musicians, in-
cluding composers, for the generation preceding Chantilly and OH, which are among
the first polyphonic sources, in the early fifteenth century, to provide significant num-
bers of composer ascriptions.
One anecdotal reference to Apollinis/​Zodiacum is of a different kind from the other
treatise references to be enumerated below as illustrations of particular mensural
features. It will now be addressed here.

Heinrich Eger von Kalkar

Kalkar (1328–​1408) was a Carthusian mystic who had studied in Cologne and Paris,
where he became magister artium in 1356 and taught at the Sorbonne until 1363, when
he accepted canonries in Cologne and Kaiserwerth. He entered the Carthusian order in
1365 and was successively prior in several houses, achieving high office, but from 1396

18 See Tribum, Ch. 4.

19 Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 140, asks: ‘Is it possible that in a motet with a retrograde tenor [Gratiosus
fervidus/​Gratiosus/​Magnanimus], even this tradition would be put in reverse? To read the acrostic, “Georgius
miles,” one must read every other line of the triplum and then every line of the duplum.’ See Hallmark, ‘Some
Evidence for French Influence’, 214.
20 Presented by Manon Louviot in a seminar at All Souls College on 20.11.2020. See Louviot, ‘Uncovering

the Douai Fragment’; the text of the motet Ferre solet in Douai74 is internally signed and dated as by Frater
Johannes Vavassoris, 1373. The text of the solmisation piece Fa fa mi fa is signed in Karlsruhe82 as by ‘cantore
Leodiensi Johanne qui in Rupis Amatore hoc compilavi’, i.e. Rocamadour (Rupes Amatoris); see Catalunya,
‘Nuns, Polyphony’, 105.
21 Ballades 18 and 34 are ascribed in Chantilly, Motet 8 and Rondeau 20 in the text manuscript Stockholm,

Kungliga Biblioteket, MS V.u.22 (see Ch. 14). There are two erroneous ascriptions (in Fribourg260 and
Stras).
290 The Musician Motets

until his death lived as a simple monk. He is known for his writings in various fields,
notably with an ascetic-​mystical focus, including his treatise on music (Cantuagium,
dated 1380).22 This carries a testimony of striking chronological precision, specifying
events ‘fifty years ago, around the year 1330’ which has been seized on in recent schol-
arship.23 However, since he was two years old at the time, his ‘recollection’ must depend
on hearsay or transmitted wisdom, and may not be as precisely datable as it has been
taken to be.

Sed quia ex notulis hiis non redactis ad mensuram cantari contigit olim satis
discorditer Ideo quidam magni artiste Parisius quorum nomina in quodam discantu
ponuntur qui incipit Zodiacus si bene recolo—​et unum vidi episcopum ante annos
circiter quinquaginta circa annum videlicet domini MmCCCm Tricesimum—​specialiter
dederunt se musice certis mensuris temporum ipsam regulantes sub notis quadratis
et quadrangulis simplicibus et colligates punctis eciam et pausis . . . [Desmond,
Music and the moderni, 5–​6, stops here] quibus iam religiosi utuntur communius
[MS communis] propter concordanciam servandam in cantibus et mensuras in
discantibus. [Kügle, ‘Die Fragmente Oxford’, 319, stops here] Erat eciam maximus
Cantor quidam Magister Franco de Colonia qui pulchrum de arte illa edidit librum
quem et alios si perlegeris mensuras mirabiles notarum et pausarum in cantibus
multis per ipsos regulatis et compositis perpendere poteris.24

Since it used to happen that one sang rather discordantly from notes not reduced to
[temporal] measure, therefore certain great artists in Paris, whose names are listed in
a certain discantus with the incipit ‘Zodiacus’, if I remember correctly (and I saw one
as a bishop), about fifty years ago, namely around the year 1330, especially devoted
themselves to music, regulating it according to the specified time values given to
square, quadrangular, simple and composite notes, dots and rests, which monks were
already using in order to keep concords in chant and measures in discantus. There
was also the greatest singer, a certain Magister Franco de Colonia, who compiled

22 Hüschen, Das Cantuagium des Heinrich Eger von Kalkar, 44–​45. For an excellent survey and assessment

of the treatise, see Meyer, ‘Le Cantuagium de Heinrich Eger von Kalkar’, which shows extensive parallels
with Anonymous I such as to suggest a common source. The Cantuagium was a companion work to his
so-​called Loquagium, a treatise on rhetoric, for which see Hüschen, p. 12. There are three manuscripts of
the Cantuagium: (1) Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Ms. Mus.theor. 1325, ff. 18–​37v; (2) Darmstadt, Hessische
Landes-​und Hochschulbibliothek MS 705, ff. 140–​71; both of these are late 14th c. and from the Cologne
Charterhouse; (3) Mainz, Stadtbibliothek, MS II 375, late 15th c., from the Benedictine abbey in Mainz.
Three further MSS are attested but not extant. I am grateful to Elżbieta Witkowska-​Zaremba for sharing her
knowledge of the sources and discussing the interpretation of these passages. Meyer points out the often
faulty nature of Hüschen’s edition; only the Berlin MS was known when he edited the text in 1952.
23 For recent citations by musicologists, perhaps attaching more importance to Kalkar than he may de-

serve, see Kügle, ‘Die Fragmente Oxford, All Souls 56’, 317; Desmond, Music and the moderni, 5–​9 and 202;
Rico, ‘Music in the Arts Faculty’, 232f and Zayaruznaya, ‘Old, New, and Newer Still’. Fuhrmann, ‘Rhetorik
der Verinnerlichung’, discusses other important aspects of Eger’s formation and his Cantuagium. He lists the
sources (p. 499 n. 23); I echo his plea for a critical edition, which might help to clarify the sometimes-​garbled
syntax.
24 Hüschen, Das Cantuagium des Heinrich Eger von Kalkar, 44–​45 (italics added). Shorter excerpts are

given by Rico, ‘Music in the Arts Faculty of Paris’, 232 n. 147; Desmond, Music and the moderni, 6; Kügle,
‘Die Fragmente Oxford, All Souls 56’; and Kügle, ‘Vitry in the Rhineland’. The first part of this passage is
translated by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens (email of 23.4.2017), who acknowledges that the text has redactis
not reductis, ‘but when Cicero speaks de iure civili in artem redigendo’ we render ‘of reducing civil law to a
system’.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 291

a beautiful book about that art. If you read him and others, you will be able to un-
derstand the admirable measures of notes and rests in the many pieces which are
regulated and composed by them.

Anyone who hastens to this text hoping for more will be disappointed. Eger’s trea-
tise is quite conventional: it deals with the origins of music, the place of music in
the seven liberal arts, the monochord, consonances, intervals, neumes, psalm tones,
and ecclesiastical chant. As Wolfgang Fuhrmann has pointed out, the intended audi-
ence for the treatise is unclear and uneven. Although explicitly addressed to children
(pueri), it lacks elementary aids such as solmisation instruction and a tonary, while
writing extensively on the modes.25 The importance that has been attached to it as
a chronological marker for notational developments of the ars nova is undermined
by the continuation in which Eger goes on to give a rudimentary but inaccurate ac-
count of Franconian notation.26 Besides neumes and chant notation, his notational
characterisation (‘sub notis quadratis et quadrangulis simplicibus et colligates punctis
eciam et pausis’) gives no hint of acquaintance with ars nova innovations (including
minims) such as would indicate any familiarity with the musical notation of the
motet. He confines his limited notational palette to what monks do ‘to keep concords
in chant and measures in discantus’, probably implying no more than fairly simple ho-
mophonic singing.
It has proved tempting to take such a dating literally because it seems so precise: but
for dating what? The word order and lack of punctuation make it unclear precisely
what Eger is setting at c. 1330; the bishop, the motet, the activity of those named in it,
or their innovations. But in fact Denis le Grant became bishop of Senlis only in 1350
(he died in 1352), Vitry bishop of Meaux in 1351. Only because we know these dates
can we say that Eger’s text, despite the misleading word order, cannot apply the 1330
date to either of them; and that he probably only knew about one, the better-​known
Vitry, about whom he may have heard in Paris in the 1350s; I have therefore put that
phrase in parentheses in the translation. His text cites the motetus Zodiacum (calling
it the discantus), but the musicians (his artistae) are in fact named in the triplum,
Apollinis.
Eger tells us that, as a monk, he did not deal with or approve of polyphony or in-
strumental music. This gives some discount value to his testimony. In fact the now-​
famous passage above is the only one in the whole treatise to suggest that he may have
had some acquaintance with (Franconian) polyphony, but its authority is undermined
by the patent gap in his knowledge; this part of his treatise appears to be imperfectly un-
derstood hearsay. The final paragraphs of the treatise are:

Ecce, carissime, feci quod promisi, aperiens vobis!27 Hostium musicae praecipue
ecclesiasticae, si cui autem placuerit, intrare longius ad musicam speculativam vel

25 Fuhrmann, ‘Rhetorik der Verinnerlichung’, 502.

26 As noted within the Latin text above, recent citations by Kügle and Desmond stop short of the sentence
about Franco, and its further continuation into a perfunctory account of older notation, which gives some
context to his comments about later music, reducing his credibility as an informed witness.
27 This is Hüschen’s text and presumably his punctuation. I have ignored the first exclamation mark and

modified the punctuation of the next sentence.

292 The Musician Motets

practicam legat libros et studeat Boetii, Augustini, Hieronymi [de Moravia] et aliorum
musicorum ecclesiasticorum, qui cantus corrigunt, qui differentias tonorum in
diversis tonis dividunt et multa exempla de cantibus ecclesiasticis ponunt. Discantus
autem discere vel musicis instrumentis insistere, licet multum esset pro juvenibus, non
audeo persuadere, quia religiosus sum, ne forte occasionem dem lasciviae. Sufficiat
ergo saltem hoc scire cantuagium ad laudem Dei et omnium sanctorum, ut post hanc
miseriam det nobis gloriam idem ille, quem laudant mille milia angelorum per omnia
saecula saeculorum, amen!

Behold, dear one, I have done what I promised, opening to you the door of music,
mainly ecclesiastical [chant]. If, however, one wishes to enter further into music,
let him read and study the theoretical and practical books on church music by
Boethius, Augustine, Jerome [of Moravia] and others, which correct melodies, di-
vide the differentiae of the tones in the various tones, and give many examples
of ecclesiastical chant. However, because I am a monk, I dare not encourage the
learning of discant or musical instruments, although it means much for the young,
lest it give rise to lasciviousness. At least let this Cantuagium suffice, therefore, for the
praise of God and of all the saints, and to know that after this misery he may give us
the same glory which a thousand thousand angels praise, world without end, Amen!

If Eger had had direct knowledge or understanding of the music of Apollinis/​

Zodiacum, he would know that its musical style and notational innovations go well
beyond Franco. He probably knew or understood only the verbal text, and had seen
the names in the triplum. His repudiation of polyphony, on grounds of being a
monk, reduces the credibility of his testimony as a witness of ars nova. As he simply
reiterates respect for Franco and his teaching, it would be rash to accept Eger von
Kalkar as a reliable witness to the dating of subsequent notational developments
or musical genres that he neither understood nor claimed to know about. His ac-
count has little more status than hearsay; it seems to have been chronologically
misinformed about the relationship between Franco and the Paris ‘artistae’ who are
at least one if not two generations younger.28 In short, it is unclear whether we should
assume he intended 1330 as the date of the bishoprics (wrong), of the innovations of
these ‘artistae’ (too late), of the motet (possible), or whether his testimony is too con-
fused or ill-​informed to be useful for setting chronology.

Sources of the Motets and References in Treatises

The five complete motets and two fragments under consideration are listed below with
their sources, and theoretical mentions in the case of Apollinis and Sub Arturo.

28 Eger studied in Paris in the 1350s, obtaining the doctorate in theology in 1362, and was a magister

regens in the faculty of arts; he might well have picked up hearsay in Paris, both about Franco and about the
musicians named in the motet.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 293

Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​In omnem terram

Editions: PMFC 5, no. 9; Bent, Two 14th-​Century Motets, 8–​13; Harrison, Musicorum
collegio, no. 2, and Example 16.1.

Manuscript sources
Ivrea, ff. 12v–​13: complete a3
Barc971, ff. 11v–​12: complete a329
Barc853, f. 1r: motetus and tenor, followed by a textless triplum which fits. There is
also a ‘Contratenor per sanctam civitatem’ claimed as a fifth voice by Gómez, ‘Apollinis’,
which even with drastic adjustments does not fit. (See Ex. 16.2.)
Stras, ff. 64v–​65: a5, including the additional texted triplum Pantheon abluitur and a
textless ‘Quadruplum sive triplum de Apollinis’, both with pseudo-​imitative beginnings
following Apollinis. (See Ex. 16.3.)
Tarragona2, f. 2v: this was an original recto (contains mo and T, Zodiacum and tenor);
tr of Colla jugo on recto (original verso).
Leiden2515, f. 1r: triplum only, original verso.30
Leipzig223, recto: end of triplum, and the motetus and tenor; the verso is blank.31
Pad658, f. Bv: most of the triplum only.
LoTNA, f. 2r.32 Five-​part version with additional texted triplum ([P]Sallentes zinzugia)
and contratenor; followed by Musicus est ille (Ch. 21). The core three-​part version is not
preserved, just the two new additional parts. (See Ex. 16.4.)
OxAS56, f. Ar: tenor and triplum, fragments.
SL2211, ff. R188v–​189 (no. 215; A 69v, 79r): a version a3, not contrapuntally viable,
with Pantheon and Apollinis presented as Italianate equal-​range cantus parts, and tenor,
omitting the essential low motetus. (See Ex. 16.3.)
Trém (index only): Apollinis/​Zodiacum was on the missing recto of the first opening,
presumably complete, facing the complete Colla jugo on the verso of the index page.
Brno, rear pastedown: contains a lightly ornamented version of about two-​thirds (104
breves) of the triplum.33

29 For the most recent work on the Barcelona and Tarragona fragments, see Catalunya, ‘Polyphonic Music’.
30 The verso of this fragment (original recto) carries the end of the triplum and the motetus and tenor of an
otherwise unknown motet which has textual resonance with Apollinis eclipsatur nunquam. It may have been
another musician motet: see Ch. 21.
31 This new source was reported by Eva Maschke at the Medieval and Renaissance music conference in

Maynooth, July 2018, and is now published as Maschke, ‘Entfernte Einbandfragmente . . . Leipzig’, at 272–​74.
She presented additional material in a seminar at All Souls College, Oxford, 12.3.2020.
32 Not a motetus contrafact, as stated in Zayaruznaya, ‘Form and Idea’, 377.
33 Described with facsimile and transcribed in Horyna, A Prague Fragment, 78–​ 86, and Horyna, ‘Ein
Brünner Fragment’.
294 The Musician Motets

Vienna922, f. 2r: fragment containing the end of the motetus, and the tenor.
Vienna5094, f. 158v–​r: instrumental version in German tablature, ‘rundellus’; triplum
and motetus only.34
The three versions with added voices:
Barc853 with added textless triplum.
Stras with added triplum Pantheon abluitur (also in SL2211) and Quadruplum sive
triplum.
LoTNA with added triplum [P]Sallentes zinzugia and contratenor.

Treatise citations of Apollinis

The contents of items 1–​3 below are closely related in that they draw on the same core
repertory of motet titles, with only slight variations. Of these, Apollinis with fifteen
sources and Degentis vita with seven are among the most widely circulated motets of
the fourteenth century, followed by O Maria, with at least three sources.35 Ave coronata
can be identified as the motet with that triplum incipit in Speciálník, pp. 420–​21
and Franus, ff. 345v–​346; it shares the mensural description of Apollinis, which both
are cited to illustrate, namely perfect modus, imperfect time, major prolation. The
motetus is texted Alma parens regem glorie. The tenor in both sources (truncated and
incomplete in Speciálník) is broken up and rhythmicised into repeated notes to carry
the triplum text, but was reconstituted by Jaromír Černý into its original values and
identified as Ave regina celorum.36 These corrupt late transmissions of Ave coronata/​
Alma parens/​Ave regina celorum obscure the original simple isorhythm, with three
five-​note taleae per color, and four color statements without diminution. The wide ci-
tation of Apollinis in related theoretical sources and the sharing of examples between
these treatises give rise to the suspicion that this motet took on a life of its own in

34 Identified by Strohm, ‘Native and Foreign’, where he names the voices as motetus and contratenor.

Rondellus or rundellus was a common term in Germanic and eastern European sources for a cantilena with a
lively texted upper voice and slower-​moving tenor (and sometimes a contratenor), in this case an adaptation
of the motet. Stras no. 166, f. 94v, preserves the composition Musicorum inter collegia (transcribed in CMM
53/​3, no. 299, p. 205), a title suggesting some connection to this group of motets (Strohm, The Rise, 116, states
that the opening ‘quotes Apollinis’ but only a verbal similarity is involved). Widely cited in eastern European
theoretical sources, and here headed Rex rondelorum, it is in three evenly active parts with a central structural
break, suggesting a forme fixe rather than a motet adaptation. There is no list of names, but it surely once had
more text than the minimal amount here provided.
35 Only eight of the fifteen sources of Apollinis were known to Harrison for PMFC 5. Degentis vita, an-

other motet whose title is widely cited in eastern European theoretical sources, is in Yox, Chantilly, Barc971,
Brussels5170, Nuremberg9, Stras, Trém: PMFC 5, no. 23. O Maria is in PMFC 12, no. 41; its three sources
have strikingly different endings. See Ch. 1.
36 For this motet, and for more on the central European treatises, see Gancarczyk, ‘Memory of Genre’. The

motet is transcribed in Vícetextová moteta 14. a 15. století, ed. Černý, 131–​37, and Historická antologie, ed.
Černý, 144–​50. I am indebted to Paweł Gancarczyk for a copy of the motet. Černý had hypothesised that Ave
coronata was composed around 1400 by a local musician, despite its unique status as a motet with isorhythm
from eastern Europe, but in this more recent publication he identifies the tenor as Ave regina celorum/​Mater
regis/​O flos (LU 1864, WA 405), a chant unknown in Bohemian sources. That melody is the same as Ave rex
gentis Anglorum (PM 270), the tenor of the English motet De flore martirum/​Deus tuorum militum/​Ave rex
gentis, which leads Černý to ask if Ave coronata could be an import from England. The rhythms mostly follow
the defaults for stemless semibreves except that (as in Apollinis) some breves are imperfected by a single
minim; and both f g ggg ggg f g
and are used for groups of five.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 295

theoretical transmission independently of knowledge of the motet, rather as the late

thirteenth-​century motet Aucun ont trouvé ascribed to Petrus de Cruce appears to
have done.37 However, unlike Aucun ont trouvé, the motet itself had wide circulation
over many decades, and still invited the composition of added parts into the early fif-
teenth century.

1. Wrocław16: Anonymous, Tractatus de musica mensurabili (Breslau, now

Wrocław).38 After citing Musicorum inter collegia with a music example that
seems not to relate to the composition of that name preserved in Stras (see below,
Ch. 21), and ‘Monachant’ [=​ Mon chant en plainte?], Apollinis twice heads lists
of examples, first in company with Ave coronata, Degentis vita and O Maria for
mensural properties, and then with the first two of these for motet definition.39
Apollinis is correctly cited for perfect modus, imperfect tempus, major prolation.
A motet is there defined as that in which each part has text, and which has no
general pause except at the end (i.e. it is not sectional like a song form):

(I)tem propter maiorem euidenciam priorum est sciendum, quod in numero

canticorum quidam sunt modi perfecti temporis perfecti et maioris prolacionis. Et
illorum pauca inveniuntur ut: Monachant de morte wilhelmi.
  Quidam sunt modi perfecti temporis imperfecti et maioris prolacionis, ut Appollinis,
Aue coronata, Fenix arabie et sic de aliis.
  Quidam sunt modi perfecti et temporis imperfecti et minoris prolacionis ut Degentis
vita, O Maria.
  Quidam sunt de modo imperfecto, de tempore perfecto et minori prolacione, vt
Virginem mire pulcritudinis, Deo gracias papales. Quidam sunt modi imperfecti
de tempore perfecto et maioris prolacionis, ut Deo gracias conclamemus, Par
ma[i]ntes foys.40
  Quidam sunt modi imperfecti, temporis imperfecti et minoris prolacionis ut
Demonis astuto et communiter alie probationes.
  Item sciendum: differencia est inter mutetum, rondellum, piroletum, baladum,
stampaniam sive stampetum, katschetum et rotulum. Unde mutetus est, qui
nullam habet pausam generalem nisi finem cuius quelibet pars habet textum, verbi
gracia: Appollinis, Aue coronata, Degentis vita, Fenix arabie et sic de aliis.

37 See Bent, Jacobus, ch. 2. On some problematic transmissions of motet examples in treatises see Hamilton,

‘Philippe de Vitry in England’, 35–​36 and Leitmeir, ‘Types and Transmission of Musical Examples’.
38 Wolf, ‘Ein Breslauer Mensuraltraktat’, 335–​36; now Wrocław16.
39 The text continues with definitions (by section and clausula) for mutetum, rondellum, piroletum,

baladum, stampaniam [BOZ1 adds trumpetum], katschetum and rotulum. Monachant may well be the refrain
of a ballade from Jean de Le Mote’s Regret Guillaume of 1339, Mon chant en plainte, and in turn related to the
triplum of the Ivrea motet Mon chant/​Qui doloreus, no. 39 (Trém no. 43); see Plumley, The Art of Grafted
Song, 231–​49, and Ch. 32 n. 51.
40 The motetus of Deo gracias conclamemus is in Mu3223, recto, and Cortona2, f. 1. Deo gracias papales/​

Deo gracias fidelis/​Deo gracias salvator is in Nuremberg9 and was in Gdańsk2315; Fenix arabie is not known.
For the identification of Virginem mire pulcritudinis as a contrafact of Adiscort see Ward, ‘A Central European
Repertory’. Other unfamiliar titles may also be sacred contrafacta, a practice well attested in MuEm. For
Cortona see Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, at 82–​86. I thank Lawrence Earp for pointing out that
Par maintes foy must refer not to the Vaillant virelai but to the motet (triplum and tenor only) in Ca1328
and Würz.
296 The Musician Motets

2. Melk950: Anonymous, Tractatulus de cantu mensurali seu figurativo musice

artis.41 Again, Degentis vita, Apollinis and Ave coronata head the list, suggesting
a derivational relationship between these theory texts. F. Alberto Gallo dates the
content to mid-​fourteenth century, the manuscript to the fifteenth century:

Ulterius sciendum, quod de numero cantilenarum que sunt cantus mensuralis

quedam sunt in modo perfecto et tempore [im]perfecto, ut Degentis vita, Apollinis,
Ave coronata; alie sunt tam de tempore perfecto quam de modo perfecto, ut Yelangis
[Je languis]; alie sunt de modo imperfecto et tempore.

3a. BOZ1, p. 508.42 Closely related to the Wrocław16 treatise, this version was
copied into the codex after 1467, when an index was entered. A paragraph on
genres, almost identical to Wrocław and including mutetus/​motetus, again
defines it as that in which each part has text, and which has no general pause
except at the end. The examples cited are Apollinis, Ave coronata, Degentis vita,
Linor aula (of which the last is unknown).
3b. BOZ2, p. 527 gives examples of motets, here defined having a texted discantus
and medius, and a tenor. Apollinis is distinguished as having a texted tenor (this
may refer to the motetus Zodiacum below the middle-​voice tenor, which is, how-
ever, often given with its chant text), Degentis vita an untexted tenor. The tenor of
Degentis vita is the unidentified Vera pudicitia, often unlabelled, whose music is
cited in BOZ1 (p. 503) as an example of modus perfectus.
4. Pra103 (unpublished excerpts kindly provided by Martin Horyna).43

F. 74r: Propter clariorem evidenciam predictorum sciendum, quod de numero

cantuum quidam sunt in modo perfecto et tempore imperfecto sicut degentis vita,
Appollinis, Ave coronata. Alii sunt de tempore perfecto et de modo imperfecto
sicut musicorum inter collegia. Alii tam de modo imperfecto quam de tempore
imperfecto sicut Gelagwis [Je languis], Schag melodie. Alii tam de modo quam de
tempore perfecto ut nequicie peniteo, post missarum solennia, et illorum pauca
inveniuntur. Sequitur figura supradictorum de valore notarum.
F. 84v: Mutetus est, cuius omnes partes sunt una indistincta pars ut degentis vita,
Appollinis, Beacius etc.44

Thus, of the above treatises, (1) cites Appollinis, Ave coronata, Degentis vita and O
Maria; (2) cites Degentis vita, Apollinis, Ave coronata; (3a, BOZ1) cites Degentis vita,

41 CSM 16.
42 For these Warsaw sources, see Witkowska-​Zaremba (ed.), Notae musicae artis. Vitry’s Tuba sacre fidei is
cited in BOZ1 for red notation in the tenor to vary the modus, as it indeed does (505) along with the tenors of
the unknown Hedroys and Heres unica (505), both of which may be the same as Hedwiges heres unica (528).
Other motets cited in these treatises but not known at all include Linor aula zeli and Fenix arabie, and the two
motets Nicolai solempnia and Martine sancte pontifex.
43 Cf. Horyna, ‘Ein Brünner Fragment’, 2 n. 1. There are close similarities to BOZ2; cf. Witkowska-​Zaremba

(ed.), Notae musicae artis, 516 and 527.

44 This is the only known theoretical reference to what must be Beatius/​Cum humanum, a motet

reconstructed in Zayaruznaya, ‘Quotation, Perfection’. It is listed in Trém. See also Ch. 4 n. 42 and Ch. 16
n. 26 below.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 297

Appollinis, Ave coronata; (3b, BOZ2) cites Degentis vita, Appollinis; (4) cites Degentis
vita, Appollinis, Ave coronata, Musicorum inter collegia, Nequicie peniteo, Post missarum
solennia, Beatius. All these motets were in Stras except Ave coronata, which circulated
in eastern European sources, and the last three cited in (4).

Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili/​[Alleluia Dies sanctificatus]

Pic, f. 67v: see Example 17.1 and Figure 17.2.

Musicorum collegio/​In templo Dei posita/​Avete

Durham20, ff. 338v–​339: see Example 18.1.45

Alma polis religio/​Axe poli cum artica/​[Et] in ore eorum

Chantilly, ff. 67v–​68: see Example 19.1.

Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium/​In omnem terram

See Example 20.1.

Manuscript sources
Yox, f. i: black notation, red coloration [anon.]; motetus and tenor only. J. Alanus (in mo
text); c. 1410? This is the only English source.
Chantilly, ff. 70v–​71: black notation, six-​line staves, red coloration. J. Alani (in mo text).
1410s or later. ‘Tenor De sub archuro’ (not labelled ‘in omnem terram’).
Q15, no. 218 (f. 225v)–​R226, A254v–​255: black notation, void coloration, and Q15,
no. 328, f. R225v, A342v. Ff. R225v–​226 were originally facing pages, early 1420s.
The original f. R225 is now at the end of the manuscript as A342. The present A254v in
the body of the manuscript is a later recopy, early 1430s, of A342v (=​R225v) with no
independent authority but now facing the original recto. Both copies headed Jo. Alani
(J. Alanus in mo text). The original facing pages, now as end flyleaves A342v–​A255,
were originally R225v–​226.

References in theoretical and archival sources

There are two Italian references to Sub Arturo, both evidently of the early fifteenth cen-
tury. One is to the tenor of Sub Arturo in a vernacular Italian treatise, the anonymous

45 Not to be confused with the similar incipit of the rondeau Musicorum inter collegia; see Ch. 21.
298 The Musician Motets

Notitia del valore delle note del canto misurato, the date of whose unique source is not
established. Although dated by its editor to the fourteenth century, the script rather
suggests the early fifteenth; it seems to have enough humanistic features to be datable
probably to the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The treatise itself, however,
could well be earlier.

Onde colore nella musicha pratica sara un processo di piu note con sincope, <et> con
spirationi, et poi, ripreso un’ altra volta o piu, le medesime sincope et spirationi et valore,
dissimili le voci. Niente di meno taglia ancora é medessimo modo. Ma usasi ne’ tenori
artificiali, partendo il tinore in certe parti, si come el tinore di certi motetti, cioe LUCE
CLARUS o SUB ARTURO o OMNI HABENTI.46

After ‘Luce Clarus’ is given the first eight-​note talea of the tenor [In omnem terram],
with the accompanying text: ‘SUB ARTURO a tre taglie di valore; ma in voce sono dif-
ferentiate’;47 in other words, in a rare description of what we call isorhythm, the three
taleae apply the same rhythms to different pitches within each color, which indeed is
the case. The fact that Sub Arturo is named from its triplum makes it likely that the
other two are also triplum incipits, as they do not correspond to known chants; and
the fact that it is not named from its motetus suggests a later rather than an earlier date;
most fourteenth-​century motets (as in the Trém index; see Ch. 31) are named by their
motetus parts, in the fifteenth century (as in ModB) by triplum. This is further discussed
in the Introduction.
The other reference, kindly communicated by John Nádas in an email of 2009, is
in an Augustinian inventory dated Rome, 1432, now housed among the Augustinian
materials at the Rome State Archives, under the heading ‘Libri cantus’, where the third
entry refers to the ‘contratenor’ of Fons citharizancium:48 ‘Liber quidam cantus figurati
in papiro cuius princ’ 1 Contratenor fons cythariçantium finis vero Et ascendit.’ This is
interesting in that the part specified is not a contratenor, as stated, but the motetus in-
cipit. The motet has no contratenor and did not need one to support the harmony. This
could indicate an added part, such as the additional ones supplied for Apollinis.
It is hard to imagine what format could lead to this being on the first recto of a manu-
script unless the perhaps unbound book started incompletely, and had this voice on the

46 Anonymous, Notitia del valore delle note del canto misurato, ed. Carapetyan (CSM 5), 57 (Redi71, f. 24r).

The tenor is given accurately, except that the first rest is omitted, and the first note should be a long, not
a breve.
47 The tenor is not that of the 14th-​c. English motet Omnis terra/​Habenti dabitur (Ox7, no. 12, ff. 266v–​

267; PMFC 15, no. 22). See now Colton, ‘Making Sense of Omnis/​Habenti’. The entries before and after Sub
Arturo are:
LUCE CLARUS a tre taglie di valore a questo modo; ma in voce sono differentiate. [As stated for
Sub Arturo.] c d f f g a b a g f
Tenor OMNI HABENTI a due taglie, non in medesma voce. Pero che se fossono le taglie in valore
et in medesima voce, una compositione di note piu volte repetuta parebbe, et non altro (i.e. two taleae
attached to different notes): g f e f e d e d | d f e f g a g a.
48 Rome, Archivio di Stato, Agost. busta 34, f. 147r. Nádas comments that all entries are of some interest

(and the poetry collections allow for an identification in entry no. 2). The inventory was brought to musico-
logical attention by Morelli, ‘Musica e musicisti’, 326, citing the complete edition of the inventory published in
Gutiérrez, ‘La biblioteca di Sant’Agostino’, particularly 46–​47; Pieragostini, ‘Anglo-​Italian Musical Relations’,
ch. 1, pp. 57–​58; Pieragostini, ‘Augustinian Networks’. Alma polis (Ch. 19) celebrates twenty Augustinians, so
the presence of Sub Arturo in an Augustinian inventory might be suggestive.
 Apollinis eclipsatur: Progeny and Sources 299

first surviving recto, where a motetus part would normally be. No binding is described,
as it is for the two preceding entries. Perhaps it was a manuscript of large format, like
Trém, which could accommodate an entire motet on a single page.
Between them, these two Italian testimonies attest the presence of copies of Sub
Arturo in Italy perhaps contemporaneously with those in Q15 in the 1420s and 1430s.

Fragments, Possibly of Musician Motets

The surviving portions of three fragments lack names of musicians.

Arta/​Musicus est ille qui perpensa racione

LoTNA, f. 2r, written c. 1400 (see Ex. 21.1 below).

Non eclipsis atra ferrugine

Leiden2515, f. 1v, original recto, contains the end of the triplum, and the motetus (Non
eclipsis atra ferrugine) and tenor of an otherwise unknown motet. On the other side
is the triplum of Apollinis: see above and n. 30. It may have been another musician
motet: see Chapter 21.

Fons origo musicorum

Cu4435, fragment 16br, possibly belongs together with 16cv. Part of a fragmentary royal
choirbook of the 1420s.49 The fragments of surviving text, and further candidates, are
given in Chapter 21.

49 Facsimiles and a reconstruction of the choirbook (RC) are in EECM 62; for the contents see Ch. 25 and
Table 25.1.
 16
Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/
​In omnem terram and Later Versions
with Added Parts

This widely circulated motet, transcribed in Ex. 16.1, was the progenitor of the net-
work of motets which quoted and played off it and each other over many decades. These
relationships are explored in the chapters of Part IV. Commentary notes to the tran-
scription are in the Appendix to this chapter.

The Texts of Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​

In omnem terram

Texts and translations by David Howlett. The named musicians are in boldface.

Triplum Rhymes Words Syllables

Apollinis eclipsatur a 2 8
nunquam lux cum peragatur a 4 8
signorum ministerio b 2 8
bis sex, quibus armonica c 4 8
fulget arte basilica 5 c 3 8
musicorum collegio b 2 8
multiformibus figuris, d 2 8
e quo nitet J. de Muris d 6 8
modo colorum uario, b 3 8
Philippus de Uitriaco 10 e 3 8
acta plura uernant a quo, e 5 8
ordine multiphario; b 2 8
noscit Henricus Helene, f 3 8
tonorum tenorem bene, f 3 8
Magno cum Dionisio, 15 b 3 8
Regaudus de Tiramonte, g 3 8
Orpheÿco potus fonte, g 3 8
Robertus de Palacio b 3 8
Actubus petulancia h 2 8
fungens, gaudet poetria 20 h 3 8
Guilhermus de Mascaudio, b 3 8
Egidius de Morino i 3 8

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0017
302 The Musician Motets

baritonans cum Garino, i 3 8

quem cognoscat Suëssio, b 3 8
Arnaldus Martini, iugis 25 j 3 8
philomena, P. de Brugis, j 4 8
Gaufridus de Barilio; b 3 8
vox quorum mundi climata k 4 8
penetrat ad agalmata; k 3 8
doxe fruantur bravio! 30 b 3 8
11 93 240

Motetus
Zodiacum signis lustrantibus a 3 10
armonia Phebi fulgentibus a 3 10
musicali palam sinergia b 3 10
Pictagore numerus ter quibus a 4 10
adequatur preradiantibus 5 a 2 10
Boetii basis solercia. b 3 10
B. de Cluni nitens energia b 5 10
artis practice cum theoria b 4 10
Recommendans se subdit omnibus a 4 10
presentia per salutaria; 10 b 3 10
musicorum tripli materia b 3 10
noticiam dat de nominibus. a 4 10
2 41 120

Tenor: In omnem ter[ram exiuit sonus eorum et in fines orbis terre uerba eorum]

Triplum: The light of Apollo (i.e. the sun) is never eclipsed while it is brought through
its course in the service of the twice six signs (of the zodiac; but the same words may
mean ‘The light of Apollo, i.e. music, is never eclipsed while it is executed in the
service of the twice six signs’), by which (sunlight or music) the church shines with
harmonic art from the company of musicians with multiform figures; from among
which (company) Jehan des Murs is brilliant in the varied mode of colours, Philippe
de Vitry, from whom spring many accomplished things in multifarious order, Henri
d’Helène knows well the tenor of tones with Denis le Grant, Regaud de Tirlemont,
drunk from the Orpheic fountain, Robert du Palais, executing his achievements
with boldness, Guillaume de Machaut rejoices in poetry, Gilles de Thérouanne,
singing low with Guarin, whom Soissons ought to know, Arnaud Martin, the ever-​
singing nightingale, Pierre de Bruges, Godefroy de Baralle, of which men the voice
penetrates to the cardinal points of the world, to their honour. May they enjoy the
prize of glory!
Motetus: With signs circling round (and irradiating) the zodiac, shining with the har-
mony of Phoebus, manifestly in musical cooperation, by which, radiating out, three
times the number of Pythagoras (i.e. 3 x 10 =​30) is made equal with the cleverness
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 303

of the basis of Boethius (i.e. 12). B. de Cluny, shining with the active power of the
practical art joined with theory, recommending himself introduces himself to all by
these present greetings. The subject matter of the triplum gives notice of the names of
musicians.
Tenor: Into every land their sound has gone forth and their words to the limits of the
land of the world.

Much of the following paragraph is indebted to David Howlett’s unlocking of the in-
genuity of these texts.1 The name of the author B. de Cluny begins the second half of
the motetus Zodiacum; the central, twenty-​first, word is ‘Cluni’. He states, just before
the mid-​point of the motetus text, that ‘Pictagore numerus ter quibus | adequatur
preradiantibus | Boetii basis solercia’: ‘three times the number of Pythagoras is made
equal with the cleverness of the basis of Boethius’. The thirty-​line triplum (thrice ten)
and the twelve-​line motetus are made equal by the musical setting, which causes them
to begin and end together. In De institutione arithmetica II.XLII Boethius attributes
the perfection of the number 10 to Pythagoras’s observation that it was the sum of 1
+​2 +​3 +​4 (the tetraktys). The number 12 is referred to as the Boetii basis because in
De institutione musica II.X Boethius explains musical proportions from it. The thirty
octosyllabic lines of the triplum comprise 240 syllables, and the twelve decasyllabic
lines of the motetus 120 syllables, a ratio 2:1, together 360, so that the total number of
syllables in the motet equals the number of degrees in the circle. For a motet about the
circling of earth, sun and zodiac signs this could hardly be more appropriate. The be-
ginning of the triplum states that ‘the light of the sun . . . is brought through its course
in the twice six signs (of the zodiac)’; the beginning of the motetus recounts the ‘signs
circling round the zodiac’. Musicali in the motetus coincides with musicorum in the
triplum at B31, serving to emphasise the phrase musicorum collegio, whose words and
rhythm were to exercise such generative power on subsequent motets. Musicali is the
seventh word from the beginning, musicorum the seventh word from the end. Thus
musicali is preceded by six words that outline the twice six signs of the zodiac, and
musicorum is followed by six words that allude to the twice six musicians named in
the triplum. The opening of the triplum may allude to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book
13, verses 618–​19: ‘cum sol duodena peregit | signa . . .’. ‘Twice six’ musicians (bis
sex) are named in twelve of the thirty lines; they are aligned with the twelve signs
of the zodiac which open the motetus, Zodiacum signis, forming a kind of celestial
monochord mirroring the earthly musicians Pythagoras and Boethius.2 Both names
for the Greek god of the sun, Phoebus and Apollo, appear respectively in motetus
and triplum, in both cases standing for the sun and for music. Twelve musicians are
praised in a triplum whose mythological and cosmological programme is announced

1 Howlett, ‘Apollinis’. Among the textual variants in Brno the most striking is at the beginning: Apolinis

eclipsatur | lux, quo peragatur | signorum sub emisperia | bis sex. In this case, the crucial omission of ‘nunquam’
means that the sun sets (rather than never sets) when it passes below the hemisphere of the zodiac: Horyna, A
Prague Fragment, 76, 86; ‘Ein Brünner Fragment’, 11. This is clearly a corruption which disrupts the octosyl-
labic lines and the presentation of the musicians as inextinguishable luminaries. The scribe was presumably
trying to mend a corrupted text.
2 The author of Musicorum reinterprets the twelves as monthly-​calendrical as well as Apocalyptic. Canto X

of Dante’s Paradiso links twelve wise souls (named or implied) to twelve heavenly lights.
304 The Musician Motets

by the first word: Apollo, son of Zeus and leader of the nine muses (sometimes
considered their father, hence the fount of music and poetry) and god of the sun.
The last lines of the motetus refer to the musicians listed in the triplum: ‘musicorum
tripli materia noticiam dat de nominibus’. The triplum (line 4) refers to the represen-
tation of these twelve by the twice six zodiac signs of the motetus. A similarly unu-
sual cross-​referencing between triplum and motetus texts occurs in other motets of
this group: in Sub Arturo, Alanus refers in lines 29–​30 of his motetus to the names in
the triplum, ‘quorum numen nominum triplo modulatur’, and the motetus text also
elucidates the tenor proportions. By sealing the links between text and music, such
measures tend to make a motet proof against contrafaction, another manifestation of
artful sinergia or ‘working together’.3 The words of the tenor also imply that the twelve
musicians, representing the twelve apostles, spread their message to the ends of the
earth, as in the Apocalypse, and as recounted in Musicorum—​over a different tenor
and with seven musicians representing the seven stars and apocalyptic sevens.
‘Johannes de Muris is brilliant in the varied mode of colours’: there are no statements
in his early treatises about coloration—​red notation—​an innovation widely attributed
to Vitry in the various testimonies to a treatise that he appears to have written and in
the motet(s) widely attributed to him, especially Garrit gallus.4 One name that is absent
from all these motets is the theorist Jacobus. His enormous treatise (which survives in
only one complete copy) never achieved the kind of circulation and reception enjoyed
by Muris and Vitry—​which ironically resulted in their treatises surviving in much more
problematic form than the Speculum musicae.

The Music

The well-​known text of the tenor In omnem terram has multiple liturgical placements
and different melodies. Its source is Psalm 18, Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei, verse 5: ‘in
omnem terram exivit sonus eorum et in fines orbis terrae verba eorum’, quoted in
Romans 10: 18. The choice of tenor text, with its biblical contexts, is obviously
appropriate for a motet about the light of the sun irradiating the signs of the
zodiac. Verse 6 indeed refers to the sun: ‘in sole posuit tabernaculum suum’. Ursula
Günther argued that this tenor and the similar but unlabelled tenor of Alma polis
related freely to the same chant source, the Offertory for the Mass of the missionary

3 The balance of sinergia with energia implies the authenticity of sinergia, but the readings of this unfa-

miliar word as sinsagia, sinsurgia, sinzugra, sinzigra respectively in Ivrea, Barc971, Barc853 and Tarragona2
attest a variant which appeared early enough in the transmission of this text to influence the text of Psallentes
zinzugia (see below), and now Leipzig223 has zinzugia, indicating a possible link with the English added
triplum.
A number of words or phrases in the triplum are echoed in the motetus: Apollo—​Phebus; signorum bis sex—​
Zodiacum signis; armonica—​armonia; arte—​artis; musicorum—​musicorum; nitet—​nitens. Some of these
occur nearly simultaneously (signorum—​signis, armonica—​armonia, musicorum collegio—​musicali).
4 Red notation was also used in In virtute (attributed to Vitry by Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Related Motets’, 5–​8,

18; transcribed and discussed in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, ch. 2 and appendix 1; and now in a
motet in Paris934 where it is used in the way described for Thoma tibi (see Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars
nova Motets). On Vitry’s theoretical writings see Desmond, ‘Ars vetus et nova’. For early English uses, see Ch.
4 n. 38.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 305

saints Peter and Paul,5 but Kévin Roger has now identified the tenor of Alma polis; see
Chapter 19 and Ex. 19.2.
Apollinis stands out as unusual in the fourteenth-​century repertory with its middle-​
voice tenor (see Ch. 1) and contrapuntally essential texted motetus Zodiacum, which lies
mostly below the tenor, the main contrapuntal foundation, although it provides struc-
tural and melodic foundational material. Triplum and motetus form a largely but not
wholly self-​sufficient duet which takes account of the tenor pitches. The tenor provides
essential support only at breve 37 when it dips below the motetus, and it rises above the
triplum to form a fifth with it at breves 26 and 122. At breves 85, 133, and at 43, 91 and
139 the tenor goes below a self-​contained triplum–​motetus interval. The low motetus,
Zodiacum, supports consonances, providing essential underpinnings to what would other-
wise be fourths between triplum and tenor on strong beats, turning the sonorities into
acceptable octaves and fifths.6 This function was misunderstood by at least two of its me-
dieval transmitters (in SL2211 and Barc971) and by Frank Ll. Harrison, who mislabelled
this part ‘Contratenor’. Although the In omnem terram tenor of Sub Arturo plebs (a dif-
ferent chant) is not a middle voice, that piece is composed in such a way that triplum and
motetus, while not entirely contrapuntally self-​sufficient, largely work together as a pair.
Apollinis is 144 breves in length. As the theoretical citations note, it is in perfect
modus, imperfect time and major prolation. The tenor color of sixteen perfect longs is
stated three times, each consisting of two taleae (six altogether), each of eight perfect
longs, each containing 3B =​24B.7 Each talea has eight perfect longs =​24 breves =​144
minims. There are eleven notes per talea, 6 +​5, divided and followed by a rest. The tenor
is also arranged in regular groups bounded by rests that cut across the taleae but cor-
respond to them. The entire tenor has seven perfect longs between each rest, offset by
placing five at the beginning and two at the end: 5 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 2. This pattern creates
a displacement (i.e. syncopation) of periods at the beginning and end of the motet,
creating a structural counterpoint with the outer parts.

Music: Texted (Outer) Parts and Number

Both triplum and motetus fall into periods of twenty-​four breves, each period ending
with a breve rest in the triplum, two breves rest in the motetus. These periods are not co-
incident with the tenor taleae, but flanked in the triplum by periods of twenty-​nine and
nineteen breves, in the motetus by periods of twenty-​seven and twenty-​one breves, thus
setting the triplum and motetus periodicity off from each other.8 The twenty-​four-​breve

5 GR [90]. CMM 39, p. LIV; p. XLVI compares the tenors of Alma and Apollinis with the Offertory chant.

Sub Arturo, however, uses a different chant of the same name, which Günther identified as an adaptation of
the first antiphon for the first Nocturn for Common of Apostles. See Ex. 20.2 below.
6 At breves (bars) 13, 23, 47, 55, 59, 67–​71, 73, 76, 115, 119, 141, 143.
7 I use the words color and talea here in their received meanings to indicate respectively the melodic and

rhythmic qualities of the tenor. See Ch. 1. It has long been known that medieval theorists are less consistent
in applying these terms. The relevant passages have been usefully assembled in Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice
Structures, appendix.
8 Nineteens are a multiple for color I of Alma (9 × 19), and for the whole of Sub Arturo counted in upper-​part

breves (152, 8 × 19) as opposed to the 144 of its nominal tenor breves. The lunar cycle of nineteen years yields the
golden numbers used for finding Easter, and corresponds to nineteen places on the calendrical or musical hand.
306 The Musician Motets

Fig. 16.1 Staggered periods in Apollinis

periods correspond to those identified by Ernst Sanders in some Vitry motets as the
motet’s modular number of twenty-​four.9 The central periods in each voice are thus the
same length as the tenor talea, but are overlapped and staggered in relation to the tenor
by two breves. Periods bounded by rests are in all three parts offset against the tenor
taleae (see Fig. 16.1).
Apollinis has no tenor reduction, no upper-​voice isorhythm, no recurrent local
rhythmic patterning, no hockets, and in those respects stands early in what has often
been considered an evolutionary spectrum from simple to complex.10 The old habit of
equating non-​isorhythmic upper parts with less developed musical thinking confronts
us immediately in this motet. Writers on music of all periods have often taken the iden-
tification of sameness, the recognition of repetition, as primary for form-​building and
foremost in interest. Much that can be said about the music of Apollinis will come in dis-
cussion of the later pieces that quote from it and make play with the material it provides.
But as well as likeness and quotation, the congruences also have to do with structure
such as the longer-​range periods recounted above, with number, placement and order,
with quotation and allusion, with symbolic representation, with the textual and mu-
sical interrelationship between parts, many of these in ways that have thus far been little
noted, and which therefore give us a quite new access to the intellectual aesthetic of
this repertory. Words, melody and rhythm are often quoted or alluded to separately, or
quoted by two of those dimensions but not all three. Such quotations are often signalled
as significant moments by being placed in prominent or neatly proportioned positions
within the piece. While individual claims of such placement might seem forced, their
accumulation is compelling.
As noted, the motet is 144 breves long, 12 squared, reflecting the twelve zodiacal signs
and the cosmic ambition of the motet. Twelves underpin other motets in this group. The
ç
tenor talea length is the same in four of the musician motets: 24B of in Apollinis,

9 Sanders, ‘The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry’.

10 Notably Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 307

Musicalis, Musicorum (12B in the second color) and Sub Arturo, and in the second color
of the fifth motet, Alma polis. The total length of Apollinis and Musicorum is 144 breves
in each case, which is also the length of the tenor of Sub Arturo (although there the
breves are of different lengths by mensural reinterpretation, and the count differs for the
upper parts). In Musicorum the 144 is explicitly Apocalyptic, implicitly by punning with
Apollinis; Alma polis would later join this game.11 The second color of Alma polis is 144
semibreves (here on the accompanying transcription counted in semibreves to accom-
modate the different mensurations in the two texted parts). Apollinis and Sub Arturo
each have three statements of a single notated color, Apollinis without change, Sub
Arturo with mensural reinterpretation; Musicalis has a single color, so its seven taleae
are fully written out, the seventh talea taking it beyond the 144 breves of the first six. In
that sense, too, it goes one beyond the six taleae of Apollinis. These are just some of the
ways in which the subsequent motets acknowledge Apollinis and each other. The second
color of Musicorum in straightforward diminution is fully written out, though it could
have been read from the first statement; the second color of Alma polis is mensurally
reinterpreted without rewriting.

Music–​Text Relationships

Although Apollinis has no repeating isorhythm in the upper parts, there are distinct
melodic gestures whose recurrences articulate the form. Falling and rising fifths (d–​a,
a–​d, g–​d, d–​g) are prominent in the motetus throughout, sometimes as solmisation
vowel-​rhyming puns: motetus 97–​100 a–​d, la–​re: theorica Recommendans, and the slow
enunciation of basis in the motetus on bb–​a, fa–​mi, at B70–​71. Other descending a–​d
fifths occur at the opening Zodiacum, for the author’s name B. de Cluni B77, and at nu-
merus ter B46, rising d–​a fifths for musicorum at B28 and B124; rising and falling fifths,
sometimes in palindromic configuration, at musicali B31, sinergia B38, adequatur B55,
artis practice B85, musicorum tripli materia B124. Zodiacum’s initial descent of the fifth
a–​d precedes an octave ascent followed by the descent down through a seventh, features
which will be taken up in Musicorum collegio, Alma polis and Sub Arturo. In the triplum,
all three colores begin with a descending scalar fifth outlining a–​d.
No borrowings from earlier pieces have yet been detected in Apollinis, though
Apollinis is itself the source of borrowed—​and often dismembered or separated—​
verbal, rhythmic and melodic units in Musicalis, Musicorum collegio, Alma polis and
Sub Arturo plebs. Breves 30–​32 and triplum line 6 of the text of Apollinis have the words
musicorum collegio, later to provide both words and rhythm (but not pitches) for the
opening of Musicorum collegio and an important building block throughout that motet.
Their rhythm provides the opening of Musicalis, repeated in each talea. Two striking
passages in Apollinis, both involving a double presentation of the musicorum collegio
rhythm, occur at breves 98–​104 and 129–​135. They correspond neither in their position

11 As well as Alma polis, Apollinis, Apocalipsis, the English motets Alma proles and Are post libamina may

nod at the same tradition. Connections between motets outside this group may be signalled by shared opening
words: Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores, Ch. 7; Vos/​Gratissima, Ch. 8; and the Durham20 motet O vos omnes which
might be English, or possibly by Vitry. See Ch. 1. See Ch. 6 for Floret/​Florens, Ch. 30 for Flos/​Celsa, Alís
Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’ for Flos vernalis/​Fiat. See also Ch. 25 for a lost motet Flos mundi.
308 The Musician Motets

in the tenor talea nor, hence, in their own twenty-​four-​breve cycles. This is one of many
instances of rhythmic recapitulation outside what would be the expected corresponding
locations in an isorhythmic structure.
Robertus de Palacio and Philip de Vitry are presented in both Apollinis and Musicalis
in melodic and rhythmic parallel (Apollinis B51 and 84: f ggg f
e efe d and e d efefg ggg f
d; Musicalis B41–42 and 65–66: ggg fg fg f
eee cd ec d). Philippus de Vitriaco at B43–​B52
of Apollinis straddles the junction to the second color (B49), starting at B43–​B44 with
emphatic parallel octaves on Phili-​. While not presenting an exact melodic or rhythmic
quotation, the triplum starts the second color with a clear allusion to the opening, thus
setting Vitry’s name parallel to that of Apollo. Vitry is the first musician named in the
second color, Machaut in the third, which is introduced with the musicorum collegio
rhythm. The musical mid-​point coincides with the midpoint of the motetus text (by
lines), between ‘Boetii basis solercia’ and ‘B. de Cluni nitens energia’, both text lines
starting with the letter B and ending with -​ia.
Interesting harvests can be expected from the—​hitherto little-​remarked—​ways in
which tenors provide melodic material integrated into the newly invented parts whose
texts in turn determined the choice of tenor.12 Here, the opening notes of the chant In
omnem terram, a cs d, also recur in long notes in the motetus for artis, B82–​85, where
they coincide with the name of Robertus de Palatio in the triplum, while the tenor sounds
its other non-​conjunct progression with the descending fourth c d a g.13 Transposed to
e gs a, an octave above their pitch in most versions of the chant, they emphasise Morino
at tr 106, also in long notes. In all three cases, the second note is signed as mi (thus the
second and third notes are mi–​fa), and in all three statements of the tenor color cs is
contrapuntally called for.14 Uninflected, a c d set to solerci(a) in mo 71–​72 ends the first
half of both text and music. The descending fourth of the largest non-​conjunct interval
in the tenor is picked up several times in the texted parts. It announces theorica at mo
91–​94, transposed at tr 38–​39 for Muris. Its melodic fourths abound, as do the unmedi-
ated descent of this fifth and its ascending inversion, a rising fifth, throughout the tr and
mo. The notes are varied to a g d cs with rising fifth for musicali at mo 28. Melodic leaps
of fourths and fifths are unusually prominent in this motet.
Triplum, motetus, and tenor all begin on the note a. The A of Apollinis and the Z of
Zodiacum recall the ‘alpha et omega’, principium et finis of Revelation, anticipating the
reverse span from the invocation of Genesis in Sub Arturo responding to that of the
Apocalypse in Musicorum. The triplum range is from a up to b′ (sometimes flattened);
the bs are all rather prominent as the top note, at the beginning B1, at musicorum collegio
31, actubus 86, and agalmata 139 (emended by Howlett from algamata). The range
of the later triplum Pantheon is c up to d′. The words musicorum collegio in Apollinis
mark the first return to the opening highest note b, which is ‘never exceeded’ (nunquam
eclipsatur).

12 Chant citations worked into the texted parts: I have given further examples in Chs. 4, 12, 14.
13 The same three notes g a c d c also end the color. The tenor thus sounds a c d six times, twice in each of the
three colores. At B124–​127 in Ivrea it occurs on the word ‘musicorum’, but all other sources have b in B127 (see
commentary), which has been preferred, to avoid the crashing octaves with the tenor.
14 See Ch. 20 and Ex. 20.2 for chant affinities and connections with on Sub Arturo and an erroneously

signed mi in the tenor in Yox.

 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 309

In the motetus Zodiacum signis, the twelfth note (the number of the zodiacal signs) is
the first note of signis (coinciding with signorum in the triplum, B12–​14), while the en-
tire first text line, Zodiacum signis lustrantibus, occupies the first six perfect longs of the
motet. It starts with a melisma, so that the opening triplum words Apollinis eclipsatur
nunquam are heard with no textual competition. The triplum then starts the second
group of six longs, punningly, with the words bis sex (‘twice six’), which occur after six
tenor notes and after six perfect longs.15

The Notation of Apollinis

The notational and musical style suggest a date of c. 1330, though all the surviving
sources are at least several decades younger. The priority given in the listing to Muris
and Vitry over the younger Machaut could reflect the greater fame of the older men
at this date. Vitry is given emphatically slow notes in all parts at B43–​49 (sounding to-
gether with numerus ter), as is Boethius at B67–​73, ending the first half of both text
and music. The nature of some of the many variants suggests that they may go back to
a model that was less notationally precise; and the considerable variation in melodic
details (see commentary in the Appendix) is, moreover, what might be expected from
performerly interventions in such a widely circulated composition.
Despite the music being attested in fifteen sources, only two are complete: Ivrea and
Barc971. Stras was also complete but survives only in the copy made by Coussemaker
before the fire of 1870, with the original three-​part version, plus two added voices.16
Further nearly complete or legible versions of the triplum only are Leiden2515, Pad658,
Brno, and of the motetus Barc853, Tarragona2 and Leipzig223. The commentary does
not attempt to report damaged or illegible passages or very fragmentary witnesses; it
gives variants in dots or ligatures only where these seem to be significant. Witnesses to
interesting or troublesome readings are reported where they can be discerned.
Given that Apollinis was reported in the theoretical treatises noted in Chapter 15 as a
model example of perfect modus, the musical sources show a surprising degree of vacil-
lation between perfect and imperfect modus:

1. Some longs are dotted where, in perfect modus, a dot is not needed: Ivrea need-
lessly dots the first two longs of the motetus; Barc971 and Leipzig223 dot those
and all other perfect longs, including those in the tenor.
2. The two perfect long rests in the notated first tenor color (16–​18 and 40–​42) cover
three spaces in Ivrea, Barc853, Tarragona2, Leipzig223, Vienna922, Brno, but

15 The expression of 12 by bis sex also has a calendrical resonance; it recalls the denomination of what we

call leap years as bissextile because the letter for 6 Kal. Mar. (24 Feb.) was repeated, yielding two dominical
letters for those years. The tenor of Apollinis has three cs in the seventh perfect L, coinciding with the triplum’s
bis sex. The tenor of Sub Arturo has five consecutive occurrences of the note c towards the end of each color.
Indeed, each color contains 12 cs, exactly half of its 24 notes. 9½ out of 24 perfect longs sound c. 9½ is the im-
perfect brevial length of the internal talea repetitions in Alma.
16 While we must be grateful for Coussemaker’s transcription, it cannot be assumed to be a faithful repre-

sentation of the lost source. Assuming the bar divisions marked in the copy are his own, his command of the
notational conventions was not perfect.
310 The Musician Motets

Barc971 notates the first rest as an imperfect long and a breve, covering two plus
one spaces.
3. The rule of similis ante similem is mostly observed. In all sources of the tenor, al-
d s
teration of a before the is necessary, and those breves are never misnotated as
longs, even in Barc971, which in other respects appears to construe the motet at
least partly in imperfect modus: rests, dots, and what would, if perfect, be an in-
fringement of similis ante similem. At triplum B106–​108, Ivrea’s dd
ligature now,
properly, requires alteration of the second breve before the ensuing at B109. s
This ligature originally had a downstem to the right, making the second note a
s s
long, improperly imperfect before the following . The downstem is (improp-
erly) present in Leiden2515. It is correctly notated as a breve (to be altered) in
Stras, and in Barc971, surprisingly, given that source’s other implementations of
imperfect modus. At motetus 31–​33, Ivrea and Stras correctly require alteration
d s
of the second before the ; Leipzig223, Barc853, Barc971 and Tarragona2 no-
tate it as a long, again improperly if construed in perfect modus. Leipzig223 and
Barc971 thus waver between perfect and imperfect modus. All of Leipzig223’s
‘perfect’ longs are dotted, which they would not need to be if perfect modus were
ds
in force. In Barc971 tenor 73–78 is notated improperly as (in ligature) followed
s
by a separate , although the corresponding place in the first talea (1–6) is correct
d ds
with , alt , . Some of these anomalies could possibly go back to an exemplar
that was spelt out in duple modus (ad longum). The tenor is mislabelled ‘Contra’ in
Barc971, apparently misunderstanding its status as a middle-​voice tenor.17

The intact survival of the Ivrea version does not confer preferential status on its
readings. Where Ivrea seems to have a less good reading, and where there is some de-
gree of unanimity between other sources in favour of one I judge preferable, I have used
that. There remain many passages where equally valid alternatives exist in one or more
sources. Given the fragmentary state of most of the sources, and the high level of nota-
tional corruption, I make no apology for offering a transcription with some elements
of conflation, a version which seeks to remove some of the anomalies which may have
crept in over a decades-​long transmission. The triplum has a wide range of melodic
and ornamental variants in its various sources, the most striking being in Brno, which
introduces many more minim groups, often to fill in disjunct intervals; it is more
ornamented even than the organ intabulation in Vienna5094.18 There is some nota-
tional hesitancy in Brno; a few S groups are left unstemmed, perhaps indicating uncer-
tainty about their values. Some of the rhythms are unclear, perhaps requiring minim
alteration, though scribal uncertainty is more likely. One minim stem points down
(B88). Some longs and breves at the ends of ligatures are incorrectly notated, a feature
not uncommon in late Germanic and eastern European sources in which the niceties of
French ars nova notation were often simplified.19

17 See Ch. 1 on middle-​voice tenors. Stras labels the tenor of Rex Karole ‘Contratenor’.
18 Those two versions are transcribed alongside Ivrea in Horyna, ‘Ein Brünner Fragment’, 11 and Horyna,
A Prague Fragment, 78–​86.
19 See Ward, ‘A Central European Repertory’ for documentation of east European adaptations of French

notational practices.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 311

To place the use of shorter note-​values in Apollinis in context, we should recall that the
stemless semibreves in the ars nova motets in Fauvel and others of only slightly later date
lend themselves to interpretation according to the default specifications for unstemmed
semibreves in imperfect time and what would later be called major prolation (rhythmic
groupings of values below the breve) given by theorists (see CS iii: Anon III):

2 ff
3 f fg
4 fg fg
5 ggg fg
6 ggg ggg
For several Fauvel motets, notated there without minim stems, these default values
are confirmed by stems in later sources.20 Occasional downstems on the first of a
group affirm a longer rather than a short value; they are accidental, and do not neces-
sarily make the note longer than it would be if unstemmed. Any other dispositions of
rhythms within the breve outside those defaults require notated stems. Although the
unsigned minim value exists in the advanced Fauvel motets, only when departure from
the default values is required did stemming become necessary, earlier by downstems
confirming longer notes, later by upstems for shorter values.21 When groupings other
than the defaults were wanted, or minim rests, it gradually became necessary to stem
all minims, whether using the default rhythms or not. While the minim value already
existed in the 1310s, only from the 1320s does it become an independent notated value.
Its place in the hierarchy is clear in the gradus system of Muris’s Notitia of 1319, though
major and minor prolation is not so formulated and named until the treatise of Petrus
dictus palma ociosa of 1336, and the Libellus attributed to Muris usually dated in the
1340s, when the semibreve–​minim relationship took its place in the theoretical hier-
archy (mutatis mutandis) parallel to long–​breve and breve–​semibreve, similarly subject
to alteration and imperfection. This had applied in practice long before the theoretical
formulations, though not always with absolute consistency. For the motets attributed
to Vitry, observation of defaults provides partial corroboration of a chronology for
his motets that can sometimes be proposed on other grounds. Indeed, the very term
‘prolation’, meaning performance, or bringing forward, hints at a tradition of perfor-
mance practice preceding its theoretical codification, and it was used in a more general
sense before it took on the specific meaning of the semibreve–​minim relationship.
While all the musician motets show some departure from the default values that ap-
plied to stemless semibreves during the earliest stage of ars nova, Apollinis, the earliest
of the musician motets, has only a very few variant sub-breve groupings. The only

20 Garrit gallus in Pic, Tribum/​Quoniam, Firmissime/​Adesto and Super/​Presidentes in Br19606, Firmissime/​

Adesto and Orbis/​Orbatus in Koblenz. In some cases later sources (especially Koblenz) show some uncer-
tainty, due probably to being transcribed from a stemless source with dots (some of which are retained).
21 Some sources (mostly of the earlier 14th c. in France, also later in England) distinguish major semibreve

rests intersecting the staff line from minor semibreve rests worth two minims, suspended from the line. Earp,
‘Tradition and Innovation’, sets out clearly the distinction between, on the one hand, motets whose hockets
are or could have been notated with minor semibreve rests, where the rest simply replaced a note within
the same rhythmic framework and, on the other hand, notation requiring single minim rests in interlocking
hockets which are later developmentally and probably chronologically. See Ch. 30 n.20.
312 The Musician Motets

non-default combinations used are: for three notes 2 1 3 ( fg f

);22 for four notes: 1113,
3111 ( ggg f and f ggg 23
); for five notes: 2 1 111 ( fg ggg
24
). The motet could therefore
originally have been notated with mainly unstemmed semibreves, requiring stems
only in the fifteen bars with departures from the default values. Apollinis also exceeds
the defaults by imperfecting breves (in B1, 6, 10, 59, 71, 73, 74, 112) and a long (in
g
B137–138) by a single ensuing , known as imperfection by a ‘remote’ or non-​adjacent
note-​value.25 Most or all of these could originally have been notated as plicas. Works
attributed to Vitry, including late and recently reconstructed works like Phi millies and
ç
Beatius/​Cum humanum,26 never imperfect the breve in by a minim, except by using
a plica, a usage which could be an authorial marker for Vitry, or at least a reason for
doubting his authorship of motets with imperfect breves further imperfected by minims
(see Chapter 7).
Other departures from the defaults involve rests and altered minims. In most sources,
Apollinis has a single minim rest in B85 ( f ©gg
| on Palatio). There are not even any semi­
breve rests (the one at Barc971 B29 is in error for a breve rest), so that a single minim
rest may seem suspicious and anomalous, resulting in a rhythm which stands outside
the rhythmic vocabulary of this motet.27 I have treated the rest as an alternative reading
placed above the staff, adopting the main reading from Brno and Vienna5094. See the
Appendix to this chapter for variants for multi-​source motets.
The evidence is mixed as to whether B. de Cluny used an altered minim before a
semibreve. On balance, I suspect that there were no altered minims in Apollinis as orig-
inally notated. If Barc971’s few altered minims are discounted in a transmission with
evident corruptions, it would be the case that neither Apollinis nor Musicorum has al-
tered minims. A single anomalous instance of alteration in Musicalis (repeated in each
talea) is discussed below. At triplum 7–​8 Pad658, Stras, Barc971 all have f gg
, requiring
alteration of the second minim. (Leiden2515 is cut off and Brno has fg ggg
d e fef twice,
typical of its ornamental variants.) Ivrea originally had stems on both second minims,
but these have been erased, a deliberate correction resulting in the rhythm used here
(2 1 3, fg f
). There is only one other place in the motet apparently requiring an altered
minim, the single iambic pair in Harrison’s transcription and present only in Ivrea: the
last minim in triplum 118 (Suessio): | f fg fgg f f
| g a a | g gf | a e, requiring alteration
of the second M preceding the S. All other sources of B117–118 have a less awkward
reading: Barc971 and Leiden2515 read | f f fg fg f f
| g a | a g f g | a e, which has been
used here. Stras has f fg f ggg f f
| | g a a | g g f g | a e; Pad658 g a| a g g f, all of which
make better sense, requiring no minim alteration in what was presumably the original
version. It seems more likely that there is a minim missing here in Ivrea than that it is a
unique instance of an altered minim in this transmission. Barc971 has a pair of altered
minims on actubus at B88, and a missing stem on the third note of the following group.
Apart from these there are no other iambic progressions in the entire motet ( or gf gg
22 At tr 7, 8 (if the reading of 7–​8 is correct: see below on altered minims), 28, 124.
23 f ggg ggg f
at tr 32, 51, 104; and at tr 55.
24 At tr 9, 27, 37, 84, 123; mo 24, 120.
25 Such remote imperfection is already allowed in the Conclusiones of Muris’s Notitia (1321), as is imperfec-

tion of a breve by a single semibreve in perfect tempus. See Bent, ‘Artes novae’.
26 See also Ch. 4 n. 42.
27 The presence of a single minim rest (in each of the final four triplum taleae) has been used to cast doubt

on the 1325 dating of Machaut’s Motet 18. See Ch. 13.

 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 313

alt), which is resolutely trochaic. The anomalies may arise from corrupted transmission,
possibly from a less prescriptive original notated form; given the absence of any other
iambic formulations, or of alteration of values below the breve, iambic minims with al-
teration, whether in B7–​8 or B118, may have lain outside the predominant style of this
composition. If the altered minims and the minim rest are judged to be corruptions, the
original form of this motet could well date to c. 1330 or even back into the 1320s, only
needing stems for the few exceptions to the default values.28

Other Versions of Apollinis: Added Parts

The sources listed in Chapter 15 include three versions of Apollinis with an added
triplum, the only fourteenth-​century composition for which such arrangements or
glosses exist. Two of these also have a fifth voice: as well as an additional triplum in
both, there is a ‘Quadruplum sive triplum’ in Stras, and a contratenor in LoTNA, both
textless, making them the only Continental examples of five-​part motets during the en-
tire fourteenth century, notwithstanding theoretical references to five-​part composition
(see Ch. 1). These additions are apparently later, probably dating from around 1400.
They add no new names.
Although the two five-​part versions seem not to be interrelated, it can be no accident
that they each perform a similar double exercise on the same foundational composi-
tion, and each begins with ‘P’ (though LoTNA spells the opening word Sallentes). This
also corroborates the primary status of Apollinis; like the Roman de la rose, it became
a model for remaniement, for reworkings. These versions are treated under Apollinis
because they are dependent on it; however, they may not antedate the other musician
motets, which will be discussed in what appears to be their chronological order. Of the
three additional triplum parts in later manuscripts, Barc853’s is textless and two are
texted, Pantheon and Psallentes.

The Textless Triplum in Barc853

Barc85329 (see Ex. 16.2). Folio 1r contains the motetus Zodiacum signis, the tenor
In omnem terram, and in the same hand a textless ‘triplum’ and a ‘Contratenor Per
sanctam civitatem’.30 Like Pantheon abluitur and the textless ‘Quadruplum sive
triplum’ in Stras, the new extra triplum has no repeating or regular structure. As noted
above, the ‘Contratenor Per sanctam civitatem’, claimed as a fifth voice by Gómez,
cannot belong to Apollinis and has no textual connection; this is a four-​part version.
Gómez acknowledges the problems but maintains nevertheless that it contributes to a
five-​part version. The presence of this contratenor, however, is unexplained; there may
have been insufficient space on this opening for other voices of the motet to which it

28 See Appendix to this chapter.

29 See Gómez, ‘Une Version à cinq voix du motet Apollinis’.
30 g
Variants in the triplum: 9–10 ambiguous; 10.1 ? in which case 10.2 is alt; 24, 28–30, 53–55, 61, 91, 112,
sd ff d d
114 uncertain; 50 d; 62 ? no stem visible, but must be lig.; 83 ; 114.4 ? Gómez, ‘Une Version à cinq voix
du motet Apollinis’, remarks on the exceptional nature of an upper motet voice without text.
314 The Musician Motets

presumably belonged. It is indeed hard to explain the format, taking into account the
missing facing verso, which presumably contained the triplum Apollinis, leaving little
space for the other parts of a different motet. Gómez sets out style-​related chronolog-
ical arguments, presumed manuscript datings, presumptive dates of the musicians
mentioned, and adds to the list of interconnections between the compositions.31 The
new triplum was clearly composed to fit the motetus–​tenor pair (the low motetus
being the contrapuntal foundation) but with only erratic regard to its consonance
with the original triplum Apollinis, with which it has some doublings and parallel
seconds, and much incidental dissonance. Occasional anomalies with the motetus
include parallel ninths at B120. It is strongly dissonant with the tenor at B87 (but so
is Apollinis), 128 and 131, less so at 79 and elsewhere. Groups of six semibreves (with
some variation), punctuated by a few minim rests, recur at corresponding places B7–​
9, 55–​57, 103–​105, but there is no other regular periodicity. Those single minim rests
create expectation of hocket, but there is none. There are many rhythmic and melodic
echoes of the triplum Apollinis (notably at B29–​30), which was clearly known to the
later composer, who often took account of any available contrapuntal positions that
avoided doubling, for example at B11–​12, even if he allowed free incidental disso-
nance. The rhythmic vocabulary is very similar to Apollinis, but even closer to the
defaults; the only exceptions are breves imperfected by minims, semibreves by minim
rests, and the group fg ggg
instead of ggg fg
at B21, 29, 70, 94, 120, 139. (B3. 4–​5 could
be sharpened.)

Pantheon abluitur in Stras and SL2211

Stras contains a five-​part version with the texted upper voice Pantheon abluitur and an
additional textless upper part labelled Quadruplum sive triplum de Apollinis.32 Pantheon
abluitur is also now in SL2211. See Ex. 16.3. Commentary notes to the transcription
are in the Appendix to this chapter.
Text and translation by David Howlett:33

Rhyme Words Syllables

Pantheon abluitur a 2 7
templum pseudodeorum; b 2 7
[hodie] construitur a 2 7
ecclesia sanctorum; b 2 7

31 Gómez uses stylistic arguments drawn from Günther, ‘The 14th-​ Century Motet’, and also adds to
Günther’s list of linking characteristics between the two pieces the repetition of three notes (c) in the tenors of
Apollinis and Sub Arturo. Sub Arturo actually has five consecutive cs in each of its three colores.
32 PMFC 5, no. 9a.
33 6 mutaui; 11 confinitas; 12 iore over maiestate; 14 posi deces; 22 decorantur; 24 fruetur; 27 iubetur; 29

honoris; 34 lauato. The first two syllables, maies-​ of maiestate 12 and ier-​ of ierarchias 13, must be elided to
produce heptasyllabic lines. SL2211: large portions of the text are illegible, but where they can be deciphered
they seem to confirm the above readings. One exception is in lines 2–​3, where there is no room for a word be-
tween pseudodeorum and construitur; criste seems to be between construitur and ecclesia, but this fits neither
the rhyme scheme nor the heptasyllabic count.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 315

plus error destruitur 5 a 3 7

muta[tus] ui bonorum. b 3 7
Prima Sancta Trinitas c 3 7
ibidem ueneratur, d 2 7
gratiam Diuinitas c 2 7
ut plene largiatur; 10 d 3 7
hinc laudum concinitas c 3 7
maiestate collocatur d 2 7
ierarchias complete e 2 7
post decem uenerari; f 3 7
laus sequitur prophete 15 e 3 7
Johannes tam preclari. f 3 7
Duodecim athlete e 2 7
tunc debent collaudari; f 3 7
martirum uibratio g 2 7
consequenter laudatur, 20 d 2 7
confitens flagratio g 2 7
uicissim decoratur, d 2 7
uirginum fragratio g 2 7
laude simul fruatur; d 3 7
nos ubique locorum 25 h 3 7
his festum celebrare i 3 7
iubemur singulorum. h 2 7
Si non constat seruare i 4 7
ius[ta] supplent honorum h 3 7
quos contigit peccare; 30 i 3 7
nunc Caput deprecentur, j 3 7
istius membra festi k 3 7
corda nostra lauentur; j 3 7
sic lauate celesti k 3 7
ne nobis dominentur 35 j 3 7
proditores scelesti. k 2 7
11 93 252

The Pantheon, temple of false gods, is cleansed; [today] it is built as a church of saints;
moreover error is destroyed, changed by the power of good men. On the first (day, i.e.
Sunday) the Holy Trinity is worshipped there, that Divinity may bestow grace fully;
afterwards from all sides a harmony of praises should be conferred with majesty to
worship entirely the Ten Hierarchies (of Angels); praise of the Prophet so radiant John
(the Baptist) follows; then the Twelve Contestants (i.e. Apostles) ought to be praised
together; the Brilliance of Martyrs should be praised in succession, the Confessing Fire
(i.e. the Company of Confessors) should be honoured in turn; the Fragrance of Virgins
should enjoy praise together. We of particular places everywhere are bidden to cele-
brate the feast with them. If one does not agree to keep (the feast) those whom it has
suited to sin will supply the dues of honours. Now let the members of this feast beseech
316 The Musician Motets

the Head that our hearts may be washed. So wash [us] for heaven that evil traitors may
not dominate us.

The texted voice Pantheon abluitur and untexted Quadruplum sive triplum de
Apollinis were copied as additional voices to Apollinis eclipsatur in Stras and survive in
Coussemaker’s transcription, fortunately made before the manuscript was burnt, but
of sometimes questionable reliability. According to his note, the two added parts are
written on a separate folio pasted to the bottom of f. 64v. The quadruplum is labelled
‘f 65 milieu de la page’. The presumption is therefore that the three-​part motet filled an
opening, and the two added parts were on a loose leaf pasted in; whether by the same or
a later scribe is not known.34
This voice was unique until identified in the San Lorenzo palimpsest SL2211, the
only added part that occurs in more than one source and thus attests more than local
circulation. In the absence of overwriting, it is musically more legible than many pages
of the palimpsest manuscript, especially in the most recent multi-​spectral images, and
offers variant readings which are in some cases improvements, as well as (from the
spacing of notes) some guidance on text underlay, despite the largely illegible state of
the verbal text.35 The present edition uses the text as restored by David Howlett from
Stras; it mends the syllable count, even though both sources suggest that the composer
worked with a defective text. (Maie-​sta-​te has to be elided, B39, line 12.) Curiously,
this added triplum is presented in SL2211 on a single opening together with only the
triplum, Apollinis, and the tenor, omitting the contrapuntally essential motetus. I have
suggested that the compiler of SL2211 may have been trying to give it the texture of an
Italian motet, with two more or less equal upper voices and tenor, without realising that
in this case it is the motetus and not the tenor that supports the counterpoint.
The text is tied to its model in many ways. There are exactly as many rhymes and
words in this text as in Apollinis eclipsatur, eleven rhymes and ninety-​three words, ev-
idence of modelling that is also reflected in musical imitations. Like all voices of the
original three-​part Apollinis, both these added voices begin on the note a. Both the
texted new voice Pantheon and the textless ‘quadruplum sive triplum’ have pseudo-​
imitation at the beginning and enjoy rhythmic imitations throughout. There are many
reminiscences of the Apollinis triplum, showing a clear attempt to integrate the added
parts, though there are (inevitably in a five-​part texture) many parallel perfect intervals
with the original parts and each other, and free dissonance. Pantheon mainly uses the
rhythmic vocabulary of its model; apart from one anomaly noted in the commentary,
none of the groupings requires minim alteration, which has therefore been avoided in
cases of ambiguity. (Quadruplum 47 imperfects a breve by two following minims.)
The quadruplum fits almost perfectly with the motetus and tenor (dissonance with
the motetus may invite further emendation at B113). At B122 the triplum supplies
the support for what would otherwise be a fourth between quadruplum and tenor. At
B73–​74 there are incidental parallel sevenths between the two new parts, and Pantheon
B64–​65 is dissonant with the quadruplum. There are many corruptions in the Stras

34 See the reconstructions in Welker, Musik am Oberrhein, 74–​76.

35 Nádas and Janke, The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, ii, ff. R188v–​189.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 317

quadruplum, some of which are wrongly resolved by Harrison, who also made some
transcription errors in relatively unproblematic passages. The guiding principle here
has been to establish how the added parts were formed. Both seem to have taken the
motetus as their starting point, and with corrections to Harrison’s transcription they
mostly form reasonable counterpoint with it and usually also with the tenor. The price of
this five-​part effort is a residual high level of incidental dissonance, and a large number
of parallel unisons of both parts with the motetus and with each other. The two new
parts have parallel unisons at B33–​34, B69–​70, B81–​82 (also with Apollinis), B90–​91,
B136–​137.36

Psallentes zinzugia in LoTNA

LoTNA has a new texted triplum [P]sallentes zinzugia and a new contratenor (see
Ex. 16.4). The fragmentary bifolio LoTNA was rediscovered by David Howlett and
the music identified by Andrew Wathey.37 It has a new contratenor and yet another new
triplum, this time texted.
[P]sallentes zinzugia is known only from LoTNA, where it is followed directly by a
Contratenor de Apollinis, making a second five-​part version, and then by the fragmen-
tary motet [Arta]/​Musicus est ille, two adjacent motets about music and musicians. All
these added voices appear in manuscripts datable around 1400 and later, but they do not
include names, as do the tripla of the core motets of the group, and are not easily datable
on musical grounds, especially when (at least in Pantheon) they are clearly accommo-
dating to the older model. Despite surviving only in an English source, this text seems
to be addressed to implicitly compatriot Frenchmen. Musicorum collegio, also unique to
an English source, appears to celebrate musicians at the exiled French court in England.
Its tenor of greeting, Avete, is echoed here by Gallici salvete.
Text and translation by David Howlett:

Rhyme Words Syllables

[P]‌Sallentes zinzugia a 2 7
monocordo musa b 2 6
nos illus[tre]t gracia a 3 7
Domini diffusa b 2 6
normulis ypocritis, 5 c 2 7
r[ith]mis emiolicis, c 2 7
formis epogdoicis c 2 7
sol[l]‌erter ela[tos] d 2 6
diesisque commatis c 2 7
tinnulis ornatos. 10 d 2 6

36 See Appendix to this chapter for commentary to Ex. 16.3, web transcription of Apollinis with addi-
tional triplum Pantheon.
37 Wathey, Manuscripts . . . Supplement 1 to RISM, 54–​57.
318 The Musician Motets

Perstrepent tum [y]‌paton e 3 7

menti musicorum f 2 6
flosque diesum[e]‌non e 2 7
licanos tenorum f 2 6
fig[uris] cromaticis 15 c 2 7
modis enarmonicis c 2 7
odis ypoyasticis; c 2 7
sic qui [il]lustrati h 3 6
ypermixolidia a 1 7
iam plaudant elati 20 h 3 6

resulta[ntes] musica i 2 7
muse preparata j 2 6
necnon yperbolica i 2 7
rudibus inflata j 2 6
flatus scenophegici 25 k 2 7
pulsus ypophregici k 2 7
practicique pistici k 2 7
musici discrete l 2 6
psallatis armoniam. m 2 7
Gallici saluete! 30 l 2 6
13 63 198

Let the diffused grace of the Lord illuminate us making music in combination on a
monochord with the Muse (either ‘the Muse’ of poetry or ‘the bagpipe’38 or both), [us]
expertly uplifted with norms for performers, with hemiolian rhythms, with epogdoic
forms, and embellished with the jingling commas of the diesis.
Then the flower of the lowest notes of the tetrachord and of the disjunct tetrachord,
the second highest note of the tetrachord of the tenors will resound to the mind of
musicians, in chromatic figures, in enharmonic modes, in hypoiastic odes. Thus
those who have been illuminated, uplifted, should now beat out in hypermixolydian,
resounding with music prepared for the Muse and hyperbolical, inflated for the un-
instructed (or ‘prepared for the bagpipe and inflated by the sticks’, i.e. the ribs in the
bag), reed-​devourers [should mark] breaths, beats of the hypophrygian (mode), and
practical musicians who understand, may you make music discretely in harmony.
Frenchmen, greetings!

The text of [P]sallentes zinzugia is a tour de force which parades the poet’s knowledge
of Greek theoretical terminology. David Howlett has shown that the many words of
Greek derivation, twenty-​nine out of sixty-​three, are nearly all known from Boethius,
De institutione musica, Martianus Capella, De nuptiis philologiae et Mercurii and Isidore
of Seville’s Etymologiarum libri. The triplum text Psallentes has the same number of

38 The Summa Musice, ed. Page, 143: ‘musica dicatur a musa quoddam simplicissimo instrumento quod

a pastoribus gregum circa mundi principium primo fuit inventum’. I thank Bonnie Blackburn for this
reference.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 319

lines, thirty, as the primary composition Apollinis eclipsatur; Pantheon abluitur exhibits
the same number of rhymes (11) and words (93) as Apollinis.
Pantheon, Apollinis, Zodiacum, In omnem terram and Psallentes all begin on the note
a. Just as Apollinis/​Zodiacum plays with the extremes of the alphabet, A–​Z, Psallentes
does the same in reversed order, Z–​A:39 lines 1 and 29, psallentes zinzugia and psallatis
armoniam, recall from Zodiacum signis the first words of the first two lines, zodiacum
and armonia, and the variant readings of line 3: sinsagia Ivrea, sinzurgia Barc971,
zinzurgia Leipzig223, for sinergia; these may be the sources for use of that word in the
LoTNA text—​which could even be the source of that corruption. The presence of this
motet in relatively late Germanic or east European sources (Stras, Leipzig223, Brno)
attests a circulation that could account for its citation in theoretical treatises from
those areas.
Notationally, this new texted triplum is more advanced than the other added voices
detailed above, with frequent use of syncopation within the breve of ( ç g gfgg
, here
notated without dots, but not implying alteration) and more syncopation at B72. There
is only one altered minim, at B30, which could invite emendation. It appears to be in
perfect modus on the strength of the apparently undotted three-​beat L at B19, but oth-
erwise has no clear modus indications, and no isorhythmic structuring. This voice again
appears to have been composed to the motetus, with which it forms good counterpoint,
but it is often strongly dissonant with the other parts, including most places where the
tenor descends below the motetus, at B82–​91, 133, 139 (and less so at 37), and it has
some dissonance and parallelism with the new contratenor. It clashes strongly with the
Apollinis triplum at B42 and generally has some roughnesses and parallels. Unlike the
other added voices, the contratenor is isorhythmically structured, with four 36-​breve
taleae superimposed on the three 48-​breve color statements of the tenor, each of two
24-​breve taleae. It forms good consonant counterpoint with the foundational motetus
and, unlike the triplum Psallentes, with the tenor, except at B91, where it only goes with
the tenor.40 It provides a third in the final chord, as in occasional English compositions
of the early fifteenth century, a feature absent or vanishingly rare in French works, but—​
surprisingly—​present in Musicalis.

De modo componendi tenores motettorum

Egidius de Morino is named in the texts of both Apollinis and Musicalis. A man of this
name (also spelt Murino) has been associated with two treatises, Tractatus figurarum
and De modo componendi tenores motettorum, linked in the sources in which both
appear. Chapter 1 reviews their authorship and sources. The Tractatus figurarum is
thought to date from the end of the century, and should probably be deemed anony-
mous.41 Although Philipoctus and Egidius are rejected as authors, Egidius’s name has

39 A similar reversal is the later echoing of Musicorum’s ‘testatur Apocalipsis’ in Sub Arturo’s ‘Genesis

testatur’. See also below.

40 Music variant: breve (in the isorhythm) is here split into two semibreves on a. Because of the exten-

sive textual emendations and completions, the musical transcription has not been encumbered with square
brackets: see the text above.
41 See Tractatus figurarum, ed. Schreur, for the case for and (largely) against the authorship of Philipoctus;

compositions ascribed to him do not use the note-​shapes advocated in the treatise.
320 The Musician Motets

stuck to the motet treatise, though the source situation leaves his authorship extremely
dubious. I proposed there that the treatise revert to anonymous status. In any case, its
author is very unlikely to be the Egidius named in these much earlier motets.
As noted in Chapter 1, the treatise is specifically directed to the teaching of children
(ad doctrinam parvulorum). After the more-​often-​quoted elementary instructions, and
after a peroration which may identify what follows as an addition, the author describes
‘another way of writing motets’, with a central tenor:42

Est autem alius modus componendi There is, however, another way of
motetos quam superius dictum est, composing motets than that given above,
videlicet: quod tenor vadat supra motetum namely when the tenor goes above the
et sic ordinabis: motetus, and you arrange it thus.
Accipe tenorem de antiphonario, sicut Take a tenor from the antiphoner as stated
superius dictum est, quem colorabis above, order and colour it.43 [If] it stands
et ordinabis, et stat in gamma bassa; et in gamma bassa, you can place it in gamma
tu potes eum mittere in gamma alta; et alta [i.e. transpose it up]. And when it is well
quando est ordinatus bene, tunc facias ordered, make a discant below the tenor as
discantum sub tenore, sicut melius scis. well as you know how. And you can colour
Et potes ipsum colorare et de modo [here, rhythmicise] it and make it in perfect
perfecto facere si vis. Hoc facto facias modus if you wish. Then make the triplum
triplum concordare supra motetum sicut concord above the motetus as well as you
melius scis et potes. know how and are able.
Et si vis ipsum facere cum quatuor, tunc And if you wish to make it in four parts, then
debet ibi esse contratenor. Sed oportet the contratenor must be there [composed]
quod contratenor sit primo et concordet first, and be consonant with the tenor,
cum tenore, aliter non posset colorari. otherwise it cannot be coloured.44

This description perfectly fits the three-​part original version of Apollinis, one of the rare
French motets with a middle-​voice tenor.45 The central tenor of Apollinis is indeed in
perfect modus, and transposed up an octave from most chant sources, a fourth or fifth
from others.46 It is very striking that a purportedly elementary treatise should advocate
such an uncommon usage, and that the description fits Apollinis better than any other
known motet of the period. The author of the treatise almost certainly knew Apollinis;
since he is unlikely, decades later, to be the Egidius de Morino named in it, could

42 Source: CS iii. 124–​28. Electronic version prepared by C. Matthew Balensuela, Oliver B. Ellsworth, and

Thomas J. Mathiesen for the TML, 1990. Partial edition and translation in Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional
Techniques, i. 18–​24 and appendix I, collated with variants from the five sources. Now a fuller text with
translation is in Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures, appendix. Tractatus figurarum, ed. Schreur, gives full
descriptions of the manuscripts containing both treatises.
43 In omnem terram has many liturgical placements. The tenor of Apollinis, however, is not from the

antiphoner, but from the gradual, though the different In omnem terram tenor of Sub Arturo is from the
antiphoner. Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, says there are no examples where the cantus firmus
is placed in gamma alta; perhaps Egidius simply meant that the cantus firmus can be transposed up.
44 This does not apply to inessential later-​added contratenors. Of the other musician motets only the four-​

part Alma polis has a contratenor, in that case contrapuntally essential.

45 On middle-​voice tenors see Ch.1. Zodiacum is one of the rare motetus parts in the French repertory that

lies below the tenor; Tribum/​Quoniam may have been the first.
46 See Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, H9.
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 321

his name have become attached to the treatise because of its presence in this widely
circulated motet?
Again surprisingly for an elementary treatise, the author goes on to the rare case of
composition in five parts:

Item si vis facere motetum cum quinque, per If you want to make a motet in five
hunc modum potest fieri: fac primo tenorem, parts, first make the tenor, then a
sicut dictum est, et fac [motetum] discantari [motetus] in discant below the tenor,
subtus tenorem et concordare; hoc modo then a triplum above the motetus.
fac triplum discantari insuper motetum, Then you can make another discantus
sicut melius scis. Adhuc potes facere alium sounding around that triplum [=​in
discantum qui ibi circumsonat triplum the same range?] and embellishing
fulgendo ipsum triplum. Et iste quintus cantus it. And this fifth cantus is called
vocatur quadruplum, et sic erit motetus quadruplum, and then your motet will
totaliter plenus. Et credo quod non possint be full. And I think you cannot make
fieri plures cantus insimul. more parts simultaneously.

Apollinis is not named, but not only does it fit the prescription for a three-​part motet
with motetus below the tenor in both passages; its adaptations fit the prescription for
five-​part composition to be on the basis of a three-​part composition with low motetus
and central tenor. The description, however, accounts for only four parts, though five
are promised. Perhaps the author was assuming a contratenor, as prescribed earlier
in the treatise. Two of the adaptations of Apollinis with later-​added upper parts are
indeed the only five-​part motets from the entire period, and they too precisely fit this
description. The terminology (circumsonat, fulgendo) resonates with the shared vocab-
ulary of the motets forming the Apollinis constellation. The fifth textless part in Stras
(Pantheon) does indeed ‘sound around’ the triplum in the same range, and is called
quadruplum; as in the Stras version, no contratenor is mentioned here. I would go so
far as to say that this description, both of the middle-​voice tenor in a three-​part motet,
and of five-​part composition, can apply only to Apollinis and its satellite added parts.
Those added parts, however, invite datings close to 1400. If that becomes a terminus
post quem for the treatise, it becomes even less likely that the Egidius de Morino named
in Apollinis and Musicalis perhaps seventy years earlier can be its author. The treatise
should revert to anonymous status, as proposed in Chapter 1. For possible identities
for the Egidius named in the motets, see Chapter 17.

Appendix
Commentaries to Web Transcriptions for the Pieces
with Multiple Sources

In the editions on the web for the chapters of Part IV, poetic lines are divided by | and
each starts with a capital letter to signal lineation; u is changed to v when a consonant.
An accidental present in any source is on the staff, above if editorial, and applies to adja-
cent notes of the same pitch.
322 The Musician Motets

In the commentaries, notes relate to the numbering of the upper parts: usually (and
here) in breves.

Variants to Apollinis ( Ex. 16.1)

Triplum: 7–8 Ivrea all apparently originally minims, as in all other sources, reading
f gg f gg, requiring alt minims in both bars. Ivrea’s correction to fgf is used here; 3.4–5
Barc971 ddc ggg ; 9.2 Leiden2515 a; 10.2 Pad658 f; 19 Stras breve; 22.4 Ivrea f; pre-
ferred g in Barc971, Stras; Pad658 aga fg ggg fg ; 24.1 and 3 Ivrea M stems erased; 24.2
Ivrea e; d in Barc971, Pad658, Stras preferred; 26 Stras om.; 27.3 Stras a; 29 Barc971
S rest, wrongly; 31 Pad658 bagf; 33 Barc971 f e g f fg , stems erased on the two S; 36.4
Leiden2515, Pad658 f; 37 Stras gfef fg fg ; Pad658 g gef f ggg ; 50.3 Barc971 g; 50.4–5
Ivrea f f, stem on 4 erased; 51.1–3 Leiden2515 efg ggg ; 50–51 Barc971 agg e dee efe ggg
f ggg ggg ; 54.2 Ivrea f; Barc971, Leiden2515, Stras, Pad658 g, preferred; 58 Barc971
dd ; 62.3–4 Ivrea ag; Barc971, Leiden2515 g e; Pad658, Stras gf, preferred; 72 Barc971 g f
dg dg
; Pad658 ge ; 74 Pad658 eee f fg; 75 Barc971 eeed gg gg ; Leiden2515 eee eee all M;
Stras eeee fg fg ; 79 Barc971, Leiden2515 agaa fg fg ; Ivrea, Pad658, Stras a a a a fg fg
preferred; 84 Leiden2515 efgef fg ggg ; 85 M rest in most legible sources, here above the
fg
staff, main reading follows Brno and Vienna5094; 88–89 Ivrea b b baa|g gff fg ggg f |
ggg ; Barc971 b b b | a g g gff gg fg f gg,
| ; Pad658 bbb| ag gf f fg fg fg,,
| fg
; Stras bbba|aggf
fg fg fg, ,
; Leiden2515 b ba| ag gf f fg fg fg
| preferred; 99.2 Leiden2515 g; 99 Pad658
ed efefg ggg ; 105 Stras g f gg ; 106–108 Ivrea L stem on ligature erased, enabling alt B;
fg
L stem in Leiden2515 and Pad658; 111.2 Pad658 ; 117–118 Ivrea g a a |g gf f fg f gg
alt; Leiden2515 117–118 gg|agfg; Barc971 ga agfg; Stras g aa| ggfg f fg f ggg ; Pad658
g a | aggf preferred; all except Ivrea avoid alt M; 120 Stras fedc; 122 Stras e| f g aba|fe e
g fg ggg fg f
| | ; 123–124 Ivrea e f g g f | fe efg ggg fg f
| ; Leiden2515 efgf | fee fg fg fg f
| ;
Leipzig223 124 fee; Barc971 123–124 e f gfg | ae e fg ggg fg f | preferred; 127 Stras,
Leiden2515 f f f f fg fg ; Barc971 f f f e fg fg fg fg
; Pad658 fgef ; 133 Ivrea eee; 134.4
Stras f; Pad658 lost from 134; 136–137 Stras af g a fg f d (not L); 139 bb Ivrea, Stras;
141.4 Leiden2515 d. In Leiden2515 some breves have downstem to the left: 52, 60, 90,
137.
Motetus: 1–6 Ivrea, Barc971, Leipzig223 the first two longs are dotted; 4 om. (i.e.
the second L) Stras; 22 Stras b; Ivrea no b; 24 Stras agfe fg fg
; 32 Stras L; Ivrea alt
B, Barc971 imp L precedes 34 L, therefore assuming imp modus; 34 Ivrea, Stras
s; Barc971 no s; 34 cut off, 37 an extra S ( ); 43 b Barc971, Ivrea, Stras; no b
fg f fg
Tarragona2, Leipzig223; 63.4 Stras b; 70 b Ivrea, Stras, Barc853, Tarragona2; no b
Barc971; 72 cut off Tarragona2; 83 s Ivrea, Stras, Barc853, Tarragona2; no s Barc971;
88–92 one lig Tarragona2; 94 b Stras, Barc853; no b Barc971, Tarragona2; 105 Stras
d; 111 ddd f fgStras, 111.1 cut off Tarragona2; 111.2 c Barc971; 112 no Barc971; d, g
118 b Barc853, no b Barc971; 120 agfe fg fg
Tarragona2; 125 Ivrea cs, approaching d in
127, also necessitating cs in tenor 124, reading rejected; 127 Ivrea d, rejected; all other
sources (Barc971, Tarragona2, Barc853, Leipzig223, Vienna922, Vienna5094 and
Stras) have b, Vienna5094 with bb, Barc971, Barc853 with sharps before b and for 131
c; Stras n before b, on c, could be meant for 127 or 131; Ivrea (alone) has a b on b before
 Apollinis eclipsatur and Later Versions 323

the c in 131; 134 Tarragona2 a in error; 136 b Barc971, Stras, Tarragona2, no b Ivrea;
137–138 ff
not d d,
end torn out from 142 Tarragona2. Leipzig223 has no accidentals.
Tenor: 2 s on b in Barc971, Barc853 and Stras; 20–​21 are a long in Barc971; for rests
see above.

Variants to Apollinis/​Pantheon ( Ex. 16.3)

Readings are taken from Stras unless stated. The palimpsest SL2211 is only partly leg-
ible; visible variants are recorded here.
fƒ dg
14.1–2 Stras g a (a b SL2211 used here); 11–15 SL2211 a |b a |g f |a b g| a g gf | |
d g f g f f gf g
| | ; 28–29 e |a b fƒ dg gg fg,
| ; 33.4–5 Stras ; rendered here as as the second
g cannot properly be altered before the ensuing breve; SL2211 34–35 a c fƒ d
| ; 36.2
Stras b; SL2211 d used here; 54–55 b c|d b c | dg ggg; 60 both sources s; 70–71 d |a b |
fƒ
dg f
; 74.3–4 bracketed in Stras but needed; 75.5 ; if the bracketed notes are omitted, the
rhythm of 74–76 would be fg fg g g f d g
| | ; 74.4 SL2211 b; 75.5 S; 77–79 a |ag| fed |ag
d ƒf g f g f ƒf g
| | | ; this passage in SL2211 appears to be a breve longer than Stras, and
s
may be compensated by the breve in 88 (instead of Stras’s ), but this does not fit, and
both sources seem to be corrupt; the passage between 76 and 90 is problematic in both
added parts. Adjustments have been made to allow (mostly) consonance on the first
perfect long of the combined motetus and tenor parts, though not with each other;
91–93 gabc|a| c f gf g fƒ d
| | ; 104 SL2211 breve; 109 2–3 one S; 124 f fg a ab; 134 a dff
ligature.
Quadruplum: The present transcription of the quadruplum differs from Harrison’s in
many places, including at 38–39, 48, 57, 61, 68. Longs are imperfect; thus it does not re-
spect the perfect modus of the tenor, though the barring in this transcription coincides.
gf, f
4.4–5 resulting in an iambic pair with improperly preceding the following ; I have f
fg
preferred to retain the imitation and assume an error for rather than a similis ante
similem impropriety; 8 s precedes g; 18 c ; 19 drawn long; 29.5 f and d both present
s ∂
s d
vertically; 74 dotted; 78.4 M; 80.2–3 absent; 82 ; as in the upper part, the passage be-
s,
tween 76 and 90 is problematic; 113 g; 123 redundant f precedes bracketed in Stras;
s
137 stem crossed, but it must be a . s
 17
Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili and the
Musicians Named in Apollinis and Musicalis

Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili

The musicians named in Musicalis overlap with those of Apollinis, from which Musicalis
also borrows formal and musical material, cementing their relationship. Unlike
Apollinis, with its many sources, Musicalis, the second motet of the group, is known only
from a single source, Pic: see Figure 17.1.1 Fortunately, and fortuitously, f. 67 was cut
from the rotulus in such a way as to preserve the complete music and text on the verso.
For the edition see Example 17.1.
Texts and translation by David Howlett. Named musicians are in boldface and talea
ends are shown by |:

Triplum Rhymes Words Syllables

Musicalis sciencia a 2 8
qua regitur melodia a 3 8
rethoribus uniuersis b 2 8
arte suaque practicis, b 3 8
specialiter dilectis,| 5 c 2 8
subscriptis suis subiectis —​ c 3 8
de Douacho dicto Thoma d 4 8
cuius fama fuit Roma, d 4 8
Johanni de Muris quoque, e 4 8
de Uiteri Phillippoque;| 10 e 3 8
Normanno Dyonisio, f 2 8
de Burces et Egidio; f 4 8
Gaudefrido de Baralis, g 3 8
Ualquero de Ualencienis, g 3 8
de Palacio Roberto| 15 h 3 8
atque Louchart Ingelberto; h 3 8
dicto de Soissons Garino, i 4 8
Egidio de Morino, i 3 8
Reginaldo de Tyremont, j 3 8
G. d’Orbendas et Jo. du Pont;| 20 j 7 8

1 It can also be viewed (in black and white) on Gallica at https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv​1b10​0339​04t/​

f212.item. MS variants: tr 167 d?; mo 28 e for d.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0018
326 The Musician Motets

Guisardo de Cameraco, k 3 8
et de Bailleul Reginaldo, k 4 8
atque de Machau Guillelmo; k 4 8
Petro Blauot et Matheo k 4 8
de Luceu, d’Arras Jacobo —​| 25 k 5 8
salutem et obseruare l 3 8
sua precepta mandare l 3 8
uestrum cuilibet cupio, f 3 8
ne sit erroris motio f 4 8
in dominam rethoricam, | 30 m 3 8
neque contra grammaticam; m 3 8
lingua secans incomplexa n 3 8
sit in silentio nexa; n 4 8
cuncta uicia cauete; o 3 8
in melodia ualete. | 35 o 3 8
15 117 280

Motetus
Sciencie laudabili, a 2 8
musice uenerabili,| a 2 8
rethorica sciencia b 2 8
cum omni reuerencia| b 3 8
salutem, O dulcissima 5 c 3 8
subiectisque gratissima,| c 2 8
tali conquerens nuncio d 3 8
quod maxima corrupcio| d 3 8
fit a multis canentibus e 4 8
in nostris dictaminibus 10 e 3 8
nam diuidunt simplicia, f 3 8
faciendo suspiria.| f 2 8
Quare pietate rogito g 3 8 pie-​ta-​te
remedium his audito.| g 3 8
7 38 112

Source: Pic, f. 67v

Triplum: Musical science, by which melody is ruled, to all rhetors practising in her art
and to her specially beloved subjects written below—​Thomas called de Douai, whose
fame was in Rome, Jehan des Murs also and Philippe de Vitry, Denis le Normand and
Gilles de Bruges, Godefroy de Baralle, Volquier de Valenciennes, Robert du Palais and
Ingelbert Louchart, Guarin called de Soissons, Gilles de la Thérouanne, Réginald de
Tiramont, G. d’Orbendas and Jehan du Pont, Guisard de Cambrai and Réginald de
Bailleul, and Guillaume de Machaut, Pierre Blavot and Mathieu de Luxeuil, Jacques
d’Arras—​greeting, and I desire to command each of you to observe his precepts, lest
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 327

Fig. 17.1 Musicalis sciencia in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection de

Picardie 67, f. 67v. © BnF

there be movement of error against Lady Rhetoric or against Grammar. The tongue cut-
ting connected things should be bound in silence. Avoid all vices. Flourish in melody.
Motetus: To the praiseworthy science, venerable Music, Rhetorical science with all rev-
erence (sends) greeting, O most sweet, and most pleasing to your subjects, lamenting
such a message, that the greatest corruption is made by many singers in our poems, for
they divide single elements, making breathings; wherefore in piety I ask, listen to the
remedy for these things.
328 The Musician Motets

Text and Content

The first two words of the triplum are also the first two words of the later Musica (c.
1355) of Johannes Boen.2 The triplum text lists twenty musicians, of whom nine were
named earlier in Apollinis out of its total of twelve. Summary biographical notes on
the musicians named in both motets are given below. Identifications range from firm
to conjectural (the latter with little more than identity of surname without musical
credentials). The large overlap of names in the two motets probably dates Musicalis soon
after Apollinis. The identifiable musicians had careers in the first half of the fourteenth
century, with most of the documents dated between 1316 and 1352. Heinrich Eger von
Kalkar’s testimony (of questionable authority; see Ch. 15) appears to attribute the nota-
tional inventions of some of the musicians named in Apollinis to around the year 1330,
a date that seems likely for Apollinis, on grounds of notational and musical style and
techniques, and of biographies of candidates for the named musicians; Musicalis, with
its many overlapping names, then probably dates from the early 1330s.
Twenty is twice ten (bis decem), perhaps chosen to echo Apollinis’s ‘three times the
number of Pythagoras’ (3 × 10) and its bis sex (twelve zodiac signs). The text of this
motet has no direct authorial signature; the only other motet of the five not to name an
author directly is Musicorum, where at best it is obscurely veiled. The name of Egidius de
Morino, however, falls in the central triplum line (18 of 35) and ends the first half of the
music (B84); this was the authorial position for B. de Cluny in the motetus of Apollinis,
so this Egidius, whoever he was, could be a candidate for the composer of Musicalis.
Some of the listed musicians in other motets may be spread over a long period, as in Sub
Arturo; in Musicalis they are addressed directly and urged to obey rhetorical principles,
so are presumed to be living.3
David Howlett observed that the motet is cast in the form of an epistolary exchange,
the triplum a letter from musical science to rhetoricians and the motetus a letter from
rhetorical science to music:

Musicalis sciencia Rethorica sciencia

   rethoribus dilectis    musice uenerabili
salutem  
  salutem

Both texts require that words not be broken by rests (‘The tongue cutting connected
things should be bound in silence’, and ‘the greatest corruption is made by many singers
in our poems, for they divide single elements, making breathings’). The text–​music rela-
tionship is so managed that not only are words not broken by rests (in accordance with
the precepts of the text), but that rests only occur between lines of text.4 The challenge

2 Johannes Boens Musica, 32.

3 Noted by Gómez, ‘Une Version à cinq voix du motet Apollinis’. She observes that as Jean de Muris died c.
1350, Musicalis could be earlier than Apollinis. That seems to assume a later date for both motets than is here
proposed.
4 See Ch. 9 for discussion of the compositional choice whether or not to break words with rests. Machaut’s

Motet 18 and OH’s Carbunculus are there cited as examples. See also Chs. 8, 13, 25. This discipline is more re-
cently referenced in Zayaruznaya, ‘Hockets’.
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 329

of not breaking words is avoided altogether in the textless hockets that occupy the last
quarter (six breves) of each talea in both upper parts. The text distribution and underlay
are identical in each talea, and apart from the opening motetus ligature of each talea,
the setting is completely syllabic. The text is evenly distributed, reflected above by gaps
in the text: of the thirty-​five triplum lines, five are assigned to each of the seven taleae;
of the fourteen motetus lines, two occupy each talea. The texts are not stanzaic; the
motetus is rhymed in couplets throughout; the triplum is rhymed in couplets at lines 1–​
20 and 26–​35. Only one rhyme (-​io) is repeated, apart from lines 21–​25, which are all -​o.
Machaut is named in the middle of those five lines. The total number of lines of triplum
and motetus, 35 +​14, is 49, 72. This motet’s insistence on sevens goes one beyond the
sixes (bis sex) of Apollinis, and possibly acknowledges the seven liberal arts, of which
music and rhetoric are invoked in the first lines.
In four places, while musicians are being named in the triplum, a single sound is being
held over from preceding bars in the motetus, over a rest in the tenor. This happens first
at B10, ‘de Uiteri Phillippoque’, second after four more lines at 15, ‘de Palacio Roberto’,
third after four more lines at 20, ‘G. d’Orbendas et Jo. du Pont’, fourth after four more
lines at 25, ‘Matheo de Luceu, d’Arras Jacobo’, allowing those six names to be sung—​or
heard—​without competition from other sounds.

Music: Tenor

The tenor of Musicalis consists of a single color disposed in seven taleae of 8 longs in
perfect modus, imperfect tempus, 6 breves (coloured) in imperfect modus, a total of 24
breves. The perfect modus and talea length are the same as in Apollinis, on which it is ob-
viously modelled. Six taleae come to 144 breves, then there is an extra one, bringing the
total length to 168 breves, another instance of sevens. Just as some of the motets outdo
their predecessors in the number of musicians celebrated, so do they sometimes exceed
the number of taleae, or the talea length, or some other measurable unit, by a unit com-
parable to that of a preceding piece. Apollinis boasts bis sex, then in Musicalis there are
seven taleae, and in Musicorum seven musicians. Sub Arturo has fourteen musicians—​
twice (bis) the seven of Musicorum, nodding also at the bis sex of Apollinis and, as we
shall see, it also goes one better in overall length. The single-​color tenor of Musicalis is
unlabelled but was identified as the full neuma (but not the verse) of the Alleluia Dies
sanctificatus for the third Mass for Christmas, where it is preceded (unstated context)
by Viderunt omnes fines terre, a resonance for In omnem terram.5 Musicorum’s tenor is
from an Easter Alleluia verse. ‘Nam dividunt’ begins the sixth talea: one of a number of
instances noted in this book where a word of division coincides with a musical struc-
tural join, as we shall also see in Musicorum.

5 Anderson, ‘Responsory Chants’, 122, identifies the tenor as ‘Alleluia: the full neuma and its jubilus, but

not the verse: Dies sanctificatus (LU, 409, MMMA, VII, 118)’. Note also the motet Omnis terre. Meanwhile
Zayaruznaya, ‘Hockets’, at 498 calls the ‘heretofore unidentified’ tenor ‘a mode 2 Alleluia of the type Dies
sanctificatus. Due to the near-​identity of the multiple chants in this family, we can never know which Alleluia
it was. But perhaps the best semantic match is the Alleluia Hic est discipulus . . . It may well be that the tenor
is pointing fingers as well, whether at a specific composer or at each of Music’s disciples in turn: hic est ille!’
330 The Musician Motets

Music: Upper Parts

Musicalis opens with the rhythm of Apollinis B30–B32, line 6, where the words were
musicorum collegio: f fg fg fg d
| | . The same rhythm also occurs in Apollinis at B98–B100
for fungens gaudet poetria and at B102–B104, on the name of Machaut. In Musicalis, this
rhythm is repeated obsessively three times in each triplum talea: 7 × 3 = 21, perhaps
standing for twenty musicians plus the anonymous author. This is followed by | | f f d fg
fg d ggg fg fg f
| | | , rhythms which are conspicuous in Apollinis. The motet Musicorum
collegio strikingly takes as its opening not only this same rhythm, over fully ten breves,
but also the same words from Apollinis B30–​B32, suggesting that its composer may
have known not only Apollinis but also Musicalis. Figure 17.2 compares the openings of
Musicalis sciencia and Musicorum collegio.
Musicalis is musically the most straightforward and least ingenious of the musician
motets. Richard Hoppin and Suzanne Clercx (‘Notes biographiques’) treated it as pri-
mary, perhaps because of its more simplistic style, or because it names more musicians.
If Apollinis ranked low with respect to upper-​voice isorhythm, Musicalis ranks high. But
because of the close links between them, and their shared names, they must be fairly
close in date to each other. Gómez (‘Une Version à cinq voix du motet Apollinis’) also
thought Musicalis came first, because of the presumed respective dates of the first trans-
mission of each motet, but these are not necessarily informative about composition
dates. The upper parts observe strict and mechanical isorhythm corresponding to the
tenor periods, each talea ending with six breves of wordless hocket with minim rests, a
more advanced notational feature than Apollinis. The final cadential progression is unu-
sual and surprising, especially the third in the final chord.
Pic contains the only instances known to me of a scribe’s attempt to align iso-
rhythmic repetitions (Fig. 17.1).6 The alignment here is not perfect, but when writing
the triplum in a single (left-​hand) column, the ends of each of the first three taleae fall
at the ends of alternate staves. That this was deliberate is shown by compression or
extra space to preserve this distinction. The text was written before the music, in this
case with a regular correlation between text-​line and upper-​voice talea. The syllable–​
note relationship is precisely indicated; the short column width gives ample opportu-
nity to test this at line ends. At the end of the first staff of the motetus, two notes have
been erased (B30.1–​2) and transferred to the new line, to place them over the correct
syllables. (As usual, the text was written first, but this is confirmed by these changes.)
A text-​copying error required a few notes to be erased and relocated: when writing
‘dyonisio de burces et egidio de mori-​. . . de’, the scribe was evidently looking ahead
(eye-​skip) to ‘egidius de morino’ in triplum line 18, but added gaufrido over ‘de mori-​’

Fig. 17.2 Opening rhythms of Musicalis sciencia and Musicorum

6 Dorset, Ascendenti/​Viri, aligns section beginnings of a voice-​

exchange motet. See Bent, Hartt and
Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus.
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 331

and erased the d c (B57.3–​4), replacing those notes on the next line in order to accom-
modate Baralis.7
Each talea ends with six untexted breves with hocket. The fourth talea ends on the
first staff of full-​width copying, and is followed by a gap before the fifth talea. The ends
of taleae 5 and 6 are more or less aligned with that of talea 4, and the final notes of talea
7 had to be tucked in at the end of a staff on which the next composition begins. The
motetus is entirely contained in the right-​hand column. The visually striking four-​note
ligature that begins each talea occurs at the beginning of staff 1, then at the end of staves
1, 2, 3, 4 for the first five taleae, and at the beginnings of staves 6 and 7 for the last two
taleae. There was space for the scribe to have continued to align this ligature with the
ends of the previous staves, but it may be that by then he recognised that the beginning
of the talea should start the staff. The short tenor taleae are not lined up. They con-
tain two strange double-​stemmed symbols for the first two breves following the initial
maxima.
There is a similar lining up for Amer amours/​Durement/​Dolor meus on Pic, f. 67r.
This is especially striking in the tenor, whose two identical taleae are fully written out;
space is left at the end of the line in order to start each one on a new line. The rhythmic
repetitions in the upper parts are only partial. Those in the triplum at the beginnings
of most taleae are more or less aligned by alternate lines when the copy is still in two
columns, but when it goes to the full page width, the last three taleae are more or less
aligned by line. Interestingly, though, the line beginnings do not coincide with the
talea beginnings. The motetus has less rhythmic repetition, but the three surviving line
beginnings coincide approximately with the tenor taleae.
Pic, f. 67r contains the Fauvel motet Garrit gallus/​In nova fert, which has no upper-​
voice repetition, so there is nothing to be lined up (Ch. 4). Musicalis on f. 67v is flanked
by two chaces, where such repetition likewise does not apply. The tenors of Garrit gallus
and Musicalis both have tenor sections in coloration to denote imperfect modus; as is
often the case in the earlier part of the century, tempus and prolation are not affected.
(Later coloration for imperfection tends to fix notes at their minimum imperfect value
at all levels of the notational hierarchy.) Both motets are given in Pic with void colora-
tion (possibly the earliest known use), even though the scribe had red ink available for
the staff lines. The copy of Garrit gallus in Fauvel famously displays the first recorded
mensural use of red notation. In each of its six taleae (two colores each of three taleae),
four longs of perfect modus (plus a final rest) notated in black flank four longs of imper-
fect modus plus a central rest, notated in red.8 In each of the seven taleae of Musicalis,
four longs of perfect modus in black precede six longs of imperfect modus notated in
void (probably likewise originally red, and so shown in the present transcription in
Ex. 17.1).9 As in Garrit gallus, the coloration passage also includes an imperfect long

7 Motetus 124–​25: the ligature originally ended with b, erased; c is attached to the erased note and clearly
s,
intended to belong to the ligature. 64, 130, 160 , not dotted, probably confirming perfect modus throughout.
Other undotted longs at the end of motetus taleae are imperfected from in front.
8 See Ch. 4 and Fig. 4.2 for the notation of each talea as a nominal palindrome, and for the notational

anomaly whereby a breve has to be altered before a dot, and before another (albeit coloured) breve. Neither
condition sufficed to cause alteration later in the century.
9 This is also suggested in Kügle, ‘The Notation’, 236, where he also cites examples from Ivrea of the fairly

widespread practice of outlining, in void, notes intended to be filled in red. In many manuscripts, intended
rubrication was not completed, and void notation may have originated in this way.
332 The Musician Motets

rest. The Pic copy of Garrit gallus provides the unstemmed semibreves of Fauvel with
stems in accordance with the default values with which they would originally have
been evaluated. Musicalis uses a very limited rhythmic vocabulary, with the musicorum
collegio rhythm from Apollinis predominating. It follows the default values except
for the rhythm fg f
(instead of f fg
) at B18 and corresponding places, and in the fol-
lowing respects. At B15 and all corresponding places in each talea (breves 39, 63, 87,
111, 135, 159) it has the rhythm f gg s g
, where the second has to be improperly but
inevitably altered before the long; improperly, because the minim does not precede a
note of the next value up, a semibreve.10 I suspect that the original may have been , fg
f
considering the first minim in each case as an error for , restoring the trochaic norm;
but this rhythm is repeated in each talea in its unique source, possibly reflecting an
erroneous repeating template for the isorhythm in the process of composition. The iso-
lated iambic rhythm is retained here. Musicalis also includes ‘complementary’ hockets
with paired and single minim rests in the last six textless breves of each of its seven
rhythmically identical taleae, and therefore belongs to a later notational stage than
Fauvel and slightly later than Apollinis. Early in the century, rests shorter than a breve
are often not distinguished, and short strokes of various kinds are used for major and
minor semibreve rests and minim rests. These gradually gave way to more explicit and
systematised rests, paired minim rests in France, the hanging rest being used exclusively
for the perfect semibreve. Especially in England, a distinction is often found between
major semibreve rests intersecting the staff line, and minor semibreve rests (worth two
minims) hanging from the line without intersecting it.11 Musicalis notates major but
not minor semibreve rests, and uses single and paired minim rests for the interlocking
hockets, as became normal. The adjacent chace Se je chant likewise has major semibreve
rests intersecting the staff line and paired minim rests.12 Karl Kügle has convincingly
attributed this chace to Denis le Grant: Gace de la Buigne refers unmistakably to a chace
by him about hunting with falcons, as this does.13 It occurs anonymously in Ivrea and
Pic, and is listed under motets as no. 9 in Trém. Further new testimony to Denis as a
composer of mass movements is offered in Chapter 31. Denis is named in both Apollinis
and Musicalis; in Pic, the unique source of Musicalis is immediately followed by Se je
chant. The chace also links to earlier sources, starting with a refrain that matches the
text (but not the music) of the motetus of Mo, fascicle 7, no. 277, Coument se poet/​Se
je chante/​Qui prendroit (also like the chace, with interesting hockets). The opening and
close of the chace also cite the text of the first two lines of a balette (without music) in
Ox308.14 The beginning is also cited (text and music, but without ornamentation) as the
final refrain line of Pour ce que mes chans fais, Machaut’s Ballade 12.

10 Vitry’s motet Petre/​Lugentium in Ivrea often requires minim alteration before a breve or long.
11 For example in Durham20, where Musicorum collegio has these rests; see Ch. 18 and also Vos/​Gratissima
in the same source: Ch. 8 n. 14, and Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’.
12 The chace is in Ivrea, no. 69, f. 52v and Pic, f. 67v, and listed in Trém. It is extensively discussed in Leach,

Sung Birds, 221–​29.

13 Kügle, ‘The Manuscript Ivrea’, 277–​78, Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 159–​60, Manuscript Ivrea . . . fac-

simile, 26. On the refrain Se je chant see also Plumley, ‘Intertextuality’, 363–​64, Stone, ‘Music Writing and
Poetic Voice’ and Leach, ‘Singing More about Singing Less’, 111–​13, a view revised in Leach, Guillaume de
Machaut, 118 n. 85, where she now thinks it likely ‘that Machaut took this refrain from the anonymous balette
rather than from its occurrence in Denis le Grant’s chace’, although ‘Machaut probably also knew’ the chace.
14 That the second line of the balette is also quoted was reported by Maw, ‘Machaut and the “Critical”

Phase’, 290.
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 333

This rotulus fragment has many other interesting aspects, not least its juxtaposi-
tion of two motets on the same tenor, Dolor meus, the final words of the Good Friday
Responsory Caligaverunt oculi mei: Amer amours/​Durement/​Dolor meus and Fortune,
mere a dolour/​Ma doulour ne cesses pas/​Dolor meus. Only the first line of the motetus
survives for the latter. Points of notational interest are signalled above, as is a pos-
sible affinity of Musicalis with Garrit gallus: the tenors of both motets are in minor
maximodus, perfect modus, with coloration indicating imperfect modus.
It follows from this notational description of Apollinis and Musicalis that both could
have undergone some notational updating. Even without making allowance for this,
the musical style and the surviving notated form suggest a date for Musicalis in the
early 1330s, not much later than Apollinis. Pic, the unique source of Musicalis, has
been dated around the middle of the century.15 There were no strong reasons for earlier
suggestions that dated Pic later in relation to Br19606, especially now that Brussels has
received a surprisingly late dating of 1335, given its conservative notation and musical
style.16 Pic’s use of void notation does not in itself require a later dating; I see no reason
to date anything in Pic, compositionally or notationally, later than the first half of the
1330s.17

Notes on the Musicians Listed in Apollinis and Musicalis

Andrew Wathey makes the interesting observation that, in terms of networks and
identities, the two lists of names in Apollinis and Musicalis seem different.18 The
Apollinis names are more identifiable and, if there is a point of intersection, it is in the
French court and those of near family (in Bohemia, Navarre, Flanders) with which it
intermingled. Those in Musicalis look much more local—​nine of the eleven unique to
that text are toponymics, a compact northern group, with several in Artois/​Hainault.
Few of these are identifiable, but see below on Blavot, and further suggestions on Arras
musicians from Brianne Dolce. Wathey wonders if some of these names could even be
historic (late thirteenth-​century trouvères or similar), but against that suggestion is
the fact (noted above) that the musicians listed are addressed as if they are still living.
He suggests that the list of names in Musicalis could be a deliberate local reframing of
that in Apollinis, adding local worthies to a more famous set of names. He notes that
the overlaps with Apollinis, in bold below, present two groups of three, the first (nos.
2–​4) consisting of established masters, the second (nos. 10–​12) perhaps as would-​be

15 Günther, ‘Problems of Dating’, 292, dated Ivrea, probably the earliest source of Apollinis, to after 1365.

Gómez, ‘Une Version à cinq voix du motet Apollinis’, accepts this, and places Musicalis earlier, as Pic is gener-
ally dated to mid-​century on grounds of script and notation (Hoppin, ‘Some Remarks a propos of Pic’). This
fails to take into account differences in dates of composition and transmission, but above all the now over-
whelming evidence that Apollinis was the first composition of this group. Kügle dates the Ivrea repertory as
mostly completed by 1359, the copying to the 1380s or 1390s. Manuscript Ivrea . . . facsimile.
16 Kügle, ‘Two Abbots and a Rotulus’.
17 Hoppin, ‘Some Remarks a propos of Pic’, presciently commented: ‘The notation of Br suggests that the

scribe was deliberately and completely modernizing a notational system which he understood but which he
felt to be inadequate and out of date. The scribe of Pic, on the other hand, may have been copying, perhaps for
purposes already somewhat antiquarian, a notation which he knew how to modernize but whose basic prin-
ciples he no longer completely understood’ (p. 106). See Ch. 8 for the use of void notation c. 1330 in Esc10 for
the tenor of Vos/​Gratissima.
18 Email of 27.6.2020, and further correspondence at that time.
334 The Musician Motets

successors, with Egidius centrally placed, some of the others alternating. Wathey fur-
ther notes that the court of Philippe III, King of Navarre, alongside that of John, King
of Bohemia, has significance for three of those named in Apollinis.19 Muris has been
documented by Lawrence Gushee, and now by Karen Desmond.20 Denis le Grant’s
1329 canonry was granted with the support of Philippe III.21 Wathey adds Guerrinet de
Soissons [=​Garinus de Soissons], a clerk of unspecified function in Philippe III’s service
1337–​43, appearing alongside Muris in the lists in BnF, MSS fr. 7855 and Clairambault
833. All of that points broadly to the 1330s. Machaut’s subordinate position in both
groups might support this rather than a later date.
Hoppin and Clercx provided the basis for most of what is known about the musicians
named in some of the other motets; they start with Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabilis,
treating it as the oldest motet of the group, although it can no longer be taken as the
progenitor.22 Clercx and Hoppin’s work, though admirable for the period in which it
was done, now looks thin and includes several near-​random identifications, for ex-
ample, on the basis of a shared forename. But they reasonably assert (pp. 65–​66) that
the named musicians, at least in Musicalis, appear to be still living, and that most of
them are composers, as befits the injunctions to ‘music’ for compositional practice in
the triplum.23 Nine of the twelve names in Apollinis recur in Musicalis. Both motets
appear to date from well before the middle of the century, as the first and second
compositions of the group, not vice versa, as Hoppin and Clercx assumed. They ex-
tended the search to the musicians named in the later motet Alma polis (for these see
Ch. 19). Muris disappears and is assumed to have died in the late 1340s, perhaps of the
plague. Assuming that those addressed are still living, Apollinis and Musicalis would
have to date from before the mid-​1340s; notational reasons are given above for placing
them closer to 1330. But personal identifications are in many cases uncertain (notably
for Egidius) and piece datings must depend on the latest, not the average datings.24
Many musicians strongly praised are names we have never heard of, a salutary caution
against assuming that only the names known to us were famous to them.
These are the twelve musicians of Apollinis, with their corresponding positions in
Musicalis:

1. Muris (Musicalis 2)
2. Vitry (Musicalis 3)25
3. Henricus Helene
4. Denis le Grant (=​Normannus? Musicalis 4)
5. Regaudus de Tiramonte (=​Reginaldus: Musicalis 12)

19 Further comments attributed to Wathey are from email correspondence in late 2020.
20 Gushee, ‘New Sources’, 26; Desmond, Music and the moderni, ch. 3.
21 Gushee (ibid., 26): Philippe d’Evreux, king of Navarre, not Philippe VI, king of France.
22 They divide the names of Musicalis into three groups, of which the first group is not also in Apollinis, and

assumed to be from an older generation. The ten names shared between the two motets are treated as a cen-
tral generation, and the remaining two, Henricus Helene and Arnold Martini, deemed younger. Hoppin and
Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, at 68–​69. See also Hoppin, ‘Some Remarks a propos of Pic’.
23 In Musicorum (Ch. 18) the musicians are still living, or at least known to the author.
24 See the discussion of Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20), where the chronological spread prevents a similar as-

sumption that the musicians are still living, and where the identity of J. Alanus is in question.
25 See Benoit XII, Lettres communes, ed. Vidal, ii (1903), 482, no. 5119, for Vitry in 1337; Hoppin and

Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’.

 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 335

6. Robertus de Palacio (Musicalis 8)26

7. Machaut (Musicalis 17)
8. Egidius de Morino (Musicalis 11)
9. Garinus de Soissons (Musicalis 10)
10. Arnaldus Martini
11. Petrus de Brugis
12. Gaufridus de Barilio (Musicalis 6)

Others in Musicalis:

1. Thomas de Douacho
5. Egidius de Burces
7. Valquerus de Valencienis
9. Ingelbertus Louchart
13. G. d’Orbendas
14. Jo. du Pont
15. Guisardus de Cameraco
16. Reginaldus de Bailleul
18. Petrus Blavot
19. Matheo de Luceu
20. Jacobus d’Arras

The musicians appear in the following order in Musicalis; those also in Apollinis are in
boldface:

1. Thomas de Douacho
2. Muris
3. Vitry
4. Denis le Grant
5. Egidius de Burces
6. Gaufridus de Barilio
7. Valquerus de Valencienis
8. Robertus de Palacio
9. Ingelbertus Louchart
10. Garinus de Soissons
11. Egidius de Morino
12. Regaudus de Tiramonte
13. G. d’Orbendas
14. Jo. du Pont
15. Guisardus de Cameraco
16. Reginaldus de Bailleul
17. Machaut

26 Roberto de Palatio and Machaut, adjacent here, are named on adjacent days in petitions to the pope by

John of Bohemia. Benedict XII, Lettres commmunes, ed. Vidal 1903: no. 749, Robert, for Meaux on 16.4.1335,
no. 751, Machaut, expectative for Reims on 17.4.1335. See n. 32 below.
336 The Musician Motets

18. Petrus Blavot

19. Matheo de Luceu
20. Jacobus d’Arras

The musicians most famous to us are: Muris (Apollinis 1, Musicalis 2), Vitry (Apollinis
2, Musicalis 3) and Machaut (Apollinis 7, Musicalis 17): these three are fully documented
elsewhere and need no detail here. Vitry was born in 1291, became bishop of Meaux in
1351 and died in 1361. Muris was born 1290–​95 and died after 1344. Machaut’s dates are
c. 1300–​77.
Six musicians besides those three are listed in both motets:
Denis le Grant, ‘Dionisius Magnus’ in Apollinis (4), and possibly the ‘Normanno
Dyonisio’ of Musicalis (4). A chapel clerk in 1328 of Philippe III of Navarre (reigned
1328–​43), he received an expectative benefice from the king in 1329.27 At this time
Vitry was in royal service to King Philippe VI of France, to whom Denis is named
as first chaplain in 1349. He was rewarded with a bishopric, the see of Senlis, in 1350
(promoted 23 Dec. 1349), and was succeeded as chaplain by his colleague in the French
royal chapel Gace de la Buigne, who praised him in ‘Le Roman des Deduis’.28 Kügle’s
attribution to Denis le Grant of the chace Se je chant, and a further attribution in Trém,
have been mentioned above. Denis was an acquaintance of Vitry and borrowed as-
tronomical book(s) from Johannes des Muris.29 A collection of nativities in the li-
brary of Charles V started with Denis; this was probably a quite detailed astrological
judgement and not a simple horoscope; it was followed by two ‘nativities’ of distin-
guished earlier men, Henry Bate of Malines and Baudouin Courtenay, the last em-
peror of Constantinople, another indication of Denis’s status in such company.30 Denis
died in 1352. Given the Normandy connections of Gace and Muris, he may well be
the Dionysius Normannus named in the triplum of Musicalis, and is so listed above,
though Senlis (of which Denis le Grant became bishop) is not in Normandy. Gace
followed Jean le Bon into his English captivity until 1359, and could provide a link
from Apollinis and Musicalis to Musicorum, which seems to be associated with John’s
English sojourn.
Reginaldus de Tyremont, Tyro Monte (Apollinis 5, Musicalis 12) is documented in
the service of Philip VI for a financial transaction in 1349, but is not described as a
musician.31

27 Wathey, ‘Philippe de Vitry’.

28 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 71–​72.
29 Gushee, ‘New Sources’. Wathey, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 227–​28 records legal cooperation between Vitry and

Denis le Grand in 1351.

30 Boudet, ‘Jean des Murs’, at 127–​28; Boudet, ‘La Science’, 144.
31 Wathey, email of 22.12.2020, reports that Reginald de Tyremont turns up as master of the song school

(scole cantus) at Bayeux, appointed by a papal letter of 20.4.1344, where he is described as a married clerk from
the diocese of Lisieux. The petition behind the letter reveals the appointment was sponsored by John, Duke
of Normandy, and that Reginaldus had earlier been provided to the song school at Meaux, for life. Bayeux is
the second of two options set out in the petition: the first, which did not materialise, is the [song?] school,
founded by the late Cardinal ‘of Auxerre’, possibly Pierre Mortuomari, d. 1335, at the Benedictine Nunnery
of Montivilliers, Rouen diocese. The connection to John Duke of Normandy may strengthen the case for
the Reginald de Tyro Monte paid by Philip VI in 1349 being the same person. This nicely pulls him earlier—​
and earlier than 1344, since he was already established at Meaux—​and draws Apollinis more closely into the
orbit of the French royal and dependent courts. And his juxtaposition in Apollinis with Denis le Grant, both
Normans, may be telling.
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 337

Robertus de Palatio is named in both motets (Apollinis 6, Musicalis 8), next to Machaut
in Apollinis. This Robert was accorded a canonicate at Meaux on 16 April 1335, the day
before Machaut was granted his at Reims (see above and n. 26). Both men were clerks,
familiars and secretaries to John of Bohemia (Robert also a notary) on dates between
1332 and 1335, one on 1 May 1334 signed by both on the same day and place. They
clearly had a close personal, clerical and musical association.32
Egidius de Morino (Apollinis 8, Musicalis 11). There is no firm identification among
the several fourteenth-​century musicians called Egidius. The place name Morino or
Murino refers to the diocese of Thérouanne in northern France. The likeliest candi-
date, in my view, for the Egidius de Morino of Apollinis and Musicalis is Egidius de
Flagiaco, of the diocese of Thérouanne, a man of the generation of Vitry and Machaut,
already a senior cleric, and attested in 1336 as a musician, ‘skilled in the art of music
and master of the boys of the king’s chapel’.33 This man could well be the Egidius
named in these motets. He is generally credited with the authorship of the variously
titled treatise De modo componendi tenores motettorum, usually thought to date from
the mid-​century, but see Chapters 1 and 16 for arguments that the treatise must be too
late for a man named in motets of c. 1330. Egidius de Flagiaco would probably have
been too senior to write a treatise at the end of the century. Hoppin and Clercx noted
an Egidius Morini who was a bachelor in civil law and student at the University of
Orléans who received a canonicate with expectation of a prebend at Le Mans in 1337
on the initiative of the same king in whose service Egidius de Flagiaco was.34 Another
man of the same name, from Amiens, received a canonicate at Nivelles in the Liège
diocese in 1378.35
Garinus of Soissons (Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 77–​78) is named
in both motets (Apollinis 9, Musicalis 10). He may be the subject of a supplication
by Robert, Bishop of Thérouanne, the future Clement VII, addressed to Urban V in
favour of his socius Garinus de Arceys, doctor of law at the university of Orleans.36 He
received several benefices and in 1370 became chaplain to the pope. He was no longer
there in January 1371 when he became bishop of Chartres, and died in August 1376.
He is nowhere named as a musician, and may not be the same as the Garinus named as
the composer of Chantilly, no. 51.

32 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 72, citing John XXII, Lettres communes, ed. Mollat. The

17.4.1332 letter is adjacent in Mollat to Machaut’s presentation to Arras, of the same date and with the same
executors. Both letters are discussed in Herzblick, Exekutoren, 403–​4, and 404–​10 for John of Luxembourg’s
clerks and their benefices. The most recent account of links between Robert and Machaut between 1332 and
1335 is Earp, ‘Introduction’, in Earp and Hartt (eds.), Poetry, Art, and Music, 39–​40, and table 3. Both signed a
document together on 1.5.1334 at Noyon.
33 Benedict XII, Lettres commmunes, ed. Vidal, no. 2895, 16.3.1336: ‘In eccl. S. Petri Arien, Morinen.

di., Aegidius de Flagiaco, in arte musicae perito, mag. puerorum capellae regis, qui perpet. capellanias de
Athies, et de Villaribus Carbonelli, ac S. Mariae de Soysiaco supra Sequanam, Noviomen, et Parisien di. dim.
tenetur. In e. m. abb. monast. s. Joannis in Monte juxta Morinum, et decano s. Donationi Brugen., ac cantori
s. Bartholomaei Bethunien., Tornacen et Atrebaten’ (A 50, f. 185; V, 122 n. 166). Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes
biographiques’, 85–​86, also suggest further possible identifications up to around 1350. Clark, ‘Concordare cum
materia’, 5, also favours this candidate. See also now Cook, Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon, 61–​64.
34 ‘In eccl. Cenomanen., consid. Philippi regis Franciae, Aegidio Morini, bac. in j.civ., Aurelianis

in dicto jure studenti. –​In. e.m. ep.o Colimbrien., et abb. monast. s. Vincentii Cenomanen., ac Bertrando
Chausardi, can.’
35 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 85.
36 Doubted in Kügle, ‘Die Fragmente Oxford, All Souls 56’.
338 The Musician Motets

Gaudefridus de Baralis (Apollinis 12, Musicalis 6) received a canonicate in expec-

tation of a prebend in Cambrai cathedral in 1342.37 He already had three benefices
with prebend at Courtrai, Saint-​Quentin and Saint-​Pierre of Lille. Two years later he
calls himself secretary of Louis, Count of Flanders, and messenger from the count to
the pope in Avignon.38 His will of 10 June 1368 is preserved among the documents
from Saint-​Pierre of Lille, and he seems to have died in early January 1369. An earlier
Joffroi de Barale, author of two songs in the thirteenth-​century Chansonnier du Roi, is
dismissed on chronological grounds.

Just three musicians are named only in Apollinis:

Henricus Helene is named in third place in Apollinis but is not listed in Musicalis. He
was a music theorist, the author of a Summula in Venice24. He could be the Henricus
signed in the text as the composer and poet of the motet Portio nature/​Ida capillorum
in Ivrea, Chantilly, Trém and Stras, whose motetus ends: ‘Hoc tibi cantamen et
dictionale gregamen offert laudamen Henricus, ovans rogitamen mortis in examen,
anime quod sis relevamen, post exalamen ut tecum regnitet. Amen.’ In Stras the
motetus was headed ‘Magister Heinricus’, with ‘Egidius de Pusiex’ entered just below it
and to the side. There is nothing more than the shared first name and attested musical
competence to support the identification with Henricus Helene. That man received
a canonicate in expectation of a prebend in the diocese of Sens on 12 February 1335,
and received the prebend from 1337. He and Denis le Grant both appear in the Sens
accounts for 1340, but Denis appears to have been largely absent thereafter, though he
remained a canon until he became a bishop, and was dead by 3 May 1352.39 The man
identified as Egidius de Pusiex by Hoppin and Clercx died in 1348, though his connec-
tion with the motet is unclear, since the motetus text seems to attribute both text and
music to a Henricus. Although both Helene and Egidius were active at the earliest date
that has been suggested for the motet, the 1342 elevation to the cardinalate of St Ida’s
descendant Guy of Boulogne, this seems much too early for the music, which must,
however, have been composed by 1376 because it was included in the Trém index by
that date. (See Ch. 31.)
Two weeks later than Helene’s expectative document, on 26 February 1335,
Arnoldus Martini (also named in Apollinis, 10) received an expectative, likewise
from Benedict XII. Martini is there specified as a Benedictine from the church of
Alet (Aude, near Limoux).
P. de Brugis (Apollinis 11) is identified with a Petrus ‘nato Goedanen de Brugis’, clerk
and familiar of Robert d’Anjou, king of Sicily (d. 1343). He received several benefices
in the dioceses of Tournai and Liège between 1324 and 1332. Robert was the dedi-
catee of Marchetto’s Pomerium and was honoured by Vitry in the acrostic of Rex quem

37 Information on him, again, from Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 73–​74.
38 Andrew Wathey reports (email of 27.6.2020) that Gaudefridus de Barilio may already have been in
the service of the Count of Flanders, as several letters of the same date as that of his canonry at Cambrai
(21.11.1342) were for servants of Louis, Count of Flanders.
39 The prebend is recorded in Fasti Ecclesiae Gallicanae, 11: Diocèse de Sens, 292. His death is not recorded

there but in AAV, Collect. 288, f. 145. Thanks to Andrew Wathey for these references. On this motet see now
Zazulia, ‘A Motet Ahead of its Time?’. See also Ch. 19 on the double attribution.
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 339

metrorum. Karen Desmond suggests that ‘P. Philomena’ of Bruges may be the as-
tronomer and mathematician Peter of Dacia, known as Peter the Nightingale, a prolific
astronomer active in Paris c. 1300. Pedersen indicates that three works of a ‘Peter of
St Omer’ may also be by Peter of Dacia, although the connections of Peter of Dacia
to St-​Omer are not yet known.40 Strohm suggests that the speaker named as Petrus in
the motetus of Comes Flandrie/​Rector creatorum/​In cimbalis might be the composer
Petrus Vinderhout, who might in turn be the P. de Brugis of Apollinis.41

Eleven musicians are named only in Musicalis:

Thomas de Douai (Musicalis 1). Thomas de Douai is the first-​named in Musicalis.

Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, propose a possible identity with the Thomas
de Diciaco documented in letters of John XXII between 1327 and 1329, when he
receives a canonicate at Arras under the protection of Philip VI, of whom he is named
a clerk the previous year. But Andrew Wathey points out (email of 27 June 2020) that
Diciaco is Dicy/​d’Issy, not Douai. An alternative candidate, canon of St-​Amand at
Douai, obtained a canonicate at St-​Géry in Cambrai in 1325. Neither of these has mu-
sical credentials, but that is not to be expected. A third candidate from the accounts of
John XXII, one Thomas ‘Gallus’, not linked to Douai, is cited as ‘cantor domini nostri’,
and as ‘Thoma de capella’, between 1317 and 1334.
Egidius de Burces (Bruges) is separately named as a musician in Musicalis (5); al-
though sometimes identified as the Egidius de Morino of both motets, there seems
to be no reason to connect them. The most promising of the candidates offered by
Hoppin and Clercx is Egidius Belwardi de Bruges who in 1324 obtained a canonicate
in expectation of a prebend at Bruges at the request of King John of Bohemia, who
was also a patron of Robertus de Palatio and Machaut. Candidates from later in the
century will be considered in relation to Alma polis, all of whose named musicians are
claimed as Augustinians. Men called Egidius known as composers include Magister
Egidius Augustinus, the author of several rhythmically complex ballades, and
Magister Frater Egidius, who collaborated with Guilielmus de Francia in the compo-
sition of five ballades in Sq. These may be the same man; see Chapter 19.
Engelbert Louchart (Musicalis 9). The Loucharts are a numerous and prominent
Arras family, and many are called Engelbert (Englebert). The likeliest candidate is
the Englebert Louchart who was a monk of the abbey of St-​Vaast in Arras. He be-
came suppraepositus (sub-​prior?) in 1304, magnus praepositus (prior?) in 1316, and
again suppraepositus in 1338. He is included in a list of names in the statutes of the
Confraternity of Jongleurs and Bourgeois in 1338; Guesnon’s edition of the statutes
calls Engelbert a maieur des bourgeois, indicating that he was or had been an elected
leader (maieur) of the bourgeois portion of the confraternity, but not himself a

40 Desmond, Music and the moderni, 4. St-​Omer is about 100 km west of Bruges. A Peter of Dacia was

rector of the University of Paris in 1327, although Olaf Pedersen believes this was not the same man as the as-
tronomer Peter of Dacia. If Pedersen is correct, it is still possible that B. de Cluny has confused or conflated the
two Peters. Pedersen, ‘Peter Philomena’.
41 Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 42, 104 and Cuthbert, ‘The Nuremberg and Melk Fragments’,

10 n. 8.
340 The Musician Motets

jongleur. In 1340 he is listed in the confraternity’s register, possibly upon his death,
confirming his membership of that organisation.42
Jo. du Pont (Musicalis 14). In April 1330 and April 1333, Johannes ‘nato Oldrati de
Ponte’, canon of Tournai, requested leave of absence to pursue his studies in law and
letters. Later, he is documented as singer and chaplain of Annibaldus, cardinal-​bishop
of Tusculum. He received an expectative in the diocese of Arras, where he already held
two chaplaincies. In 1339 he acquired a canonicate in expectation of a prebend at St-​
Omer (diocese of Thérouanne).43 Given the links with Arras, Brianne Dolce notes a
possibly likelier identification: a Jehan du Pont was a monk at the Arras abbey of St-​
Vaast, who became receptor and suppraepositus in 1326.44
Reginaldus de Bailleul (Musicalis 16). Reginaldus de Bailleul received a benefice
in the diocese of Arras in 1334, although he already held two chaplaincies in the
dioceses of Arras and Tournai.45
A Pierre Blavot (Musicalis 18) is a clerk (function unspecified, but dealing with gifts of
robes) in the service of Eudes IV, Duke of Burgundy, in 1346–​48.46
Jacobus d’Arras (Musicalis 20). Given the connections with Arras and music,
and the motet dating c. 1330, Brianne Dolce speculates whether this might pos-
sibly refer to Jacobus Louchart, a member of this very numerous Arras family, and
a canon and cantor at Arras Cathedral, hence a musical connection. Jacques was
the son of Audefrois Louchart the trouvère, as well as a moneylender to both the
Countess of Flanders and the city of Ghent. He is listed in the confraternity’s reg-
ister in 1310.47

No suggestions are forthcoming for Valquerus de Valencienis (Musicalis 7),

G. d’Orbendas (Musicalis 13), Guisardus de Cameraco (Musicalis 15) or Matheo de
Luceu (Musicalis 19).
At least eight and maybe eleven of the musicians named in these two motets are
documented in papal letters of John XXII, Benedict XII and Clement VI between
1316 and 1352, which points to careers mainly in the second quarter of the four-
teenth century, and is consistent with the naming of the young Machaut in both
motets. There may also be connections with Reims, as reported above for Robertus
de Palatio as well as for Machaut. Senlis, where Denis obtained his bishopric, is in the
ecclesiastical province of Reims. The possibilities of contact between Machaut and
some of these other musicians are high. Vitry’s procurator at Avignon, Nicholas de
Hermondivilla, was also a canon of Reims, as briefly was a Jean de Vitry who was a
notary of John, Duke of Normandy, and who may be one of Vitry’s brothers.48 Jehan
de Vitry is named as a sommelier of the royal chapel in the document which names

42 Guesnon, Statuts et règlements. I am grateful to Brianne Dolce for confirmation of this summary, based

in turn on her ‘Making Music and Community’.

43 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 73, and see Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’.
44 Dolce, ‘Making Music and Community’, 293; Van Drival, Nécrologe, 36.
45 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 73, citing Lettres de Jean XXII, iii, no. 3580.
46 Information and references from Andrew Wathey (email of 27.6.2020): Arras, AD Pas-​de-​Calais, A 653,

pièce 18–​19; A 658, pièce 35; see also Courtel, ‘La Chancellerie’, at 50.
47 For this information with documentation see Dolce, ‘Making Music and Community’, 237–​38, 288, and

Berger, Littérature et société Arrageoises, 379–​83.

48 Andrew Wathey, email of 27.3.2017, and see Wathey, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, 246.
 Musicalis/Sciencie and Named Musicians 341

Gace as first chaplain in succession to Denis. Although many of the above identities
are far from certain, there are enough potential connections between some of them,
especially at the court of the Valois King Philip VI, and with benefices in dioceses
in northern France, especially Thérouanne, to suggest that some of them may have
known each other as colleagues or at least acquaintances.
 18
Musicorum collegio/​In templo Dei/​Avete

The text of Musicorum seems to place the French court somewhere other than its usual
location, at the ‘court of the French people’. The motet survives uniquely in an English
manuscript (Durham20) which was in the possession of the monks of Durham by the
end of the fourteenth century. As Frank Ll. Harrison suggested, this probably places the
motet during the English captivity of the French king John II between 1357 and 1360.
He accepted a date of c. 1350–​60 for the manuscript, close to the presumed date of com-
position, a generation later than Apollinis and Musicalis. As we shall see, it relates to
Apollinis not only by naming musicians and by direct quotation, but also by the ways in
which it plays with significant numbers. For the edition see Example 18.1.
Texts and translation by David Howlett. Named musicians are in boldface:

Triplum Rhymes Words Syllables

Musicorum collegio a 2 8
in curia degencium b 3 8
Gallicorum zelo pio a 3 8
Dei tantum zelancium b 3 8
in sancto desiderio 5 a 3 8
Xpisti matris officium b 3 8
quater in mense —​preuio a 4 8
Hugone, quem propicium b 3 8
largum quoque cunctis scio, a 4 8
Robertum, fidum socium 10 b 3 8
huic adiungens de Hoÿo, a 4 8
Johannem et Nichasium, b 3 8
.J., speciali socio a 3 8
dicto Pallart, quem preuium b 4 8
cordetenus inspicio, 15 a 2 8
.J. Anglico, largum, pium b 4 8
circumscribere nescio, a 2 8
Stephanoque —​sit gaudium b 3 8
hiis salus et deuocio a 4 8
cum crescant ac obsequium 20 b 4 8
actoris, qui seruicio a 3 8
se totum subdit omnium. b 4 8
.O. quanta delectacio a 3 8
horum simul canencium! b 3 8
.O. mira modulacio 25 a 3 8
sonorum musicalium! b 2 8

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0019
344 The Musician Motets

.O. dulcis altercacio a 3 8

acutorum et grauium b 3 8
mediorumque uicio a 2 8
discordie carencium! 30 b 2 8
Xpistus, pro cuius proprio a 4 8
zelo canunt, salarium b 3 8
det eis ut consorcio a 4 8
iungantur celi ciuium. b 3 8
2 106 272

Motetus
In templo Dei posita a 4 8
miro modo composita a 3 8
uidi septem candelabra, b 3 8
quorum nemo cum dolabra b 4 8
nec quisque ferri genere 5 c 4 8
unum posset incidere, c 3 8
cum silice horum quia d 4 8
inpressit in materia d 3 8
formam Celestis Opifex, e 3 8
Summus Sculptor et Artifex, 10 e 4 8
ambulans horum medio f 3 8
cum bis acuto gladio, f 4 8
septem gerens in dextera g 4 8
stellas, ut inter cetera g 4 8
testatur Apocalipsis. 15 h 2 8
Sic ego spero de ipsis h 5 8
que uidi quorum nomina i 4 8
sunt scripta tripli pagina. i 4 8
9 65 144

Tenor: Auete

Triplum: To the company of musicians living in the court of the Frenchmen (or
‘musicians in the court of Frenchmen spending time [where they ordinarily do
not]’), being zealous with the devout zeal of God in holy desire for the very great of-
fice of Christ’s mother four times in a month—​with Hugh as leader, whom I know as
favourable and generous to all, adding to him his faithful colleague Robert from Huy,
John and Nichasius, to J. the particular colleague called Pallart, whom I look on from
the heart as a leader, to J. Langlois, I don’t know how to write about him, generous,
devout, and to Stephen—​may there be joy for these men, health and devotion as they
grow, and the deference of the agent (i.e. the one who is making this go, the author),
who subjects his entire self to the service of all. O how great is the delight of these
men singing together! O wondrous modulation of musical sounds! O sweet altercation
of high-​pitched and low-​pitched and middle (notes) lacking the vice of discord! May
 Musicorum collegio/In templo Dei 345

Christ, for whose own zeal they sing, give them reward, that they may be united to the
community of heaven’s citizens.
Motetus: I saw seven candlesticks placed in the temple of God, composed in wondrous
fashion, of which no man with an axe nor anyone with a sort of iron tool will be able
to cut one, because with a hard stone on material the Heavenly Craftsman, the Highest
Sculptor and Artist, has impressed their form, walking in the midst of them with a
twice-​sharp sword, bearing in His right hand seven stars as the Apocalypse states,
among other things. Thus do I hope concerning those things which I have seen, about
which words are written on the page of the triplum.
Tenor: Hail!

Context and Date

The French curia referred to in the text includes at least one Englishman, J. Anglicus,
and singers engaged for the weekly Lady Mass. Harrison plausibly suggested that
the motet was ‘written for the court devotions of Jean II’ while he was a prisoner in
England between 1357 and 1360.1 John II, ‘le bon’, king of France, was captured at
the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356, brought to Plymouth on 5 May 1357
and on 24 May over London Bridge and through the City to Edward III’s palace at
Westminster.2 He was detained in some style at the Savoy, west of the Temple in
London, and held for a ransom to be paid before St Martin’s Day, 11 November.3 This
was not paid, and he remained at the Savoy, though he was not confined there all the
time.4 King John’s accounts, kept from Christmas 1358, while he was at Hertford
and Somerton, ‘par moy Denys de Collors son chapellain’, show that he kept a chapel
establishment, in which new work was performed: ‘Le Roy, pour offerands faicte
par li à la messe nouvelle que le Chapellain, maistre Guillaume Racine, chanta lors
devant le Roy, x nobles, valent lxvi s. viii d’. Among several items for the Chapelle,
there is a payment in December ‘Pour asporter les orgues en Savoie, vi d.’, and
again later ‘Climent, clerc de Chapelle, pour ii varlet qui apportèrent les orgues
du Roy de Londres à Erthford, iiii s’. In addition to the chaplains already named,

1 Harrison, Musicorum collegio, p. iv.

2 Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V (Paris, 1909–​31), ii, ch. II, 47–​88, ‘Jean II en Angleterre’ and
works there cited. Chronica Johannis de Reading, 124–​27, 197–​206.
3 Chronica Johannis de Reading, 206. Howlett reports an item dated 17.8.1357 recording ‘protection, until

Christmas, for ministers and servants of the king’s adversary of France deputed to provide and bring to
London hay, oats, butter, meat, fish, corn and other victuals for the expenses of the household of the said ad-
versary’. Patent Rolls, TNA MS C.66/​252 m. 7 (Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward III: x. 1354–​1358, p. 597),
and Chronica Johannis de Reading, 128, 208.
4 Chronica Johannis de Reading, 129. His presence at hastiludia solempnia in Smythfelde Londoniis is re-

corded at the end of the account of the year 1357. If John of Reading states correctly that David King of
Scotland also attended, the event must have preceded his release in October. John of Reading further relates
an anecdote about John II at a banquet at Windsor on St George’s Day, 23.4.1358 (ibid., 130). An item among
the Close Rolls dated 3.12.1358 refers to ‘4 tuns of wine . . . for the maintenance of certain of the king’s
servants whom he has appointed to stay there [at the castle of Somerton] to a certain date upon the safe cus-
tody of his adversary of France’. Close Rolls, TNA MS C.54/​196 m. 4 (Calendar of the Close Rolls, Edward III:
x. 1354–​1360, 482).
346 The Musician Motets

Denys de Collors and Guillaume Racine, the accounts mention Messire Jehan
Roussel, chapellain, and with the clerk Climent three others, Caletot, Barbatre and
Baudement.5 None of these names corresponds to those in Musicorum, but the motet
nevertheless appears to date from the period of John’s captivity in England in the
late 1350s, the only time when a French court was in England. The treaty of Brétigny
(1360) imposed an enormous ransom for his release. He was liberated in order to
raise the necessary funds, in exchange for his second son, Louis Duke of Anjou, who
was retained as a hostage. Louis escaped, upon which John voluntarily returned to
England from motives of honour, and died there in 1364.
The end flyleaves of Durham20 present French motets, including five that have
with varying degrees of certainty been attributed to Vitry. Harrison hypothesised
that this and other motets in the Durham flyleaves were copied from a French manu­
script in use in John’s London chapel. However, the use of a Sarum chant, the refer-
ence to an Englishman within the text, and the English source all tend to confirm an
origin in England, as could fit with the period of captivity. Vitry was present on John’s
campaigns when he was Duke of Normandy, and shortly after he was crowned king in
1350 acted as his representative at Avignon. Vitry’s appointment as bishop of Meaux in
1351 had royal support. Harrison implies that John’s exile may have been responsible
for the transmission of Vitry motets to England, although this came during a period
of intense hostilities, vituperatively reflected in Vitry’s later motet Phi millies ad te/​
O creator/​Iacet granum/​Quam sufflabit and in his ballade text De terre en grec Gaulle
appellee, which styles England ‘de Dieu maudite’.6 If John’s exile was indeed a path of
transmission, it could account for the presence of two Vitry motet transcriptions in
Robertsbridge, which on grounds of notational usage I date in the second half of the
century rather than older datings in the 1320s.7 But an English theorist’s knowledge
of two Vitry motets it cites must have happened before John’s exile, as the Quatuor
principalia carries the date of 1351.8 However, the end flyleaves of Durham20 present
not only French motets, but also O vos omnes and Virginalis concio, which may well be
English, as well as Musicorum; the notation of these motets is basically that of the fully
developed French ars nova, but with some insular characteristics, notably the distinc-
tion between major and minor semibreve rests.9

5 I am grateful to David Howlett for these references: Orléans, Notes et documents, 129, 90, 120, 118,

131, 137.
6 Most of the triplum now survives for Phi millies, previously known only from its separately preserved

texts: Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices’, and The Monstrous New Art, appendix 3. The text calls for an end to English
perfidy (‘et cessabit horum perfidis, nec plus erit hoc nomen: Anglia’) and the salvation of the French na-
tion. A satirical ballade without music, De terre en grec Gaulle appellee (?1337–​38), styles England ‘de Dieu
maudite’. Comment on England in Vitry’s poetic output almost certainly dates from after the outbreak of
hostilities with England in 1337. Vitry’s part (the sentencia judiciis) of a jeu-​parti, Ulixea fulgens facundia,
written with Jean de Savoie (d. 1353) and Jean de le Mote, survives in an important 15th-​c. literary collection
(Paris3343) that also includes the triplum text of Vitry’s motet for Pope Clement VI, Petre clemens (see Ch.
30). Vitry may also be the author of an episode describing the treachery of Edward I in 1301 that he copied
into his copy of Guillaume de Nangis’s Chronicon; in the same manuscript Vitry commented on the danger
posed to Paris by the English in 1346. On Ulixea, see Wathey, ‘Jean de Savoie’; on Petre Clemens, Wathey, ‘The
Motets of Vitry’ and Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art; on Nangis (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana, Reg. Lat. 544) and the English in 1346, Wathey, ‘Philippe de Vitry’s Books’.
7 See now Alís Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’.
8 Aluas, ‘The Quatuor principalia’.
9 See Ch. 8 n. 14.
 Musicorum collegio/In templo Dei 347

Texts

The triplum of Musicorum sets out a calendrical programme from the start, many
ingredients of which are woven into both text and music, with counts of 7 (for days of
the week), 4 (weeks in a month), 12 (months of the year), and 52 (weeks of the year). The
triplum relates in line 7 (a week of lines) that the college of musicians sings the Xpisti
matris officium, the office of the mother of Christ, the Saturday votive Mass of the Virgin
Mary, quater in mense (four times in a month, i.e. weekly), i.e. on the seventh day. The
number of lines in the triplum (34) and motetus (18) total 52, the number of weeks in a
year.10 The sevens and twelves are Apocalyptic numbers; the Apocalypse is specifically
referenced in the motetus, as are its seven candelabra and seven stars. The sevens may be
a deliberate nod at those of Musicalis. The seven churches of Asia are not specified in the
motet, but accord with the missionary theme of the In omnem terram tenors of Apollinis
and Sub Arturo, and the cosmic ambition of Alma polis.11 The triplum text of 34 lines
is arranged in 17 pairs using only two (double) end rhymes, -​io and -​ium. The motetus
has nine couplets rhyming in disyllables, some of which extend also to the vowel of
the antepenultimate; both texts have extensive internal vowel rhyme and alliteration.
Uniquely and strikingly in this motet, both texts are written mostly in the first person;
the -​io verbs account for several of the rhymes, notably the contrast scio–​nescio, but
the author does not name himself. In the triplum he claims personal knowledge of the
seven named musicians, but does not identify as one of them. They all appear to be still
alive and active, something otherwise explicit only in Musicalis, where the musicians
are enjoined to follow the rules of rhetoric and rhetoricians the rules of music. Some of
the other motets, notably Sub Arturo, seem to have too wide a chronological spread to
refer only to contemporaries, as will be seen.

Self-​commendation, Puns

Authorial self-​recommendations have been noted in the other motets. Here they are
brought together with punning references to words of division or cutting which are
quite often placed at numerically or structurally significant points in text or music. In
Musicorum, triplum line 21 may refer anonymously to the author (actor), unusually
(within this mainly first-​person text) in the third person. The triplum words obsequium
| actoris, qui seruicio | se totum subdit omnium (‘the deference of the author, who subjects
his entire self to the service of all’) straddle the musical transition to the second color state-
ment in diminution at B97. The point of juncture between the two color statements, two-​
thirds of the way through the music, falls in the triplum after actoris: actoris | qui seruicio
and in the motetus after acuto: cum bis acuto | gladio; the ac of actoris and acuto coincide,

10 David Howlett observed the extent of this programme. He also noted that the golden section of 52 falls

at 34 and 18, precisely the division of lines between triplum and motetus, a relatively rare case of an incontro-
vertible division thus proportioned.
11 Revelation also has seven seals, four angels, four horsemen, four winds, four beasts. The musical articula-

tion of twelves will be dealt with below. Other instances of specific reference of this kind in these motets are to
Genesis in Sub Arturo and to Boethius in Apollinis and Musicus est.
348 The Musician Motets

as do the two final -​io rhymes. This point is thus heralded by bis (twice) and the verbal
phrase is cut with the twice-​sharp sword at the musical juncture. This motetus text ref-
erence to cutting, cum bis | acuto gladio, is anticipated by the earlier reference to cutting,
nemo . . . unum posset incide-​| re cum silice, where the word incidere (cut) is itself cut by
a musical structural division; it flanks the start of the third talea of the first color at B49,
one-​third of the way through the music. This falls at the midpoint of the forty motetus
words, between words 20 and 21: nemo . . . unum posset | incidere cum silice. Thus different
significant numerical or proportional structural points in text and music are brought into
alignment, and in the case just mentioned reinforced by puns and vowel rhyme.
In Apollinis and Alma polis the authors are named immediately past the mid-
point of the motetus text. At the midpoint of the Musicorum motetus text, in the
two central lines 9–​10, it is not the human but the heavenly creator who is named, as
celestis opifex, summus sculptor et artifex; sculptor is the central, thirty-​third word. This
passage straddles the mid-​point of the music (B75).12 The trinity of names is mirrored
in the triple anaphora of the triplum’s O quanta, O mira, O dulcis (lines 23, 25, 27) which
musically mark the junction between taleae 1 and 2 of the second color (B105–​B10).
There is further punning on the calendrical numbers. Line 7, Quater in mense previo,
refers to the weekly ritual and has four words; the musical phrase rises to a fourth and spans
four breves. It occupies B27–​B29, covering the twenty-​eight days of the lunar month. As in
Apollinis and Sub Arturo, the end of the motetus refers directly to the musicians named in
the triplum; the word tripli spans a third. Unum in line 6 (B45–​B46) is on a unison of pitch
(c) and syllable (-​um). There are musical solmisation puns: strange, indeed illegitimate
dissonances are contrived at the words mira modulacio and discordie carencium. Mi-​ra is
rhyme-​punned as mi–​fa, with the fa signed; in Sub Arturo plebs, the similar line mire vocis
modulo has a signed mi but no mi–​re pun.13 At acutorum et gravium (Musicorum, B120–​
B21), the triplum crosses from above the motetus to below it, high to low.

Music: Tenor

The tenor’s Avete is the first word spoken by Jesus after the Resurrection, the middle
word (7th of 13) of the Sarum Easter Alleluia verse Surrexit dominus (for the Mass for
feria iv post pasche) set melismatically in the chant: ‘Surrexit dominus et occurrens
mulieribus ait avete tunc accesserunt et tenuerunt pedes eius.’ This melisma is used for
the motet tenor, which follows the Sarum version of the melisma with a few variants: see
Example 18.2.14 It has the unusually wide range of an octave, with striking leaps.

12 David Howlett commented: ‘The word sculptor occurs only once in the Vulgate, at Exodus 28: 11, in a

verse about inscribing the names of God’s people. The word opifex occurs only once in the Vulgate, in Acts
19: 25, in association with artifex. In Hebrews 11: 10 the artifex of the heavenly city is identified as God.’
Howlett notes that ‘other words recur at arithmetically fixed intervals. There are ten words before zelancium,
and the tenth word from the end is zelo. There are fourteen words before Xpisti, and the fourteenth word from
the end is Xpistus.’
13 II 110; bb is possible, but the long-​term resolution favours bn, as does the mi–​fa pun on mira. Editorial

sharps at the final cadence (141) have been suggested, again because of the 6/​3–​8/​5 progression, but also be-
cause the motetus ends with another mi–​fa rhyming pun, pagina. Leach, ‘Interpretation and Counterpoint’,
331, points out a rare need in Machaut for ds over bn on the syllable mi (d’amie) in Ballade 5, Riches d’amour.
14 Harrison misnames it the Gradual, but prints the Alleluia from GS, pl. 120; the Roman version in GR

251 differs in both text and music. Musicorum is among those compositions that, evidently for verbal and
 Musicorum collegio/In templo Dei 349

Ex. 18.2 Chant melisma on Avete (GS 120) and the tenor of Musicorum

Harrison gives the Sarum version of the chant (GS 120) but does not comment on the
use of an English chant—​the Roman version is different in text and music. This raises
the interesting possibility that it could be an English composition (also hinted at in the
notational features just mentioned), or at least that King John’s Lady Mass devotions in
England involved English musicians who used their own chants. The fact that it refers
to the court of the Frenchmen could also suggest that its composer may not have been
French.
The tenor color is written out in full, twice, the second time in diminution (i.e. at the
next note-​level down). Each color contains four taleae, each of eight pitches and twelve
longs duration (12 breves in diminution). The maximodus is ambiguous (it becomes
modus in diminution); 12 divides either way, and there are no notational clues as to
whether it is perfect or imperfect. In the accompanying transcription, I have arbitrarily
grouped the longs as for perfect maximodus (three longs to a maxima), which in dim-
inution becomes perfect modus. Modus and tempus in the upper parts are imperfect
throughout, with major prolation.
The tenor has several links with the other motets: the major feast of Easter responds
to the Christmas chant of the tenor of Musicalis, the melisma from the Alleluia
Dies sanctificatus, for the third (main) Mass for Christmas. The notes g a c of color
3 anticipate the opening of the In omnem terram chant used in Sub Arturo. The
greeting Auete of the tenor of Musicorum rhymes with and seems to mirror the final
couplet of farewell of the earlier motet Musicalis sciencia: cuncta uicia cauete | in
melodia ualete.
The music of Musicorum, like Apollinis, is musically based on units of twelve. Both
motets are 144 breves in length (122), but differently disposed.15 Here, each color state-
ment has four taleae, four again being a calendrical and apocalyptic number. In the first
tenor color of 96 breves there are four taleae each of 24 breves, of which one-​third (8
breves) are rests. It totals 32 notes, eight in each talea. As noted above, this color is stated
(and written out) twice, the second statement a diminution of the first, resulting in the
ratio 2:1, a total of 48 breves. Put another way, the talea length of twelve (monthly) longs
diminishes in the second color to 12 breves.

symbolic reasons, do not use the beginning of the chant, but an internal portion with the desired word. This is
true of Caput, O amicus, Omni tempore and many other compositions, probably including hitherto unidenti-
fied tenors.

15 Apollinis, three colores each of two taleae, Musicorum, two unequal colores each of four taleae. The tenor

of Sub Arturo is also 144 breves, but with a difference which will be set out below.
350 The Musician Motets

Music: Upper Parts

All five motets except Apollinis have some isorhythm in the upper parts. Of those,
Musicorum is the least strict and complete. Upper-​part isorhythm in any case occurs
only between the four taleae of each color, not between the unequal colores. Repetitions
in the upper parts are not exact at the beginnings of taleae, though they become so by
the eighth breve if not sooner. In color 1, B8–​B24 of each talea correspond rhythmically,
with slight variations; in color 2, breves 4–​10, 4–​10, 4–​9, 4–​9 of the respective taleae
correspond. In color 1 the aligned transcription shows that B5–​B6 of the triplum, for
example, correspond rhythmically over the four taleae, but that these breves in the
motetus correspond only in taleae 2–​4, while B4–​B6 are occupied with a statement of
the opening musicorum collegio rhythm. Many deviations from isorhythmic regularity
occur at points of quotation or symbolic word-​painting, thus drawing attention to them
as purposeful irregularities, such as a slightly irregular placement of recurrences of the
musicorum collegio rhythmic motive in relation to the underlying rhythmic scheme.
Despite the presence of isorhythm, the texts are not regularly distributed; in some cases,
this seems to be in order to make certain significant words occur at significant or struc-
tural points.
As is often the case with partial isorhythm, hocketing occurs especially at points of
conspicuous rhythmic repetition, often around talea joins. Here there is no interlocking
complementary hocketing, but the range of intrabrevial rhythms used goes beyond the
rhythmic vocabulary of Apollinis:

in color I triplum:16ƒ g ƒg| g g g ƒ g|

in color II triplum: Ì f. g | Ì g g gg|
in color II motetus: g g g f g| Ì g Ì g|

Relationship to Apollinis

Musicorum collegio emulates Apollinis at many levels. They and other motets in the
group share the musical and cosmic subject with named musicians, a total length of
144 apocalyptic breves,17 musical and textual borrowings, and each its own multiple

Ì
16 The imperfect S rests in color I are notated thus instead of as paired minims ( ) as explained below under

‘Notation’.
17 A few other pieces also have this length, but with a less clear apocalyptic significance than that which

unites these two musician motets. These include Febus mundo (another motet dealing with the sun and the
Zodiac) and L’amoureuse fleur; Garrit gallus has 144 breves plus the final long. Its related Tribum/​Quoniam/​
Merito is 13 not 12 × 12 units, but the intended relationship is clear, and the extra, 13th, unit is introductory,
without the tenor, and standing outside the main structural scheme. We have seen that Musicalis sciencia
has 7 × 24-​breve taleae; six would have been 144 breves; that the second color of Alma is 144 semibreves;
and we shall see how the tenor of Sub Arturo, if not the whole motet, has 144 breves. Omnis terra would be
144 breves without its extra half-​taleae, q.v. Zolomina, with 108 perfect breves, is equivalent in minims to
144 imperfect breves. Degentis vita appears to be 141 breves long, but the first color (72 breves) ends, in the
tenor, with a long rest which, if observed in counting the second color, would bring it to 144 breves. It can
be argued that some of these represent acknowledgements of or deliberate deviations from a count of 144
breves.
 Musicorum collegio/In templo Dei 351

counterpointing of musical, textual and biblical symbolism and number. Musicorum

begins with the temple of God; the Apocalypse (21: 15, 17) measures the city of
Jerusalem at 144 cubits. Musicorum (like Apollinis) is 144 breves long; its motetus has
144 words, which specifically cite the Apocalypse. Perhaps the templum pseudodeorum
of Pantheon abluitur acknowledges the templum Dei in Musicorum, and the basilica of
Apollinis, whose tenor source in Psalm 18 continues et in sole posuit tabernaculum suum,
as noted above. In Apollinis, the number twelve is zodiacally referenced. In Musicorum,
as well as the calendrical features just noted, and the Apocalyptic sevens, the citing of
the Apocalypse implicates its twelve tribes multiplied to 144,000.
Besides links with the tenors of other motets, there are even stronger links in the
upper parts. The triplum of Musicalis scienca begins with three statements of the rhythm
ffgfgfg d
| | derived from B30–​B32 of Apollinis. Musicorum acknowledges Apollinis
even more strikingly by taking the words musicorum collegio as its opening words, and
to the same rhythm; the words and rhythm of triplum of B30–​B32 of Apollinis are set
to different pitches. Often a quotation, as here, will be varied by using just two out of
the three parameters of text, pitch and rhythm. In Musicorum collegio the musicians
are named between B32 and B80; Musicorum begins to name its musicians at the same
point from which it took the quotation from Apollinis.
The words and rhythm borrowed from Apollinis that open the triplum of Musicorum
collegio are set to a striking descending seven-​note scale that literally runs the gamut
from g down to a, and stands for the seven members of the musicorum collegio who are
named in the triplum. This descent is also borrowed from Apollinis; after its initial de-
scent of a fifth, the motetus Zodiacum rises an octave in order to delineate the seventh
from d down to e. Musicalis sciencia also starts with the same rhythm, at the same pitch,
and with the same first four notes. Both Musicalis and Musicorum have a tenor that
starts on low c and enters at the beginning with the texted parts. The words ‘vidi septem
candelabra’ are set to a second descending seven-​note scale in the motetus from g down
to a. The new context in Musicorum appropriates the quotation uniquely to the number
of musicians celebrated here (seven), as opposed to the twelve in Apollinis, giving new
significance to phrases borrowed from the parent motet. Seven literal statements of
the musicorum collegio rhythm occur in Musicorum, six in the triplum (breves 1, 28,
76, 111, 123, 135) and one in the motetus (B5). A seventh triplum statement may be
allowed if we count the striking scalar octave descent for Johannem et Nicasium with
an interpolated breve between their names (B51–​B54). Thus this rhythm may also have
been used to stand for the seven lights (stars, candelabra) and seven musicians, as the
Zodiac signs stand for the twelve of Apollinis. An unmediated octave descent occurs at
triplum B25–​B27; compare the direct octave ascent at the beginning of Zodiacum. The
descending fifth a–​d that opens Zodiacum finds an echo in the same descending fifth
in the passage of chant chosen for the tenor of Musicorum (B59–​B60). The motetus of
Musicorum also features a prominent rising fifth c g for vidi (at B19) and ego (at B118),
crossing above the triplum, two of the first-​person authorial word markers mentioned
above. Similar leaps of fifths in both directions have been remarked in Apollinis. The
seven stars and seven candelabra are thus fixed to the musicians and to the musical sub-
stance of the motet; the motetus and triplum texts are counterpointed to each other as
intricately as is their music. The seven stars, heavenly lights standing for men, and the
352 The Musician Motets

seven candelabra/​musicians, earthly lights standing for heavenly ones, are aligned in
the two simultaneous texts.

Notation

If it originates from the composer rather than the copyist, an interesting notational
feature may further point to an English origin for the motet. Major (perfect) semi-
breve rests intersect the staff line; these are used in the motetus. Minor (imperfect)
semibreve rests (equivalent to two minims) hang from the line . The first color of ƒ
the triplum uses these minor semibreve rests. In the second colores of the triplum
Ì
and motetus, paired minim rests are used instead; thus both systems appear in the
same motet. This change of rest notation for the same value was prompted (if not ac-
tually necessitated) to clarify the triplum syncopation at breves 103, 115, 127, 139 and
the related hockets. The triplum of Apta caro/​Flos on the same manuscript opening
has exclusively paired minim rests. Its motetus Flos virginum has (and needs) only
major semibreve rests. In Example 18.1 the minor semibreve rests in color 1 have
been normalised to paired minim rests, but the notation switches to paired minim
rests for the hockets in color 2. This change between the triplum colores may be partly
explained by the syncopated (dotted) major in color 2. f
There is no evidence in French sources of a distinction between major and minor
semibreve rests, though Earp has drawn attention to undifferentiated rests in Br19606
which include the value of a minor semibreve. French practice settled to a single type
of semibreve rest (hanging from the line, always perfect in major prolation), and paired
minim rests for a two-​minim rest or imperfect semibreve in major prolation.18 The dis-
tinction between major (perfect) and minor (imperfect) semibreve rests was retained in
some English sources (including Fountains) up to around 1400.19
These notational features, taken together with the relationships between the
motets, confirm the status of the three motets Apollinis, Musicalis and Musicorum,
in that order, as a considerably earlier chronological group than Alma polis and Sub
Arturo, a status borne out by biographical identifications, with Apollinis and Musicalis
probably in the 1330s and Musicorum in the late 1350s. Since the added triplum parts
of Apollinis try, with varying success and skill, to match their rhythms to the original
triplum, they cannot be dated on grounds of notational and rhythmic vocabulary; all
probably date from around 1400.

18 See Ch. 8 n. 14.

19 Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’, has importantly drawn attention to the use of rests of the value of two
minims when hockets follow the default rhythms for stemless semibreves, substituting equivalent rest(s) for
the minor semibreve. Both the motets on this opening, Musicorum and Apta caro, have hockets of this type.
See also Ch. 8 nn. 2, 14, Ch. 17 n. 11.
 19
Alma polis religio/​Axe poli cum artica/​
[Et] in ore eorum and its Named Musicians

Alma polis, like Musicalis and Musicorum, is another unicum, preserved in Chantilly, a
manuscript compiled after 1400 which also contains one of the sources of Sub Arturo. It
is the only four-​part motet of the group, with an integral contratenor and an ingenious
rhythmic conception. Its named musicians seem to have been active in the latter part
of the fourteenth century, suggesting that it is separated in date from Musicorum by
approximately a generation, as Musicorum was similarly separated from Apollinis and
Musicalis. For the edition see Example 19.1. Commentary notes to the transcription
are in the Appendix to this chapter. This transcription is counted in semibreves because
of the different simultaneous mensurations.
Texts and translation by David Howlett. Named musicians are in boldface:

Triplum Rhymes Words Syllables

Alma polis religio, a 3 8
doctrine pollens radio a 3 8
fratrum Sancti Augustini. b 3 8
Ydidi sunt hii celibes c 4 8
cuncti uiginti cirices 5 c 3 8
musicique precipui. b 2 8
Uno promo hinc peritos, d 4 8
in neüma doctissimos d 3 8
armonia sub pantrana: e 3 8
breuiter ex quis modulo 10 f 4 8
P. de Sancto Dionisio f 4 8
melos, plures uigent quia, e 4 8
Johannis Foreastarii, g 2 8
cum Nicholao Bichomui, h 3 8
professores theorici; 15 h 2 8
camena J. Struteuilla, i 3 8
Augustini de Florencia, i 3 8
Johannis Desiderii; g 2 8
Mutuilos, Theobaldus, j 2 8
Taxinus de Parisius 20 j 3 8
Orpheico fonte poti; h 3 8
ac uterque Ydrolanus k 3 8

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0020
354 The Musician Motets

modulator Ciprianus, k 2 8
Guillermus Caualerii, h 2 8
Girardus de Colonia, 25 i 3 8
cum Clemente de Berria, i 4 8
Petrus quoque Amatori, h 3 8
tenorem preminet Gratro, f 3 8
cum Galterio de Gardino, f 4 8
Jeronimus Parisii. 30 h 3 8
Quorum fuit melodia i 3 8
ac dulcior armonia i 3 8
in canore et cantamen, l 4 8
modulamen hoc carmine: m 3 8
A solis ortus cardine 35 m 4 8
et usque terre limitem. l 4 8
13 110 288

Motetus
Axe poli cum artica a 4 8
Ydam gerit extatura b 3 8
architipi in figura; b 3 8
antarticus a natura, b 3 8
forma cuius est sperica 5 a 4 8
uallat uercia diaphana: c 3 8
religio ita ista, d 3 8
zodiaca, siderea, d 2 8
ambit cosmum industria e 3 8
atque antonomasia 10 e 2 8
cunctos cellit armonica a 3 8
auroratque solercia e 2 8
Egidii de Aurolia, e 3 8
manant a quo cantamina c 4 8
pariter cum hac musica. 15 a 4 8
Carmineus J. de Porta d 4 8
se commendat per omnia: e 4 8
uobis istis iure oda d 4 8
debetur, que ad oria e 4 8
plauza, dignaque dulcia, 20 e 3 8
canent ergo cum latria e 4 8
uoce cuncti dulcisona: c 3 8
O gloriosa domina, c 3 8
beata nobis gaudia. e 3 8
 Alma polis /Axe poli 355

Syllables elided to maintain octosyllabic lines: tr: 4 hii, 11 Dionisio, 13 Foreastarii, 14

Nicholao, 17 Florencia, 29 Galterio; mo: 6 uercia, 13, Egidii

Triplum: [O]‌life-​giving (or ‘nurturing’) religion exerting power by the ray of the
teaching of the brothers of St Augustine (i.e. the Austin Friars or Austin Canons) at the
poles. They are knowable (i.e. famous) celibates, twenty altogether, criers (i.e. singers
or preachers) and exceptional musicians. Above all I bring to notice hence the knowl-
edgeable, most learned in neuma under all-​bright (or ‘entirely distinct’) harmony.
Because many flourish I sing briefly from among them a song of Pierre de St Denis,
of John Forester, with Nicholas Bichomus (? Beauchamp, Beecham), professors of
theory; the poetry of J. Struteville, Augustine of Florence, [and] J. Desiderii; Mutuilos,
Theobald, Taxine de Paris, drunk from the Orpheic fountain; and each modulator
Hydrolanos (‘water trough’) [and] Cyprian, Guillermus Cavalerii; Girardus de Colonia
with Clement de Berry, also Petrus Amatori; Jerome de Paris surpasses the tenor with
Gratrus [and] Walter de Gardino. Theirs was the melody and sweeter harmony and
chanting in their song and measure in this poetry: ‘Risen from the pole of the sun and
as far as the end of the earth’.
Motetus: As the arctic, bound to stand out from the axis of the pole, bears Ida in the
figure of an archetype, the antarctic by its nature, the form of which is spherical,
walls the diaphanous veils, so that religion (i.e. the Augustinian), zodiacal, starry,
goes round the world with its industry, and by antonomasia it surpasses all and
‘shines like the sunrise’ with the harmonic cleverness of Giles of ‘Orleans’ (playing
on aurorat and Aurolia, though ‘Aurelia’ is normal for Orleans), from whom flow
chants together with this music. ‘Poetic John of Port’ (or by hypallage ‘John of the
Carmentine Gate’) commends himself through all these things: to you from those
men by right an ode is owed, which as seasonable compositions, worthy and sweet,
all will sing with worship in sweet-​sounding voice: ‘O glorious lady’ [and] ‘Blessed
joys to us’.

Authors and Musicians

The motet claims to celebrate twenty Augustinian friars, celibate clerics. The naming of
twenty musicians links Alma polis to the twenty musicians of Musicalis sciencia, eight
or nine of whom were named earlier in Apollinis. After specifying ‘uiginti cirices’ in
the twentieth bar of Alma polis, eighteen are named in twenty lines of the triplum and
two in two lines of the motetus. The explicit collaboration of a poet and a composer
uniquely distinguishes this motet in the group, as does the inclusion of the composer
(Egidius de Aurolia) and poet (J. de Porta) in the motetus among the total of twenty; in
Apollinis and Sub Arturo the authorial name in the motetus stands outside the count of
names in the triplum.1 J. de Porta was reported by Frank Ll. Harrison and earlier writers

1 This also applies to Musicorum, if we accept actor in triplum line 21 as an anonymous indication of the

author. Another co-​authored motet, internally declared, is Argi vices Poliphemus/​Tum Philemon, explicitly
for John XXIII, either his election as pope in 1410 or the opening of the Council of Constance in 1414, but
356 The Musician Motets

as the sole author of this motet. Ursula Günther pointed out some of the connections
between Alma polis religio and Apollinis,2 and was surely right to suggest (then followed
by Harrison) that the double attribution signals Egidius de Aurolia as the composer of
the music and J. de Porta of the texts. Their possible identities are considered below.
The first person is used in the triplum, but the composers of texts and music are named
in the motetus in the third person, as in Apollinis and Sub Arturo, and possibly also in
Musicorum, if the composer is indeed referred to there.

Texts

The triplum begins with a reference to ‘the poles’, and ends with a reference to ‘the
pole of the sun’, giving as its last couplet the first two lines of Sedulius’s abecedarian
hymn A solis ortus cardine Et usque terre limitem.3 This widely known hymn is used
for Lauds in the Christmas season; Musicalis uses a Christmas chant, and Musicorum
one for Easter. Usque terre limitem recalls the tenor of Apollinis, In omnem terram
exiuit sonus eorum et in fines orbis terre, also used for Sub Arturo (with a different
chant), more powerfully than a still uncertain tenor identification (see below). The
motetus begins with references to ‘the axis of the pole’, ‘the arctic’, ‘the antarctic’, and
ends with the first lines of two other hymns, O gloriosa domina for the Virgin Mary,
and Beata nobis gaudia for Whitsun.4 Both voices begin with the letter A, and the
music—​yet again—​begins on the note a. The first lines of both triplum and motetus
include syllables from Apollinis: Alma POLIs religio and Axe POLI cum artica.5
These in turn have vowel rhyme with A solis. Similar play on Apollinis was noted in
the apocalipsis of Musicorum.

in any case before his discrediting that year. It is preserved in a late copy in Ao, ff. 4v–​7 (PMFC 13, no. 49).
The motetus ends: ‘Hec Guilhermus dictans favit |Nicolao, qui cantavit, | ut sit opus consummatum.’ There
is no strong reason to identify the composer with Nicolaus Frangens de Leodio (d. 1433 in Cividale), as was
suggested in PMFC 13, rather than some other Nicholas; see Ch. 30.

2 CMM 39, p. xlv. See Marchi, ‘Traces of performance’, especially 9–​10, for an interesting hypothesis that

some of the secondary names in the double attributions in Chantilly may signal a performer or rearranger.
The present cases are different, as the double names are integral to the text and appear to be explicit in distin-
guishing composer and poet.
3 Leofranc Holford-​Strevens maintains a poor view of the Latinity of these poets. He comments that ‘the

“religio” (i.e. order) would indeed seem to be Augustinian. Not finding a main verb in ll. 1–​3, but observing
that a new sentence starts in l. 4, I suppose we must understand “est” in l. 1, Life-​giving for/​at the poles [a
recognized metonymy for “heaven”, but we might expect “on earth”] is the order mighty in the ray of the
learning of St Augustine’s brethren. Granted that the sentence is grammatically detached from what follows,
it would make sense as a general statement made specific by the following list of twenty celibates. Otherwise
what is it doing there at all?’ (email of 4.12.2018).
4 The cosmological description implies the global spread of Augustinian religion. The etymological and geo­

graphical description serves at the same time to imply the dissemination of the music of Egidius de Aurolia
and the poetry of J. de Porta.
5 The opening words also evoke the later Old Hall motet by Cooke, Alma proles regia, which has been asso-

ciated with the post-​Agincourt celebrations in London. That motet also shares its rare 9:6:4 proportion with
the English motet from this group, Sub Arturo plebs, but in a simpler execution. OH is closely related to the
partially reconstructed royal choirbook (see EECM 62), which preserves the fragmentary motet Fons origo
musicorum. See Chs. 21 and 25.
 Alma polis /Axe poli 357

Although the rhyme scheme does not suggest a regular stanzaic structure, each
talea of the thirty-​six-​line triplum takes six poetic lines, of which four are set to the
undiminished part of the talea, two to the reduced section. There are some slight
overlaps at the sectional joins. Each talea takes four poetic lines of the twenty-​four-​
line motetus. The text is set out above to show these divisions. The assigning of the
same amount of text to each talea results in a faster rate of text setting in the shorter
second color. This slightly uneven distribution contrives to place the textually cen-
tral solercia and name of Egidius (the first-​named author) at the juncture with the
second color in the music, which falls beyond the middle of the piece (the two colores
occupy 171 +​144 semibreves); it must be taken as yet another strong instance of
the deliberate setting in parallel of different proportions. Egidius here occupies the
same authorial position established for B. de Cluny in Apollinis/​Zodiacum. Like
B. de Cluny’s, his name stands where the heavenly creator stands in Musicorum. In
Apollinis, the first half of the motetus text ends ‘Boetii basis solercia’; in Alma polis,
‘Auroratque solercia’ ends the first half of the motetus text and the first of the two
colores. Apollinis’s Zodiacum is echoed here by zodiaca (motetus line 8). ‘Carmineus
J de Porta’ is presented melodically as a descending seventh from g down to a as in
Musicorum collegio, perhaps alluding to that motet if not also to the different de-
scending seventh of ‘Zodiacum signis’ (d down to e), to which Musicorum collegio
undoubtedly refers (because of its twinned quotation of those words and their
rhythm from Apollinis). Between the names of the collaborators (Egidius and J. de
Porta) are heard the words uterque (‘and each’) in the triplum and pariter (‘equally’)
in the motetus.
The text contains even more Greek and Greek-​derived words than Psallentes
zinzugia. Many words link triplum and motetus.6 Apollinis, triplum line 17, ‘Orpheÿco
potus fonte’, recurs as Alma polis, triplum line 21, ‘Orpheico fonte poti’. The Orphic
word occurs at nearly the same position roughly halfway through each of these
texts. The musical placings of this line also correspond, in Apollinis starting at breve
80 out of 144, in Alma polis at semibreve 186 out of 315. The Orphic line quoted
in Alma polis from Apollinis links to the beginning of the motetus of Sub Arturo
(Fons citharizancium), which names Orpheus’s instrument (as a cithara), as well as
anticipating the initial word Fons (see further below).
Just as Alma polis takes up the global idea in the hymn quotation A solis . . . usque
terre limitem, so does Musicorum in the Apocalyptic motetus, which takes the Word
to the seven churches of Asia. The A to Z of Apollinis–​Zodiacum is picked up by ‘I am
the first and the last’ (Apoc. 1: 17), beginning and end, alpha and omega (1: 18, 1: 11)
as well as by Sub Arturo’s reference to Genesis and Musicorum’s to the Apocalypse.
The use of hymn beginnings to end the texts of Alma is another play with beginnings
and ends.

6 The triplum is linked to the motetus by many shared words. In the triplum, polis, religio, cuncti, musicique,

armonia, dulcior, cantamen, carmine, corresponding in the motetus to poli, religio, cunctos, cuncti, musica,
armonica, dulcisona, cantamina, carmineus.
358 The Musician Motets

Music: Lower Parts

Until very recently, the tenor had not been identified. Günther (in CMM 39, p. xlvi)
noted the similarity of its opening notes (d f g a g f g) to those of the In omnem terram
tenor of Apollinis (a c d e d c d) and proposed that a version of that chant might also
underlie Alma polis. (Notes 2–​4, d f g, of the tenor of Musicalis, a Christmas Alleluia
neuma, might also be suggestive.) The tenor of Alma polis is not so labelled, as are the
different chants of that name used for Apollinis and Sub Arturo.7
I had written: ‘Until such a chant turns up, the matter must rest there. Identification
will have been impeded if it comes from the middle of a chant. That the texts allude
to the sense of In omnem terram there can be no question’. But at a late stage in the
preparation of this book, a brilliant and wholly convincing identification by Kévin
Roger came to my attention.8 Indeed it is not from the beginning of a chant. The
motet tenor corresponds with only minor variants to a passage from the Responsory
for the Dedication of a church: In dedicatione templi decantabat populus laudem. Et in
ore eorum dulcis resonabat sonus (words of the relevant passage in boldface). They
are compared in Example 19.2, which is reproduced with Roger’s permission from his

Ex. 19.2 Comparison of the tenor of Alma polis with chant melody from Fribourg (Freiburg)
MS 2. Reproduced from Roger, ‘La composition du tenor’, 402, with his permission

thesis.
The words of the chosen chant excerpt (‘a sweet sound resonates in their mouth’)
are, as Roger pointed out, well suited to the musicians celebrated in the triplum, and al-
most a paraphrase of its penultimate lines: Quorum fuit melodia| ac dulcior armonia| in
canore et cantamen| modulamen hoc carmine. Tenors of the other musician motets relate
to their subjects in similar ways. In addition, the ‘templum’ of the Responsory resonates
with the motetus of Musicorum collegio/​In templo (Ch. 18).

7 Omnis terra/​Habenti dabitur (Ox7, pp. 530–​31, PMFC 15, no. 22) has some suggestive verbal links with

the group, but does not list named musicians. Lefferts suggests the possibility that it could be a contrafact from
the French, but that would not help with a connection. See now Colton, ‘Making Sense of Omnis/​Habenti’.
8 Roger, ‘La composition du tenor’, 402–​3, where he gives the version of the chant from the Franciscan

Antiphoner Switzerland, Fribourg (=​Freiburg), Bibliothèque des Cordeliers, MS 2, f. 244v (Fribourg2), ac-
cessible at https://​www.e-​codi​ces.unifr.ch/​fr/​fcc/​0002/​244v. The Cantus database, https://​can​tus.uwater​loo.
ca/​chant/​689​756 (Cantus ID 006897), cites 110 concordances, some of which may hold a version even closer
to the Alma tenor, perhaps a source of Augustinian provenance.
 Alma polis /Axe poli 359

As to the mensural plan, here we are in a different world from the three earlier motets,
and several decades later, towards 1400. Alma polis and Sub Arturo plebs are musically the
most complex of the group.9 Both use notational and mensural complexities that were
not cultivated until the last quarter of the century. The lower-​part canons read: ‘Tenor
cantatur bis, primo de modo perfecto cum diminucione eiusdem per semi. Secundo
de modo imperfecto cum diminucione eiusdem per semi. Contratenor dicitur eodem
modo sicut Tenor.’ The instruction for internal diminution simply describes what has
been implemented in the notated color. Both lower voices have a repeat sign for two
iterations, and could not have been more compactly notated, as there is no melodic rep-
etition for the internal diminution within each color. Each of the two color statements
is interpreted according to the different mensurations specified; the instructions for
the tenor apply also to the contratenor. The two lower parts are complementary and
designed together both rhythmically and contrapuntally. The contratenor supplies a few
contrapuntally essential notes (for example at S25.2, S146, but generally improves the
sonority) and must be classed as essential. The color is divided into three isorhythmic
taleae, each of which is in fact a pair of taleae embracing two unequal statements, with
the tenor (and ancillary contratenor) first as written, and then written out in notes of
the next level down (i.e. diminution), with long replaced by breve, breve by semibreve.10
These talea pairs will here be called taleae C1.I, i, II, ii, III, iii; C2.I, i, II, ii, III, iii within
each of the two color statements, as labelled in Example 19.1. Each talea has eight
notes in both T and Ct, so each talea pair has twice eight notes. The whole color state-
ment therefore has 48 notes and contains three talea pairs. The two color statements
each have three double taleae, a total of 6 × 2 (12) taleae. Similar mensural transfor-
mation occurs in Arta/​Musicus; see Chapter 21 for its explicit epogdoic relationships.
In Alma polis 171: 144 is 0.8 (divided by 9 =​19:16), very close to the epogdoic 9:8. Sub
Arturo presents simultaneously (152 =​8 × 19), Alma polis successively, a nineteen-​based
multiple in conjunction with 144. Nineteen is the number of places on both the musical
and the astronomical hand.11
The first tenor color statement is in perfect modus and (unstated) imperfect time,
major prolation; the immediately following diminution within each of the three taleae
is in perfect tempus, major prolation, written out in full. A breve is altered before a long,
the corresponding semibreve before a breve. Each unreduced talea has a duration of 38

9 The transcription of Alma is correctly solved by Günther, but not by Harrison, whereas Sub Arturo plebs

is correctly transcribed by Harrison and not by Günther. There is still a problem in the contratenor of Alma,
around S41, to which there is no obvious or elegant solution, involving as it does a rhythm whose notation is
fixed for six statements in each of two mensurations.
10 Examples of diminution within a color or talea before a color or talea repeat are rare, but occur in

Ciconia’s Petrum Marcello. See Ch. 26 on Povero zappator. Other motets with complex arrangements include
Alpha vibrans/​Cetus, Portio nature/​Ida capillorum, Almifonis/​Rosa.
Other motets for which collaboration appears to be claimed include Portio nature/​Ida capillorum in Ivrea,
Chantilly, Leiden342A, Trém and Stras, where in Stras the motetus was headed ‘Magister Heinricus’ (also
mentioned in the text, apparently as poet and composer) and ‘Egidius de Pusiex’, thought perhaps to be the
poet but whose status is uncertain (PMFC 5, no. 5, and commentary). See Zazulia, ‘A Motet Ahead of its Time’,
and here Ch. 17. Ivrea and Chantilly reverse the status of triplum and motetus parts, but Stras and the tes-
timony of Trém (which always lists motets by motetus) affirm the correct status; Portio is longer and more
triplum-​like. Zazulia, ‘Verbal Canons’, writes that the only other 14th-​c. motets besides Portio nature/​Ida
capillorum to feature mensural reinterpretation are Inter densas and Sub Arturo (p. 349). She overlooks Alma
polis which, like Portio/​Ida, also uses diminution as well as mensural reinterpretation, albeit more simply; and
the status at least of Sub Arturo is here questioned.
11 Fritz Reckow, in HMT, s.v. clavis.
360 The Musician Motets

major S, each reduced talea 19 major S (a total of 57 × 3 =​171 per color). These irregular
numbers are exploited in syncopations in the tenor and contratenor, displaced in rela-
tion to each other within the perfect modus: in the first color, the contratenor’s three-​
breve groupings are offset by a supernumerary breve rest at the beginning (1–​2) of the
unreduced talea, the tenor’s by a supernumerary breve rest at the end (37–​38); both are
similarly offset by semibreve rests in the reduced section, bringing each double talea
in color 1 (C1) to the irregular count of 38 +​19 (=​57) semibreves. The first tenor long
(which becomes a breve in diminution) is confirmed as perfect by a dot. The ensuing
breve (a semibreve in diminution) displaces the next two perfect longs (breves in dimi-
nution), and makes up its perfection group with the next two breve rests. Although the
reduced taleae are effectively in halved values, as prescribed by the rubric per semi, they
could equally well, and perhaps more correctly, have been described as being in dimi-
nution, reading the notes at the next level down, as the relationships of twos and threes
are not exactly parallel for the diminution: perfect modus with imperfect time is not di-
rectly parallel to perfect tempus with major prolation. Medieval notators seem to have
been as ready as modern scholars to take this imprecise shortcut (halving rather than
diminution); it just needs to be recognised that the two procedures will usually but not
always yield the same results. The tenor’s first perfect long is worth 18M, the first imper-
fect breve 6M (2 × 3). At the rhythmic diminution the perfect breve is worth 9M, the first
major (perfect) semibreve 3M.
The lower parts of the second color are read from the same notation, but in straight-
forward imperfect modus (without displacement), followed in diminution by imperfect
tempus in each talea, thus now with no alteration of the breve (then of the semibreve,
in the reduced sections, lower-​case i, ii, iii). The breves remain imperfect, with major
prolation. Each double talea contains 32 +​16 =​48 major S, a total of 144 for the three
taleae of the second color. The dots are ingeniously managed so that what served as dots
of perfection or division in the first color become dots of addition in the second.12 This
may sometimes result in dots that would have been helpful in perfect mensurations
being omitted so that they do not have to be read as dots of addition in imperfect ones.
See Chapter 13 for an instance of this in Machaut’s Motet 2.
Figure 19.1 shows the tenor and contratenor parts as they appear in Chantilly.
Example 19.3 shows the first talea pair of each color in simplified modern notation,
aligned to show the syncopations. Altered notes in the triple-​mensuration reading are
marked ‘alt’. The first note in each talea (except one) is dotted; the dots are for perfection
in triple measure, for addition in duple. See Example 19.1 for a full transcription in
original note values.

Music: Upper Parts

Reference to the musical scores on the linked website is usually by bar or breve. Here
the calculation is in semibreves to facilitate reference and to take account of the fact
ç ø
that the triplum is in throughout, the motetus in , with breve lengths of two and
ç
three semibreves respectively. In color 1, three breves of coincide with two of and, ø
12 The first dot is omitted in contratenor, talea II.
 Alma polis /Axe poli 361

Fig. 19.1 Tenor and contratenor of Alma polis in Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château de
Chantilly, MS 564, f. 68. Cliché CNRS-​IRHT © Bibliothèque du château de Chantilly–​
Musée Condé, reproduced with permission

Ex. 19.3 The first talea pair of each color of Alma polis in simplified modern notation
362 The Musician Motets

but for the syncopations in the lower parts, would coincide with their perfect longs.
(The supernumerary rests in color 1 are here absorbed into a regular pattern.) The ir-
regular extra beats in the lower parts are noted above. In color 2, pairs of triplum breve
ç
groups in coincide with the imperfect modus of the tenor, but the motetus in , while ø
coinciding with the triplum with each pair of its breves, only coincides with the tenor
every three imperfect longs, or every four of its breves. This should be clear from the
alignment in Example 19.1.
In the triplum of the first color the fifty-​seven major semibreves of each talea proceed
in imperfect time, with a half-​bar at 51, 108, 165 to accommodate the odd total number
(57 × 3 =​171 semibreves). The motetus proceeds in perfect tempus with a displacement
syncopation: the two semibreves at 34–​35 (91–​92, 148–​49) are made up to three with
one at 56 (114, 171). Each talea of the second color contains 48 major semibreves, with
no adjustments needed to the imperfect-​time triplum or the perfect-​time motetus. The
overall length of 171 +​144 =​315 semibreves is clear from the isorhythm, despite the in-
consistent notation of the final longs.13 In Alma polis, Sub Arturo and Arta, changes of
mensuration mean that the breves are of different lengths.
There is no hocketing in the upper parts, but the second color contains passages of
rhythmic canon (S193–​S200 and corresponding places). The upper parts have a con-
sistently high level of incidental dissonance with the lower parts; this has not been ed-
ited out.
Within each of the two colores, the upper parts have almost completely strict
isorhythm between the three taleae; in two of the three places where ambiguity or
minor variation occurs, it has been assimilated to the majority reading: tr S139 has gf
been changed to conform with S25 and S82; mo S206 gg
(the second minim altered)
fg
has been changed to to conform with S254 and S302, where an accident could have
happened over the line end in Chantilly. One anomaly remains: tr S44 is not present g
ƒ
in the other iterations. Mo S273: a redundant after d was perhaps mistranscribed from
a dot. A few omissions have been supplied editorially in [].
In the upper parts in major prolation plentiful minim alteration is required, altered
semibreves in the perfect-​time motetus (marked by swallowtails); and several passages
in syncopation are marked by dots. Some ambiguity in the smaller note-​values may be
clarified by dots in one but not all of the rhythmic replications, or by groupings. Only
dots present in the MS are marked in the transcription. (For variants, see the Appendix
to this chapter.)

Possible Identities of the Musicians Named in Alma polis

Hoppin and Clercx offered a number of tentative identifications, mostly from papal
documents from Urban V and Clement VII.14 The musicians in the triplum are named
in six groups of three: three professors of theory, Pierre de St Denis, John Forester, and
Nicholas Bichomus; three poets: J. Struteville, Augustine of Florence, and J. Desiderii.

s a d f ƒ
13 The triplum has a final , the motetus , the contratenor , and the tenor and , consistent with the cor-

responding preceding taleae.

14 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 81–​88.
 Alma polis /Axe poli 363

The areas of musical competence of the others are not specified. Three more are drunk
from the Orphic fountain: Mutuilos, Theobald and Taxine de Paris; another three un-
specified: Hydrolanos, Cyprian and Guillermus Cavalerii; three more: Girardus de
Colonia, Clement de Berry and Petrus Amatori; and finally Jerome de Paris, Gratrus
and Walter de Gardino.15 The list lacks the familiar names of Vitry, Muris and Machaut
present in Apollinis and Musicalis, perhaps because they were not Augustinians.
Hoppin and Clercx have associated many of the musicians named in Alma polis/​Axe
poli with clerics traceable in Avignon or in papal documents from 1379 to the 1390s.16
Günther plausibly dates the motet during the papacy of Clement VII, 1378–​94. The
‘professor of theory’ who heads the list might be the Frater Petrus de Sancto Dionisio
named in two manuscripts as the author of a treatise comprising a musica theorica and
a musica practica.17 The theoretical part is identical with the first part of the treatise
of Coussemaker’s Anonymous VI in Newberry, and draws heavily on the Notitia of
Johannes de Muris. The transmission of the practical part is more complex, and is fully
discussed by its modern editor. One might suspect an Augustinian link with Alma
polis; the author has imported into the Notitia frequent references to St Augustine,
the source of the treatise’s opening line ‘Musica est scientia bene modulandi’, which
in turn recalls the texts of the motet Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili.18 Because
of the Augustinian connection, he is almost certainly the ‘Petrus de Sancto Dionisio,
Ordinis fratrum Heremitarum Sancti Augustini’ named as a beneficiary in a letter of
13 September 1332 from John XXII to Guilelmus, chancellor of Paris.19 Even earlier,
the Neapolitan chapel of Robert of Anjou included in 1317 and 1318, together with
Marchetto, an Augustinian monk by the name of Petrus de Sancto Dionysio.20 Not only
does this open up a fascinating window on Franco-​Italian music-​theoretical contacts
in Robert’s chapel at this crucial time, perhaps accounting for the knowledge of French
theory displayed in Marchetto’s Pomerium, but this Petrus now becomes a strong can-
didate to be the Augustinian music theorist praised in a motet of perhaps seventy years
later. Most of the other hypothetical identifications of names in this motet are for men
active in the second half of the century; the composition itself cannot be much earlier
than the 1390s.21 It is possible, therefore, that Alma polis took a long view of the musical
achievements of Augustinians, and did not confine its praise to contemporaries. In that,
it is comparable to the long historical perspective of Sub Arturo’s roll-​call of English
musicians dating back to the mid-​fourteenth century. However, few of the twenty can be
positively identified, either from other musical activity or from dated documents. Only
Augustinus is specified as ‘de Florencia’. The provenance of the other names, where un-
ambiguous, is overwhelmingly French, as is the compositional technique of the motet,
preserved uniquely as it is in Chantilly along with other advanced French repertory.

15 He names the composer and the poet by antonomasia, with word play on their compositions and their

places of origin.
16 Colloques de Wégimont II, 1955 (Paris, 1959).
17 The late 15th-​c. WashingtonJ6 and Siena30. The treatise of Petrus is edited by Ulrich Michels in CSM 17

(Johannes de Muris, Notitia).

18 Johannis de Muris Notitia.
19 This could be the same man as the Petrus de Sancto Dionysio who was listed as regent in the faculty of

theology in 1305 and 1330. Courtenay, Parisian Scholars, 201–​2.

20 Vivarelli, ‘Di una pretesa scuola napoletana’, 289–​92.
21 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 81.
364 The Musician Motets

For Egidius de Aurolia, Günther argues for a strong connection with Avignon, based
on the identification of some of the names with Augustinians documented there, and
especially of the Egidius de Aurolia (Orleans), named in the motetus of Alma polis/​
Axe poli as the composer of the music, with Magister Egidius Augustinus, composer
of three ballades in Chantilly, ModA and Reina. These include Courtois et sages, with
an acrostic ‘Clemens’, honouring the schismatic Avignon pope Clement VII as rightful
pope, and was therefore composed after 1379, one reason for Günther’s suggestion that
Alma polis might be in honour of Clement or at least date from his reign.22 The bal-
lade Franchois sunt nobles is ascribed to ‘Magister Egidius ordinis heremitorum Sancti
Agustini’. Another ballade, Roses et lis, ascribed to ‘Magister Egidius Augustinus’, is as-
sociated with the festivities in Avignon for Jeanne de Boulogne preceding her marriage
to Jean duc de Berry in 1389.23 He may also be one of the composers of five two-​voice
ballatas in the section of the Squarcialupi codex (Sq) devoted to ‘M. frater Egidius et
Guilielmus de Francia’. In the miniature representing both composers, Guilielmus, at
least, is dressed as an Augustinian. Two of the ballatas are attributed in Paris568 to
Guilielmus alone.
An Egidius of Orleans with no known musical or Augustinian credentials studied
theology in Germany, Italy and Paris, receiving a doctorate on 3 December 1379 from
Clement VII, entitling him to call himself ‘magister’. He was entrusted with papal tasks
in 1379, 1385 and 1393 which took him to Rouen, Reims, Cambrai and Paris (an Egidius
de Aurelianis is recorded in Paris in 1385 and 1393). He continued a close relationship
with the papal court at Avignon from 1394 under Benedict XIII.24 This distinguished
cleric may or may not be the musician named in the motet, and he may or may not
be responsible for the three ballades mentioned above. But the Augustinian connec-
tion of the song composer makes it possible that he was indeed also responsible for
the motet; the connection of documented papal servant and song text with Clement
VII increases the likelihood that they are the same man. There is no connection with
the earlier Egidius de Morino named in the texts of both Apollinis and Musicalis and
to whom the little motet treatise De modo componendi tenores motettorum is usually
attributed. Doubts are here cast on his authorship (Chs. 1, 16).
De la Porte is not an uncommon name in the fourteenth century, and there can be no
certain identification. Several clerics named J. de Porta are documented in the second
half of the century, and it is not always clear whether the references are to the same
man. Hoppin and Clercx propose two candidates: one is a request on 5 January 1363
from Marguerite, daughter of the king of France, for a benefice for a Johannes de Porta
from the diocese of Arras and clerk of her chapel.25 The other is the conferral on 20
February 1379 by Clement VII motu proprio of a canonicate with prebend at the cathe-
dral of Chartres on a Johannes de Porta, priest of the diocese of Saint-​Malo, and secre-
tary to the pope’s ‘devoted son’, the Breton soldier Olivier de Clisson.26 This secretary
with a papal connection was from another diocese. There is no reason to think he is the

22 CMM 39, pp. xliii–​xlv. For a differently texted concordance in Leiden2720 see Ch. 30 n. 55.
23 Details in CMM 39, p. xliv. All three songs are similar in style and published in CMM 53/​1.
24 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 87ff., further discussed by Günther in CMM 39, p. xliii.
25 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 82, citing Fierens, Suppliques d’Urbain V, no. 495.
26 Valois, La France et le Grand Schisme, i. 251 and n. 5. Hanquet, ‘Documents’, no. 2335, vacant by the death

of the cardinal of Thérouanne; this was Gilles de Montaigu; see below.

 Alma polis /Axe poli 365

Johannes de Porta who became the parish priest of Annecy in the diocese of Langres
when his rectorship of the parish of S. Maria de Noseriis in the diocese of Vienne passed
to one Matheus Gralhonis on 16 February 1363.27 A Johannes de Porta is listed as a
canon of Laon 1331–​70, but he had already died when he was succeeded by Petrus de
Bouconvilla (1371–​95) on 29 September 1369.28 This man was too old, and died too
early, to be identified as the poet of a motet of a decade or two later.
None of these is as well documented as a Johannes de Porta de Annoniaco (Annonay)
in the diocese of Vienne, who was chaplain, domestic familiar and, evidently, secre-
tary to the French cardinal and diplomat Pierre Bertrand de Colombier (1299–​1361),
nephew and namesake of Cardinal Pierre Bertrand of Annonay.29 He is a tempting can-
didate for the poet of Alma polis because of his literary associations as a diarist and
associate of Petrarch. The younger Pierre Bertrand was promoted cardinal of Santa
Susanna by Clement VI in 1344, and became Cardinal Bishop of Ostia in 1353. He was
sent on a number of important missions, including peace negotiations with England,
and on 9 February 1355 was sent to induce Charles IV of Germany to come to Rome
for coronation as emperor.30 Johannes de Porta kept a lengthy diary of this expedition,
including reporting the cardinal’s meeting with Petrarch, and the fact that Petrarch had
earlier been crowned with the laurel wreath.31 He may have come to the attention of the
Cardinal through their shared origin in Annonay (Ardèche), perhaps as a young man.
He is last documented as an executor and beneficiary of the cardinal’s will of 5 July 1361,
so he died after that date.32 After the death of his cardinal, he would have needed other
employment. He could have known Petrarch during his period in Avignon up to June
1353. One of Petrarch’s closest friends, the Roman nobleman Angelo Tossetti, his Lelio,
was (together with Porta) in the entourage of the cardinal sent to organise the corona-
tion of Charles IV, as coordinator of the trip to Italy and of relations with the Roman
authorities. Porta witnessed and described the coronation with the laurel wreath of the
Florentine poet Giovanni Zanobi da Strada by the emperor Charles IV in Pisa on 24
May 1355. Zanobi was a grammar teacher who then exercised various public functions
in and around Florence; he was in Naples with Niccolò Acciaioli, but in 1357 he was in
Montecassino as vicar of the Florentine republic. In 1359 Zanobi moved to Avignon,

27 Urbain V . . . Lettres Communes, iii, no. 1978.

28 Millet, Les Chanoines, 515, 400–​1. Urbain V. . . Lettres communes, viii, ed. Hayez, no. 24230 of 29.9.1369
confirms that this Johannes de Porta was dead by that date.
29 I am grateful to Elena Abramov-​van Rijk for locating this promising candidate and alerting me to these

references to him, now published as Abramov-​van Rijk, ‘The Roman Experience’; to Julian Gardner for more
sleuthing and bibliography, and to Andrew Wathey for confirming the interpretation of some documents.
30 These included negotiating the marriage of the duke of Normandy (later John the Good) with Bonne of

Luxembourg. In 1335 he became bishop of Nevers and in 1339 of Arras.

31 Page 5 of the diary of J. de Porta: ‘1354 scriptus per me Iohannem Porta de Annoniaco Viennensis

dyocesis, capellanum et familiarem domesticum commensalem reverendissimi in Christo patris et domini

domini Petri [Bertrandi de Columbario Viennensis dyocesis] miseratione divina Ostiensis et Velletrensis
episcopi [and cardinal]’. Johannes Porta de Annoniaco, Liber de coronatione. Pages 115–​16 report the poetic
coronation of Petrarch, which took place in the Campidoglio in Rome in 1341 by Robert of Anjou: ‘Florentie
florem verum et toto in terrarum orbe notabilem, ymo verius unicum singularem poetam, qui nullus maior
natus umquam esse creditur, dominum scilicet Franciscum Petrarcam.’
32 ‘Quo anno natus sit, ignoramus; mortuus est post 1361. lul. 5, quo die eius ut inter vivos existentis mentio

fit in testamento cardinalis [i.e. Pierre Bertrand de Colombier] domini sui.’ Duchesne, Histoire de tous les
cardinaux, 359ff. Against this identification is the absence of any documentation after 1361, which is too early
for the motet; but in other respects he is well qualified. Reports that he died in 1369 seem to represent a confu-
sion with the canon of Laon.
366 The Musician Motets

becoming a papal secretary, responsible for relations with Florence, and died there in
1361 during the plague. Thus two Florentine poets strongly bound to the Avignon court
may both have been personally known to this Johannes de Porta. Moreover, Petrarch’s
connections with Augustinians have been documented, and his Secretum was written
in Avignon between 1347 and 1353 in the form of dialogues between the poet and St
Augustine.33 But in order to be a poet for a motet not earlier than the 1380s, he would
have to have served the cardinal as a very young man. This is possible if he was born in
the early 1330s.
Hoppin and Clercx identify Johannes Desiderii as the author of a short mensural trea-
tise in Seville25, and further identify him with a Johannes Desiderii de Latines.34 They
failed to note, as Karen Cook has now shown, that the author of this treatise is identified
within the text as ‘Magister Johannes Pipudi, canonicus Sancti Desiderii avinionensis’
(canon of Saint Didier in Avignon). The name of Johannes Desiderii de Latines seems to
derive from his father, Désiré de Latines, not from a canonicate held in Avignon. Cook
observes that Pipudi is unlikely to have been referred to as Johannes Desiderii rather
than as Johannes Pipudi. Moreover, Johannes Pipudi or Pipardi was a cleric from the
diocese of Cambrai, and in 1378 was in the household of Cardinal Johannes de Blauzac,
formerly Bishop of Sabina. Johannes Desiderii de Latines, on the other hand, was from
the diocese of Liège, and in the same year recorded in the household of a different car-
dinal. On 15 November 1378 Gilles de Montaigu, Cardinal of Thérouanne, addressed
a supplication to Clement VII in favour of his ‘dilectorum sociorum et capellanorum
ac clericorum, familiarum suorum domesticorum continuorum commensalium’; these
include Johannes Desiderii, ‘dilecto suo’, a cleric from the diocese of Liège, who al-
ready held a canonicate with prebend at Namur. On 6 May 1410 he is still mentioned as
canon-​singer of Notre Dame de Dinant.35 As Cook points out: ‘If the Johannes Desiderii
of the motet is in fact Johannes Desiderii de Latines, then neither can also be the theorist
Johannes Pipardi.’36 It is this Johannes Desiderii de Latines, and not Pipardi, who would
be a strong candidate for identification with the musician named in the motet, but for
the fact that he has no known Augustinian affiliation.
Two teachers named ‘Johannes Forestarii’ are named on 9 November 1403 in a roll
presented to Benedict XIII by the masters of the faculty of arts of the university of Paris,
but no firm identification is possible.37 Harrison vernacularises him as Jehan de Vorst.38
Günther leans towards accepting Hoppin and Clercx’s suggestions of an Avignon
cleric ‘petro tenoro’ who resigned a benefice in 1362 for Petrus Amatori, and of
Theobaldus Furnerii, a singer for Urban V in 1367 and Gregory XI in 1371.39 She notes

33 Mariani, Il Petrarca.
34 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 81 n. 7.
35 Ibid., 81, cited from the records for Sainte-​Croix of Liège.
36 Cook, Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon, 65–​67. He may have been related to Henri Desiderii

(Dezier) de Latinia (Latunna) or de Latines (d. by 1423), also from Liège, a singer in the chapel of Pope
Boniface IX in Rome, possibly also of Urban VI. Henricus succeeded another singer of Boniface IX, the
Carthusian Joannes Sapens of Malines (d. 1391), to a canonry at Liège cathedral in about 1374, when he was
described as a ‘familiaris commensalis’ of cardinal Petrus Corsini, bishop of Florence, and is also reported
as a canon and singer at the collegiate church of Saint-​Paul in Liège, where he composed an office for the
Visitation. Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 89. See also Nádas and Cuthbert, Ars nova, 51–​55.
37 Hoppin and Clercx, ‘Notes biographiques’, 82.
38 Musicorum collegio, p. xii.
39 CMM 39, p. xliv. On Furnerii see also Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’, 9 n. 5.
 Alma polis /Axe poli 367

that he held the same position in 1373–​74. No further convincing identifications have
been put forward.
All these tentative identifications are consistent with a dating of Alma polis towards
the end of the century. Günther also pointed out a few of the more obvious textual
connections between Alma polis and Apollinis while suggesting that imitation of the
older work might not have been intentional;40 those connections are here taken further
in support of a highly purposeful relationship of the younger to the older motet.

Appendix
Commentary Notes to Example 19.1, Alma polis religio/​Axe poli
cum artica/​[Et] in ore eorum

In the commentaries, notes relating to the numbering of the upper parts are usually in
breves, but here in semibreves because of the different mensurations between the parts.

Triplum: 39–42, 96–99, 153–56 | ff ggg fg, read as 3 3 | 1 1 1 2 1. The same rhythm occurs
at 47–50, 104–7, 161–64 (neutral) transcribed as suggested by some groupings; but both
passages could be read as 3 2 1 |1 2(alt) 2 1. 42–44 fg d g, read as 2 1 | 5 1, but it could be
g
3 | 1 5 1. The last is not present at the corresponding places 101 and 158. 174–76, 222–24,
270–72 fg f ggg read as 2 1 3 | 1 1 1 but it could be 2 1 2 1 |1 2alt. The grouping of 174 is
neutral; 223 is grouped fg fg gg , suggesting the latter reading, but in 271 the bb is written
f
after the d , suggesting the grouping used here. 191–92, 239–40, 287–88 f ggg actual
3 | 1 1 1 but it could be 2 1| 1 2alt. The groupings of 191–92 and 239–40 are neutral, but
287–88 has a clear gap after the S, suggesting the grouping used here.
Motetus: 4–9, 61–66, 118–123 dgf dgf
| here treated as 5 1 3 | 5 1 3; space after the at 5,g
62, 65, dot after 119, eliminating 6 1 2 | 6 1 2; 31–33, 88–90, 145–47 g fg g g f
. ; although
only present at 31–32, the dot prevents 1 2 1 1 1 3. Treating it as a dot of syncopation
yields 1 3 1 . 1 1 2, the reading used here, further encouraged by the grouping at 145. It
f
would have been clearer with a second dot after the first . An alternative reading would
be for the dot to start a new group, requiring alteration of the last minim: 1 2 1 1 2alt >
2. .
g fg g m f f
In either case the last is imperfect, which is possible, as it is followed by . g

40 CMM 39, p. xlv.

 20
Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium/
​In omnem terram and its Musicians

Sub Arturo is the only motet of the group that is unmistakably English, and it has
attracted more scholarly attention than the others. It is a brilliant and exuberant
piece, extremely cleverly constructed, and with a kind of earthy energy more char-
acteristic of English than of French composition at the time.1 For the transcrip-
tion, see Example 20.1. Commentary notes are in the Appendix to this chapter.
Although the use of isorhythm between taleae has long been associated
with the importation of French influence into England, this motet differs in sev-
eral respects from anything known in England or France from the fourteenth cen-
tury. This exceptional and unquestionably English motet names fourteen English
musicians in the triplum and seven heroes from the history and mythology of music
in the motetus, including, with mock modesty, last, lowest and least, its composer,
J. Alanus.2
Texts and translation by David Howlett (slightly adapted):

Triplum Rhymes Words Syllables

Sub Arturo plebs uallata a 4 8
plaudat melos; laus ornata a 4 8
psallatur Altissimo. b 2 7
Anglis conferentur grata a 3 8
euentu piissimo. 5 b 2 7
En milicia cum clero c 4 8
floret; musicorum uero c 3 8
chorus odas iubilat, d 3 7
e quibus modo sincero c 4 8
J. de Corbe emicat, 10 d 4 7
cuius non preuisas posco e 4 8
res, quas J. de Alto Bosco e 6 8
reserat theorica, f 2 7
qua fulgens uernat, ut nosco, e 5 8
T. Marconi practica. 15 f 3 7

1 It was recorded by Musica Reservata on Philips (1969), now available on YouTube, a performance in my

view unsurpassed by more recent (and more sedate) performances on Hyperion by the Orlando Consort
(CDA68132) and the Binchois Consort (CDA68170).
2 Alani is given within the Chantilly text in the genitive but in Q15 as Alanus. In both appearances of the

triplum in Q15 the composer heading is given as Jo Alani.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0021
370 The Musician Motets

Piis placent ac tirannis g 4 8

res Ricardi Blith, Johannis g 4 8
necnon de Exonia, h 3 7
arte cuius multis annis g 4 8
fulsit Cantuaria. 20 h 2 7
Sed G. Mughe, radix florum, i 5 8
det generibus melorum; i 3 8
Edmundus de Buria j 3 7
basis aurea tenorum i 3 8
est, quem fouet curia. 25 j 4 7
Princeps bellicus probauit k 3 8
quas Oxwick G. res creauit, k 5 8
rutilantes oculo, l 2 7
Episwich J. quas gustauit k 4 8
mire uocis modulo. 30 l 3 7
Flos Oxonie miratur m 3 8
Nicholaus, qui uocatur m 3 8
de Uado Famelico; n 3 7
E. de Miresco iungatur m 4 8
his triplo mirifico. 35 n 3 7
Prepollet G. de Horarum o 4 8
Fonte lira; uox non parum o 5 8
mulcet aures Simonis p 3 7
Clementis, os cuius clarum o 4 8
manus nitet organis. 40 p 3 7
Practizat Adam Leuita q 3 8
precellenter. Quorum uita q 3 8
sana diu uigeat, r 3 7
ut et illis, qua finita, q 5 8
porta celi pateat. 45 r 3 7
18 157 342

Motetus
Fons citharizancium a 2 7
ac organizancium a 2 7
Tubal predicatur, b 2 6
musice primordia c 2 7
sculpans ut historia 5 c 3 7
Genesis testatur. b 2 6
Pondera Pictagore d 2 7
numerorum decore d 2 7
artis uernant legem, e 3 6
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 371

quam rimans Boecius 10 f 3 7

propalauit latius f 2 7
regum laudans Regem. e 3 6
Doctrina Gregorii g 2 7
gesta Dei Filii g 3 7
canit omnis ordo; 15 h 3 6
Guido fons inicia i 3 7
lineas et spacia i 3 7
dedit monocordo; h 2 6
sed Franco theorice j 3 7
dat mensuram musice 20 j 3 7
quam colores ligant. k 3 6
Fontes hi sunt seculi l 4 7
adhuc quorum riuuli l 3 7
cuncta regna rigant. k 3 6
Huius pes triplarii 25 g 3 7
bis sub emiolii g 3 7
normis recitatur, b 2 6
ut hi pulsent dominum m 4 7
quorum numen nominum m 3 7
triplo modulatur. 30 b 2 6
Illis licet infimus n 3 7
J. Alanus minimus n 3 7
sese recommendat, o 2 6
quatenus ab inuidis p 3 7
ipsum sonis ualidis 35 p 3 7
horum laus defendat. o 3 6
18 97 240

Triplum: Let the people protected by Arthur (also ‘under the North Star’, near the
seven-​starred constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, ‘the Bear’, which is the et-
ymological root of the name ‘Arthur’) applaud song; let embellished praise be sung
to the Most High; pleasing things will be conferred on the English in a most holy re-
sult. Lo, the military flourishes with the clergy; the chorus of musicians, moreover,
shouts its odes, from whom John of Corby shines out in unblemished fashion, whose
unprecedented compositions I invoke, which John Hauboys unlocks in his Book of
Theory, from which the radiating practice of Thomas Marcon springs, as I know. The
compositions of Richard Blithe please holy people and kings, also those of John of
Exeter, with whose art Canterbury radiated for many years. But let William Mugge,
the root of the flowers, contribute to the types of songs; Edmund of Bury is the golden
foundation of the tenors, whom the court favours. The warlike prince approved the
compositions which William Oxwick created, glowing golden to the eye, which John
Ipswich savoured with the melody of his wonderful voice. The flower of Oxford is
372 The Musician Motets

wondered at, Nicholas who is called ‘of Hungerford’. Let Edmund de Miresco be joined
to them in a wondrous threesome (or triplum). William of Tideswell excels on the lyre.
The voice of Simon Clement soothes the ears not a little, the bone of whose hand shines
bright upon the organ. Adam the Deacon performs excellently. May the healthful life
of these men flourish for a long time, so that for them, when (this life is) finished, the
gate of heaven may lie open.
Motetus: Tubal (recte Jubal) is proclaimed the source of harp-​playing and organ-​
playing, fashioning the beginnings of music as the story of Genesis relates. The weights
of Pythagoras by the beauty of numbers make the law of art spring, which Boethius
examining opened out more widely, praising the King of kings. By the teaching of
Gregory every order sings the deeds of the Son of God. Guido (of Arezzo) the source
gave principles, lines, and spaces to the monochord. But Franco (of Cologne) gives
to the theory of music measure which the colours bind. These are the springs of the
age, whose rivers still water all the realms. The foot (pes) of this three-​part piece is
(sung once and) repeated twice under the rules of hemiolus so that those, the majesty
of whose names is sung in the triplum, may importune the lord. To them the lowest,
least, J. Alanus recommends himself so that the praise of these men may with mighty
sounds defend him from envious men.

General Remarks

Musicorum celebrated seven musicians: here twice seven, surely going one better not
only than Musicorum, but than the bis sex (‘twice six’) of Apollinis, and nodding at the
seven taleae of Musicalis which go one better than the six of Apollinis. The nature and
dating of Sub Arturo depends on the possible identification of the most recent musicians
named in the triplum. Dates between 1358 and the early 1370s have been suggested, but
even the 1370s now seems to me too early.
At the time the edition in PMFC 5 was made, Sub Arturo was known only from two
Continental sources dating from forty to fifty years later than the 1370s. If the motet was
indeed that old, this would be an exceptionally long transmission life: first, Chantilly,
now thought to have been copied in the 1410s,3 where Sub Arturo takes its place in a
choice collection including the most sophisticated and arcanely constructed motets
then current (compositionally at least a generation beyond Machaut), and second, Q15,
where it was first copied in the early 1420s. If dating from the 1370s, it would be by sev-
eral decades the oldest composition in the first layer of that manuscript and, moreover,
was still valued and kept alive there in a partial recopy as late as the 1430s, and that by
a compiler ruthless in discarding music that was no longer in use. Chantilly is in most
respects less reliable than Q15 with respect to pitches and rhythms. Sub Arturo turned
up more recently in Yox, a fragmentary English manuscript of c. 1400 or the very early

3 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 179–​ 82, carefully consider Günther’s suggestion of a possible
Parisian origin c. 1415, but offer an alternative possibility of copying in the orbit of the Pisan popes between
1408 and 1419.
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 373

fifteenth century, on a recto containing the motetus and tenor.4 This may be the oldest
source. The motet is perhaps tellingly absent from earlier sources of fourteenth-​century
motets, Ivrea, Cambrai and Trém.

The Motetus Text

Playing not only on the wide-​ranging A–​Z of Apollinis/​Zodiacum, but also on the
explicit Apocalyptic content of the motetus of Musicorum collegio/​In templo Dei,
Alanus’s motetus gives a unique and long-​range potted history of music, begin-
ning with ‘Tubal’. All three manuscripts give Tubal, following a long-​standing me-
dieval confusion between Jubal, ‘father of singing to the cithara and organ’ and his
brother Tubalcain, the hammerer who came to be conflated with Pythagoras’s al-
leged discovery in the smithy and associated with music as the fons citharizancium
ac organizancium, aligned with the words of the psalmist.5 The line ‘Genesis testatur’,
the authority for the mythical origins of music, names the first book of the Bible in
response to a previous motet’s invocation of the last book: line 15 of the motetus of
Musicorum collegio is ‘testatur Apocalipsis’. Pythagoras and Boethius appear in the
same order as in Apollinis.
Alanus’s roll of honour of seven ‘greats’ praises, in chronological order, ‘Tubal’,
Pythagoras, Boethius, Gregory the Great, Guido of Arezzo,6 and Franco of Cologne,
culminating outrageously with himself, albeit with mock modesty. As the only au-
thority still living, he casts himself as the seventh and last of the great authorities
since earliest times.7 He does so (‘infimus J. Alanus minimus sese recommendat’)
borrowing the authorial form of self-​reference of B. de Cluny, composer of Apollinis
eclipsatur/​Zodiacum: ‘recommendans se subdit omnibus’. In both cases (as also
in Alma polis) this formula is in the motetus. In three of the motets, Apollinis,
Musicorum and Sub Arturo, the motetus in each case cross-​refers to the names listed
in the triplum. All this suggests that the composers wrote their own texts or at least
closely controlled them.

4 For Yox see Ch. 22 and Wathey, Manuscripts . . . Supplement 1 to RISM.

5 Genesis 4: 21–​22: ‘Iubal ipse fuit pater canentium cithara et organo. Sella quoque genuit Thubalcain qui
fuit malleator et faber in cuncta opera aeris et ferri.’ Since it was Jubal and not Tubalcain who is named in
Genesis as the source (there ‘father’, here ‘fount’) of ‘citharising’ and ‘organising’, there can be no doubt who
is meant; however, the legend was confused in popular transmission, and in view of the strong tradition in
favour of Tubal, especially in sources known to musicians, ‘Tubal’ is retained here. Jacobus, Speculum I.VI
attests that the confusion goes back to Isidore, also citing Petrus Comestor and Josephus: ‘Moyses, secundum
Isidorum, repertorem musicae artis dicit fuisse Thubal de stirpe Cain ante diluvium. Hic enim Genesis [4: 20–​
22] dicitur fuisse pater canentium in cithara et organo, non quia dicta repererit instrumenta, ut ibidem dicit
Magister in Historiis, quae longo post tempore reperta sunt, sed quia aliquas repererit musicales consonantias
illis applicatas postmodum instrumentis.’
6 Cf Quatuor Principalia 2, ch. 3: ‘Deinde fuerat Guido monachus, qui compositor erat gammatis, quod

monacordum nuncupatur; voces vero in eo continentes, in lineis et spatiis distribuit’ (Aluas, ‘The Quatuor
principalia musicae’). Alanus’s six authorities are listed in the same order in chs. 2–​3, except for Gregory, who
is added before Guido in Principale 3, ch. 4.
7 David Howlett observed that the poet ‘widens the range of mythological reference by alluding in the first

line of the triplum to King Arthur, for knowledge of whom the primary source was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Historia Regum Britanniae. The diction of the motetus derives in part from Geoffrey’s preface, in which he
hopes for protection from inuidis.
374 The Musician Motets

Stanza 5 of the motetus states the proportions resulting from applying three suc-
cessive mensuration signs to the tenor: the tenor or pes (a word used for older me-
dieval English motet tenors) is to be repeated twice by hemiola (3:2): ‘Huius pes
triplarii | bis sub emiolii | normis recitatur’, that is, the three statements are to stand
in the geometric proportion 9:6:4, reducing by a double hemiola. But this describes
the resulting overall proportions, not the method by which they are arrived at; the
three statements are derived not by diminution (which would require the longs and
breves to be substituted by values at the next level down) but by mensural reinterpre-
tation of a homographic tenor under the mensuration signs , , , yielding respec-øçc
ç
tively breves of 9, 6 and 4 minims of the upper parts, which are in throughout.8 The
mensural procedure yields the proportioned result here only because the composer
has taken care to notate the tenor entirely in (imperfect) breves and longs, avoiding
semibreves or minims, the values below the level of the breve that would have re-
quired alteration and imperfection at the levels of tempus and prolation, resulting in
mensural discrepancies between statements in perfect and imperfect mensurations,
and possibly in overall proportional inexactness. Only because no value shorter than
the breve is used do no relative internal differences of rhythm arise from the tenor of
these mensural rereadings (unlike Dunstaple’s mensural tenors with overall 6:4:3 pro-
portion; see Ch. 25).

Text–​Music Correspondence

Sub Arturo is the only one of the five musician motets whose texts are unambiguously
stanzaic.9 The triplum comprises nine five-​line stanzas each with syllables and rhymes
8a, 8a, 7b, 8a, 7b. Nines are important here. There are nine taleae (3 × 3), and nine triplum
stanzas. The six motetus stanzas, albeit of different length, stand in hemiolic relation-
ship to the nine of the triplum, again reflecting the motet’s hemiolic underpinnings. The
total number of lines, 45 +​36 (5 × 9 +​4 × 9), is 81 (92, compared to the 122 of Apollinis,
Musicorum and, by one count, of Sub Arturo: see below). The triplum and motetus lines
thus relate 5:4, which add to nine; 45 exceeds 36 by 9.
There is a close talea–​stanza correspondence: despite the successive reductions be-
tween the three color statements, each of the nine taleae receives one of the nine (equal,
five-​line) triplum stanzas, with no overlaps or anticipations. This results in an audible
acceleration of text delivery in the second and third colores, which adds to the excite-
ment produced by the faster tenor and the consequently increased pace of harmonic
movement. Of the six motetus stanzas, the first three are assigned one each to the first

8 The tenor’s 144 (3 × 48) variable breves are equivalent to the 153 breves of ç of the upper parts, a para­
doxical juxtaposition; see further below. For other examples of compositional/​performance instructions
embedded in the text see O amicus (Ch. 22); for descriptions of the skill and completeness of the work see
Zodiacum (three times the number of Pythagoras, i.e. 3 × 10, the number of triplum lines, is made equal to
the basis of Boethius, i.e. 12, the number of lines in the motetus; the texts of Tr and motetus take up the same
musical time) and Musicorum collegio (take nothing away, add nothing).
9 The voice Psallentes zinzugia added to Apollinis is also stanzaic, unlike the existing texts of Apollinis,

and is probably likewise English in origin. Günther presents Alma polis also as stanzaic, CMM 39, p. xlv (its
motetus, Axe poli, rightly, in couplets), and with emendation this is indeed possible, perhaps corroborated by
the close correspondence of talea and stanza in that motet, as in Sub Arturo.
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 375

three taleae of color 1, also with no overlap or anticipation.10 The remaining six taleae
(colores 2 and 3) receive half a stanza each, with an anticipatory syllable at the end of
each talea, thus making for slight irregularity in matching corresponding syllables in
successive isorhythmic taleae. The setting is largely syllabic, though there is some room
for alternative placements; some discrepancies seem deliberate, as between motetus
breves 75–​76, 91–​92, to avoid breaking a word with a rest. All parts are strictly iso-
rhythmic throughout the three taleae within each color statement. There is only one
small deviation, at the end of the final triplum talea: for porta celi (at triplum B150) a
semibreve of taleae 1 and 2 is broken into two minims in talea 3.11 This enables the two
words to be pronounced without splitting ce-​li with a rest. Interruption of words by rests
is largely but not entirely avoided, but increases in the final color, where the fast syllabic
setting on minims with hockets is often punctuated by minim rests.
The motet was made virtually contrafact-​proof by the tight and ingenious fit of
words to music, largely syllabic; by the composer’s self-​naming in the motetus, its
cross-​reference to the names in the triplum; and by the statement of the resulting tenor
proportions (‘twice by hemiola’). Solmisation puns have been noted in other motets,
sometimes with notated signs, as in Musicorum, where mira falls on mi–​fa (Ch. 18). Sub
Arturo’s mire has a signed mi, but the pun is not continued. Rhyming mi–​fa solmisation
puns also occur here on 85 ligant, 40 rimans [sic].

Music: Tenor

In omnem terram (‘into all the earth’) are the tenor words of both Apollinis and Sub
Arturo, as noted already. But despite the same words, each tenor uses a different
chant. In omnem terram has many liturgical placements and different melodies (at
least for the apostles Thomas, Simon and Jude) but, because of a long melisma, the
only words associated with the portion used are In omnem ter-​, suggesting also a
pun on ‘three’ (cf. numerus ter in its motetus text) and the three color statements
of each tenor. The tenor chant of Sub Arturo was identified by Günther as a slightly
shortened and transposed version of the first antiphon for the first Nocturn for the
Common of Apostles, those ambassadors sent out to the ends of the earth.12 The
tenor color corresponds to a more extensive passage from this well-​known psalm,
whose words are given more fully in Q15: ‘In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum
et in fines orbis [terre verba eorum]’ (Their sound is gone out into all lands and

10 The conspicuous tribrachic group of six syllabic minims at the end of each of the first motetus taleae per-

haps reflects a similar verbal rush before the hockets in each talea of Musicalis.
11 This introduction of an extra minim near the end, if compositional and not editorial-​scribal, may con-

tribute to the minim play in this motet (J. Alanus minimus). Is it, in part, a repayment of the minim dropped
from the opening rhythmic quotation from Apollinis (Fig. 20.1 below)? Is that dropped minim also or instead
reflected in the foreshortening of the final triplum talea? Minim puns might be at work here (also in Sub
Arturo’s neighbour in Yox, O amicus/​Precursoris (Ch. 22), in turn punningly related to the verbal form of the
authorial signature, ‘J. Alanus minimus sese recommendat’, itself borrowed from Apollinis: ‘recommendans
fg.gdg
se’ (minimus is set to the first three notes of ): an error here in Bent, Two 14th-​Century Motets.
12 Günther, CMM 39, pp. liii–​ iv, gives four versions, none of which corresponds closely. Alice Clark,
‘Concordare cum materia’, H31 (228) gives more chants, but this confirms Günther’s assessment that the
chant has been adapted. The taleae are so arranged that each ends with a stepwise descent to facilitate cadence
formation.
376 The Musician Motets

[their words] to the ends of the earth). In Yox the tenor is labelled not ‘In omnem
terram’ but its continuation, ‘exivit sonus eorum’, and in Chantilly the tenor is la-
belled ‘Tenor de sub archuro’, without reference to the chant. Günther suggested that
it might be a hitherto untraceable melody to In omnem terram,13 but the tenor chant
has now been identified by Kévin Roger: see Chapter 19.
The mode II chant tenor of Sub Arturo on d has its recitation tone on f. In the
motet it is transposed up a fifth with recitation on c, where both tenors end; sev-
eral melodic cells are common to the two chants, in addition to the repeated cs. See
Example 20.2.14

Ex. 20.2 Tenors of Apollinis and Sub Arturo. Shared notes are bracketed and taleae are
labelled

( )

( )

The last note-​group of the Apollinis tenor, g a c d c (uninterrupted by rests), is con-

trived also to be the last five notes of the portion of the different chant selected for the
Sub Arturo tenor. In both motets, this note-​group ends each of the three color statements,
and hence the whole piece, making a striking and audible piece of quotation and con-
nection. In addition, the first color of Sub Arturo presents the same group, interrupted
by the notes c b. Although both chant segments end on c, the Apollinis tenor is its middle
voice, and the final sonority is f c f, whereas in Sub Arturo it is the lowest voice, and the
final sonority is c g c. Comparable affinities between the tenors of Apollinis and Alma
were noted in Chapter 19, yet another way in which these motets nod at each other and
their predecessors.
The tenor color of Sub Arturo, notated only once, is to be stated three times. Each
talea consists of eight notes, four longs and four breves, plus four breves rest, yielding
a total of eight imperfect longs (16 breves). Three 16-​breve taleae in each of three
colores yield a total of 144 breves (16 × 3 =​48; 48 × 3 =​144). These breves, however,
are of successively reducing length, as prescribed by successive mensuration signs,
requiring breves of respectively 9, 6 and 4 minims. This is not diminution, because
the tenor notes retain their status as longs and breves throughout; diminution as
strictly defined in fourteenth-​century terms involves substitution of the next note-​
level down.15 The acceleration is achieved by mensural redefinition: in Q15 by verti-
øçc
cally aligned mensuration signs , , , and in Chantilly by the equivalent verbal
canon: ‘Canon primo de tempore perfecto maioris, secundo de tempore imperfecto

13 CMM 39, p. xlvi compares the tenors of Alma polis and Apollinis with the Offertory. The source chant of

the Apollinis tenor exists in many variant versions and on various pitches, from which it is transposed up an
octave, fourth or fifth. Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, H9.
14 Cf. Paris279, which starts cd; the others start dd. Shared notes are bracketed and taleae are labelled.
15 Bent, ‘The Myth’.
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 377

maioris, tertio de tempore imperfecto minoris.’ This is written by the main scribe
at the foot of the page. A later hand has added in cursive the same canon under the
tenor itself, but supplying prolacionis after each clause. In all three manuscripts the
tenor is marked with :|||: for threefold repetition; in Q15 these strokes are written as
dragma-​like forms.

Music: Upper Parts

The counterpoint is ingeniously managed throughout, achieving a higher level of con-

sonance at the minim level than in most compositions of around 1400. Each upper
part makes good counterpoint independently with the tenor, as do the two parts with
each other. The motetus occasionally underpins what would otherwise be an exposed
fourth with the tenor.16 Parallel seconds at B76 are in both sources and the voices
have a certain individual logic. However, they stand out, without obvious purpose,
and I have emended triplum b a to c b. Some ambiguities surround the final cadence.
A breve rest is notated in Yox and Chantilly before the final breve of the motetus
(in Chantilly the final is a maxima), completing the motetus talea, and sounding the
final g after the triplum and tenor have made their final cadence on c. This rest and
breve are replaced in Q15 with a coloured (void) long, so that the motetus coincides
with the tenor at the final cadence. In the triplum, Chantilly (but again, not Q15)
follows the last (necessarily perfect) semibreve of its truncated talea with a minim rest
at B152. This appears to imperfect the final S, but it cannot do so without (unaccept-
ably) making the final triplum c coincide with the motetus f s.17 The rest enables the
triplum to cadence with the tenor; otherwise Q15’s penultimate triplum note would
need to be extended by a minim.
The total tenor length of 144 breves connects it to Apollinis and Musicorum. But
in Sub Arturo the tenor breves are of different lengths, whereas the triplum remains
ç
in throughout, in the transcription with 154 numbered breves including the final
long, but since 131 and 142 are half-​bars, the final count for the triplum is actually
153 breves, which is satisfyingly divisible by 3, and the number of the miraculous
draft of fishes (John 21: 1–​14). The final color has an unusual and highly ingenious
lateral displacement of the triplum against both other parts, a ‘creeping’ shift of
alignment: the three iterations of the triplum talea, still strictly isorhythmic within
that color, are successively shorter by a minim (63 minims =​9 × 7) than those of
the motetus and tenor (64 minims =​82). It progressively gains on those parts by a
minim in each talea. The motetus coincides with the triplum in the first talea of the
final color before this foreshortening. Its taleae continue to be coterminous with the
ç c
tenor’s, but while it remains in against the tenor’s , there is considerable dis-
turbance from syncopation, caused mainly by coloration, and by dint of the final

16 At breves 17, 65, 84, 109, 116, 146.

17 Commentary in Appendix to this chapter. The final sonority of motetus and tenor is notated as eight
minims, the triplum technically with twelve minims, a minor and allowable untidiness given the virtu-
osic combination of mensurations in the final section. Such anomalies in the length of a final note are quite
common; see also Alma polis, and on endings in Ch. 1.
378 The Musician Motets

ç
coloration group in each talea, which exceeds a count by four minims, to align it
with the imperfect tempus of the tenor.18
Not only do we hear the interplay, in excited cross-​rhythms, of the major prolation
triplum with the coloration syncopations of the motetus and the minor prolation of
the tenor, but the triplum relates differently to the two other parts at each iteration. No
other fourteenth-​century motet even approaches this complexity. Something compa-
rable occurs in the mensuration canon in OH, Credo no. 75, and the complete void-​
notation Credo Omni tempore (in Yox, the same manuscript as the English source of
Sub Arturo: see Ch. 23), where equal-​length segments in the upper parts are combined
with non-​coincident mensural transformation and diminution in the lower parts.19 The
effect is to heighten excitement towards the end, to demonstrate virtuosity, and to de-
velop with minims the minim pun (‘J. Alanus minimus’). At the very point where the
composer is about to play with time by foreshortening the triplum by one minim at the
end of the first truncated talea, he announces this emphatically with the words ‘triplo
modulatur’ in the motetus, and ‘his triplo mirifico’ directly preceding the first triplum
talea statement in its new alignment. The now displaced second talea starts with the
anticipatory syllable ‘Pre-​pollet G. de horarum fonte’, ‘Tideswell’, again playing on fons,
and on time (horarum). It ends with Simon Clemens’s shining hand on the organ and
coincides with the motetus signature of ‘J. Alanus minimus’. Other fourteenth-​century
motet tenors subject to mensural reinterpretation combine perfect and imperfect
tempus between the parts, but usually in such a way that there is a regular coincidence
of bars, as there is in Alma polis despite the irregularities. Even Inter densas, with the
extreme mensural manipulations of its tenor (see Ch. 1), achieves more regular coordi-
nation than in the artfully contrived last color of Sub Arturo.
Grammatically, the triplum and motetus of Sub Arturo are mostly self-​contained, but
at a few places (for example, breves 17–​18, 65, 84, 109, 116, 129, 146) the motetus rather
than the tenor underpins the counterpoint. Consonance is handled very deftly, much
more so than in Alma polis, and conspicuously so at the minim level in the rhythmically
complex third color. Even the most complex first-​layer Old Hall compositions rarely
achieve such precisely calculated consonance. There is a conspicuous punning on ‘A’,
letter and note, between some of the motets, and Apollinis starts on the note a. Triplum
and motetus of Sub Arturo start on a unison g, before the tenor entry on g, which might
be regarded as starting ‘Sub A . . . ’, i.e. on g, the note below a.

Notation

In Apollinis the breve is imperfected, but by no more than a single minim, and there
are no altered minims.20 In Sub Arturo plebs the breve is imperfected from both sides
by minims, and by a minim and minim rest, as well as by a single minim. Sub Arturo
alters minims before semibreves, which places it notationally beyond Apollinis. The

18 Wrongly transcribed in CMM 39, correctly in PMFC 5.

19 The notationally redundant syncopation dots strike an archaic note in this highly sophisticated
composition.
20 In Ivrea two minims in breve 118 require alteration, but this seems to be an error.
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 379

younger work, unlike Apollinis, also has minim hockets with paired as well as single
minim rests.
Coloration in the fourteenth century was mostly confined to tenor and contratenor
parts of a handful of motets by Vitry and Machaut and a few pieces in Ivrea.21 In earlier
instances, it was usually confined to modus change. If Sub Arturo is as early as has pre-
viously been suggested, the motetus coloration would represent one of the earliest
instances of coloration to effect mensural change to imperfection (in this case minor
prolation) in a voice other than the tenor or contratenor, and at a sub-​breve level. Sub
Arturo uses imperfection coloration in the motetus in a very subtle way. The three
øçc ç
mensurally different tenor statements , , are pitted against the of the upper
parts, as explained above.
The coloured notes (void in Q15) must have originally been red, because of their
associated rests, as they are in Chantilly and Yox, needing no change of signature to
colour-​code the shift to imperfect time and minor prolation. Chantilly adds redundant
v
(and anomalous) signatures for the red coloration passages. Q15 presents the void
c
notes with a signature, which in this case is necessary in order to ensure that the rests
are imperfect, as they cannot be distinguished in monochrome notation: void rests are
not possible.
The dating of Yox is uncertain (see Ch. 22). Of the two pairs of flyleaves preserved in
that volume, the motet bifolio containing Sub Arturo is in black notation, the other (with
mass movements) in void. Sub Arturo is followed on what was a centre gathering by a
motet of different but comparable ingenuity. The void notation of the Credo bifolio would
normally suggest a date after 1400. Despite the different scribes and notation, it seems
likely that the bifolios are from the same original manuscript, on grounds of format and
their survival in the same binding, as well as by the advanced nature of the compositions
in both. A date between 1400 and 1410 seems likely. But Yox also has some notational
Anglicisms: atavistic major semibreve rests intersecting the line, and swallowtailed
minims for alteration before both red and black semibreves, which would have been old-​
fashioned by 1410. Fountains, a paper manuscript using void notation, probably dates
from soon after 1400; it also has swallowtails and major semibreve rests, though these
and other English notational particularities have been eliminated in OH (whose scribe
took a number of editorial initiatives), and are not found in any later manuscripts.
The placing of the coloration passages in relation to the text has often been managed
playfully: the word colores falls at a change from red to black; normis straddles another
return to black notation. The striking and audible syncopating coloration in the motetus
(color II, 1a) reflects the reference to Franco in the motetus text: Franco gave measure
to music ‘which the colours bind’, though not as far as we know did he introduce red
notation. Coloration also coincides with ‘huius pes triplarii’, which announces the
mensurally achieved proportional relationship in a passage of red imperfect semibreves,
three imperfect in the time of two perfect notes, the second group of which starts at bis.
Recitatur also embodies the idea of repetition and heralds the third color. The motetus
coloration and the tenor mensurations may be considered to realise the ‘modo colorum
vario’ of Apollinis, triplum line 9. The reference in Sub Arturo to Guido’s invention of the

21 And one Machaut ballade, B4, with tenor coloration.

380 The Musician Motets

lines and spaces (motetus lines 16–​18, B64–​B72) is accompanied by eight successive notes
in spaces and then eleven lines in the original C clefs, not a result likely to occur by accident.

Relation to Earlier Musician Motets

Sub Arturo responds virtuosically, in both texts and music, to other members of this in-
terconnected, international and, indeed, competitive group of musician motets, of which
the earliest is Apollinis, Sub Arturo perhaps the latest. Many of those interconnections
have already been noted. Apollinis and Sub Arturo are both underpinned by a tenor
with the same words of the psalmist, singer and ‘citharist’ King David, In omnem terram
(Their sound is gone out into all lands, even unto the ends of the earth), from Psalm 18,
whose unquoted first line ‘Celi enarrant gloriam Dei’ (‘The heavens are telling the glory
of God’) resonates with the pun in the first line of Sub Arturo ‘under the North Star’.
The double meaning of Arthur for English kingship and Ar[c]‌turus the star echoes the
strategy of Apollinis, where Apollo stands for both the sun and music.
In Sub Arturo, the tenor accompanies a triplum that aligns King Arthur (a young
warrior king like Henry V) with the words of another young warrior, King David the
psalmist, with a northern star (Arcturus) and with what it is that the heavens are telling.
However, In omnem terram has, as shown above, several different liturgical placements
and melodies: the two motets are based on different chants to these words; this is just one
instance of how motets cite or acknowledge each other with creative variation. Much
of the vocabulary is shared with Apollinis/​Zodiacum and with Musicorum collegio/​In
templo Dei. The stanzaic structure of both triplum and motetus may echo that of the—​
probably English—​additional voice for Apollinis, Psallentes zinzugia (Ch. 16).
Apollinis praises Apollo and Orpheus, and in Sub Arturo’s motetus the Orphic fount
of Apollinis becomes the Jubal of Genesis 4: 21 (by medieval tradition given errone-
ously as Tubal; see above, n.5), a biblical Fons citharizancium. As we saw, the words
‘Orpheÿco potus fonte’ in Apollinis recur as ‘Orpheico fonte poti’ in Alma polis, making
as direct a quotation as we find between any of the texts, and at nearly the same mid-
point position in each of them. Fons in the two earlier motets referred to the spring of
the Muses as a source of artistic inspiration; the Muses were presided over by Apollo,
the teacher of Orpheus. What was Orpheus’ instrument, or indeed Jubal’s? If J. Alanus
thought it could be called a cithara, we might treat Fons citharizancium as a direct
reference to that Orphic line already quoted in Alma polis from Apollinis. The refer-
ence to the Orphic topos and the line borrowed in those two motets suggests that the
author of Sub Arturo/​Fons knew Alma polis as well as Apollinis. Apollo, Orpheus and
Jubal, like King David, were all citharistae. ‘Cithara’ at this period is a general-​purpose
word for any plucked string instrument, often translated as ‘harp’ or ‘gittern’. But the
instruments of Apollo and Orpheus could also be referenced in Apollinis, and that of
David in the common source of their tenor texts in Psalm 18. Perhaps even more to
the point is the position of fons, which occurs likewise just after the textual midpoint
in Apollinis and Alma polis in the three-​word Orphic line and is the opening word of
the motetus of Sub Arturo/​Fons citharizancium. Fons is recapitulated twice; in line 16
as Guido fons inicia, and at the beginning of line 22 as Fontes. Fonte lira starts line 36 of
the 45-​line triplum of Sub Arturo (the motetus has 36 lines). In Sub Arturo, the main
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 381

(line-​beginning) recapitulation of fons/​fontes occurs just after the midpoint as it does

in Apollinis and Alma polis. Fons is also the first word of the later, fragmentary motet
Fons origo musicorum (Ch. 21), and a reason for tentatively attaching that fragment to
the group. In Apollinis, Example 16.1, triplum line 14, the words ‘tonorum tenorem
bene’ coincide with ‘Boetii basis solercia’ in the motetus, straddling the midpoint of
the music at B72. The triplum of Sub Arturo links those simultaneous words succes-
sively in ‘basis aurea tenorum’ (line 24, B99).
The connection of both Alma polis and Sub Arturo to Apollinis is certain, for reasons
given above. The composer of Alma polis knew not only Apollinis but also Musicorum
collegio, to which references are strong. Axe poli ends with the line ‘usque terre limitem’,
which provides a paraphrase of the continuation of the In omnem terram text beyond
the point used in either tenor (Apollinis and Sub Arturo), defining the limits of the earth.
Beyond the Jubal–​Orpheus–​cithara link, the evidence for direct knowledge of Alma
polis by the composer of Sub Arturo is oblique. Both motets are among the most com-
plex in Chantilly. The polar aspects of artica explored in Alma polis/​Axe poli might be
reflected in Ar[c]‌turus (in the northern constellation Boötes) with or without the later
piece having knowledge of the earlier. Certainly the play on words and the letter ‘A’ is
striking, perhaps also taken up punningly in Arta/​Musicus est ille (Ch. 21) and other
uses of the word ars. There may be a further correspondence. In Alma polis the next
line is ‘ac uterque Ydrolanus’. Ydrolanus is a water trough, but ydraulis could also denote
water organs; [or]ganizancium in Sub Arturo is set to the same descending fifth in the
same rhythm as ydrolanus in Alma polis, where it is a fourth higher. This phrase in turn
is part of the descending seventh mentioned above that derives from Zodiacum, and
appears in spectacular and prominent form at the beginning of Musicorum collegio at
the same pitch used also for Fons citharizancium.
As noted above, Sub Arturo’s Genesis (‘genesis testatur’) responds (with a stronger
rhythmic tribrach) to Musicorum collegio’s Apocalypse (‘ut testatur apocalipsis’),
creating another elliptical beginning and end, A–​Z. In Sub Arturo, Tubal (recte Jubal)
fashions the beginnings of music, ‘sculpans ut historia’, at the beginning of the Genesis-​
based motetus, implying the beginnings of creation more generally; Musicorum gives
sculptor as one of the three central creative names in its Apocalyptic first-​person
motetus (as noted). Apollinis referred in the motetus to the names listed in the triplum,
‘musicorum tripli materia’: both Musicorum collegio (‘nomina sunt scripta tripli
pagina’) and Sub Arturo (‘quorum nominum tripli modulatur’) do likewise. In any case,
Musicorum and Sub Arturo are related to each other even as each derives more directly
from Apollinis. Musicorum names seven and Sub Arturo twice seven musicians.
Sub Arturo has many verbal echoes of Apollinis and Musicorum collegio, as well as
striking musical cross-​references. Just as Musicorum collegio quotes its opening words
and rhythm from within the triplum of Apollinis, Sub Arturo takes its opening triplum
rhythm from the opening of the triplum of Apollinis, with only one minim variant in a
passage of sixteen notes, seventeen in Apollinis (see Fig. 20.1).

Fig. 20.1 Opening triplum rhythms of Apollinis and Sub Arturo

382 The Musician Motets

The variant is due to the alteration of a minim; see above for the argument that this
was not yet in the rhythmic vocabulary of the composer of Apollinis.
Because there are three taleae to each color, with exact upper-​part isorhythm within
each, this opening triplum rhythm is repeated at the beginning of each of the first three
taleae (3 × 12 notes). The second talea opens, in both triplum and motetus, with a trans-
position up a tone of the first four breves of the opening—​only the first two triplum
pitches are different. Moreover, just as this triplum quotation ends, the motetus Fons
citharizancium has a descending seventh from g down to a on ‘ac organizancium’. This
descending scale refers to the opening of Musicorum collegio, which quotes words and
rhythm from Apollinis to the notes of that same descending seventh g to a, which in
turn derives from the prominent descending seventh from d down to e at the begin-
ning of Zodiacum. Thus, in pitches and rhythms a correspondence of Sub Arturo to the
parent motet is established as strongly as it is for Musicorum collegio. Among additional
reasons for believing that the composer of Sub Arturo knew Musicorum collegio are the
choice of the same pitches for the descending seventh at the beginning and Sub Arturo’s
‘genesis testatur’, balancing Musicorum’s ‘testatur apocalipsis’.
Bis occurs in three of the motets. In Apollinis, the number 12 is presented as bis sex.
In Musicorum, ‘bis acuto gladio’ ‘cuts’ the main structural join between the two color
statements. In Sub Arturo, ‘bis sub emiolii’ prescribes or describes the three color
statements that stand in a hemiolic relationship, 9:6:4. Sub Arturo doubles (bis) the
number of musicians in Musicorum from seven to fourteen.
The later motet thus recognises its predecessors, and particularly Apollinis, as both in
different ways celebrate the cosmic sound of music. We noted that twelves underpin the
words and music of Apollinis; the Pythagorean numbers from which the musical ratios
derive, 6, 8, 9 and 12, are all factors of 144 (122) and are conspicuously exploited in these
motets, and of course not only these. Pythagoras is named in Alanus’s review of music
theory, as well as in Apollinis. We saw that the triplum of Musicorum collegio names
seven musicians at the French court, linking them to the seven stars and candelabra of
the Apocalypse (which also records the spreading of the gospel to the seven churches
of Asia). The number of English musicians praised in the triplum of Sub Arturo—​
fourteen—​is twice that number, perhaps going one better than the twelve (bis sex)
musicians of Apollinis. It continues the astral references of these predecessors, Arcturus
being the brightest star in the northern constellation Boötes, as well as referring to
Arthur, king of a northern nation.

The Musicians Named in Sub Arturo plebs

This strikingly unusual composition had been noted for nearly a century before
Brian Trowell brought it into prominence in 1957 with his ingenious unmaskings of
Latinised versions of English vernacular names, and a series of archival identifications
for many of those celebrated, mostly in English royal household chapels (of Edward
III, Richard II, John of Gaunt, the Black Prince, and St George’s, Windsor).22 These

22 Brian Trowell noted: ‘The texts of Sub Arturo, naming the composer and several other musicians, enjoy

a long historiography as literary curiosities, beginning with Coussemaker’s edition of 1869’ (Les Harmonistes,
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 383

identifications led him to date the motet for the Garter celebrations at Windsor in
1358 following the victory at Poitiers. Because of this early dating, Trowell thought
that Sub Arturo was earlier than the clearly related Apollinis eclipsatur, whose text
‘is so close to the English motet in some respects that it appears to be an answer to
Aleyn’s challenge’.23 Writing before modern editions of most of these motets had been
published, he had not seen a transcription of Apollinis, and it is now clear that the re-
lationship must have been the other way round. Indeed, at that time, little was known
of the fourteenth-​century French repertory, let alone of English motets, but discom-
fort was soon expressed by others with such an early date for the advanced musical
style of this apparently isolated work.24
As knowledge of English fourteenth-​century music increased, especially with the
publication of PMFC, volumes 14–​17, Trowell’s dating of 1358 came to seem too early.
Already in 1986 Harrison wrote that the advanced structure of Sub Arturo is the only
thing that argues against Trowell’s 1358 dating, though even there the spread of dates
makes it unlikely that only ‘fellow choir members’ are named.25 In 1990 Roger Bowers
revised and extended some of the identifications and their archival anchorage, pointing
up their wide chronological span—​the earliest candidate proposed is documented in
1341 and the latest died in 1420—​and arguing that some of the datings must be retro­
spective. Bowers gives the triplum spelling variants; the presentation of the names
differs considerably between the sources.26 He moved the date forward to the early
1370s, still treating the terminus ante quem as the death in late 1373 of the royal chaplain

12ff.); Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​Century Ceremonial Motet’, 74. Some of the musicians named in Sub Arturo
are completely obscure to us, and at a distance of two or three generations must have been equally so to the
compiler of this text. But this is just a reminder of something already familiar from other sources: some of
the names on Loyset Compère’s famous musical roll-​call in the motet Omnium bonorum plena, alongside the
names of Du Fay, Ockeghem, Busnois, Caron and Josquin, are equally unknown to us. See Wathey, ‘The Peace
of 1360–​1369’, 150.

23 Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​Century Ceremonial Motet’, 74.

24 Including by Günther in CMM 39 (pp. li–​lii), and more strongly in Bent, ‘Transmission’, 70–​72, and in
Bent, Two 14th-​Century Motets. I would now disown the performative concessions I made there in barring the
lower parts to fit with the regular 6/​8 of the triplum, and seek a layout that better reflects the interplay of the si-
multaneous mensurations; see Ex. 20.1. Günther’s transcription (CMM 39) is wrongly aligned in the final
section. Harrison’s (PMFC 5) is correctly aligned, and he gives tables of the musicians in this group of motets.
When Trowell was writing in 1957 he had access only to the facsimile of Chantilly in Wolf, Musikalische
Schrifttafeln, pll. 30–​31, and the edition in Ficker, Sieben Trienter Codices, 9–​11.
25 Harrison, Musicorum collegio, p. v.
26 Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’, at 321–​22, 327–​29. At p. 322, citing Trowell: ‘For the fifteen named musicians

he was able to propose identifications that have proved convincing for no fewer than eleven, almost all
of whom were active at some point in their careers as members either of the Chapel Royal of Edward III
and Richard II or of the chapel of Edward, Prince of Wales (the Black Prince), between the 1340s and the
1380s. On the grounds that all the named musicians must have been alive when the text and music were
written, Trowell gave late 1358 as the terminus non post quem for the composition of the motet and, indeed,
proposed Edward III’s extravagant congregation of the Knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle in April
1358.’ In a 1999 supplement to ‘Fixed Points’, Bowers dates Sub Arturo before the death of John Aleyn in late
1373, to the early 1370s ‘on the grounds that it would not have been possible for that particular collection of
names to have been made any earlier than about 1370’. I doubt if his dating would have been so constrained
without a death date for Aleyn; he does not consider that it might be later. Bowers shows that at the end of
his life (1372) Aleyn withdrew from court to live as a canon residentiary at Exeter, of which he had held an
absentee prebend since 1370. Bowers interprets this as a ‘disastrous’ falling out with the king, but it could
have a much more innocent explanation, such as old age. He also interprets the motet as an act of propi-
tiation for this hypothesised disaster, in which Alanus ‘urges the list of musicians (or the potency of their
memory, in the case of those deceased) to defend him from the malice of the envious and to prevail upon
their lord in Aleyn’s favour’.
384 The Musician Motets

and canon of Windsor, Johannes Alanus (or Aleyn), who owned ‘unus rotulus de cantu
musicali’, and assumed by both him and Trowell to be the composer.27
In an article published in 1990, Andrew Wathey substantially extended the docu-
mentation of many of the men named in the triplum.28 He strengthened the musical
credentials of some of them, including William Mugge, dean of St George’s Chapel,
Windsor, who participated in the services of the royal chapel in the mid-​1360s, and
the Benedictine monk Edmund de Bury (alias Bokenham), described in the text of the
motet as ‘the golden foundation of the tenor’, who was in charge of the boys of the royal
chapel by 1368 and presumably responsible for their musical instruction.
But despite the evidence of names and death dates that underpins even that later
dating to the early 1370s, the motet still seems problematically precocious, both on
grounds of musical technique and of the manuscripts in which it is transmitted, given
the greater knowledge we now have of English and international musical styles in the
decades around 1400. Even a dating c. 1370 stands out as earlier by at least a full gener-
ation than the motet’s nearest musical comparands, English or otherwise, all of which
date from after 1400.29 I have noted above the late datings of sources containing this
motet, all of which suggest a date closer to 1400 than a generation earlier.
There are two men named Excestre or Exeter, John and William. Trowell thought
that William was a likely identity for the OH composer, but Harrison pointed out that
his initial there is J.30 John served as a chaplain of the chapel royal c. 1374–​96, largely
under Richard II. It is reported that John de Excestre held the prebend of Pratum Minus
at Hereford by royal grant 1389–​96, in which year on 18 October he exchanged it with
Walter Trote for a prebend in the collegiate church of St Chad, Lichfield.31 Since there
is no later trace of him, he may have died soon after 1396. Earlier in the same year,
on 19 July 1396, William de Exeter was collated to the prebend of Stotfold in Lichfield
cathedral,32 and held it until his death before 20 August 1419 when his will (dated 1
October 1416) was proved.33 William served in John of Gaunt’s chapel in 1383 and was
rewarded with many benefices including a canonry at Wells cathedral; he served in the

27 Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​Century Ceremonial Motet’, 69, refers to ‘our Aleyn’. The dating problems are

reviewed by Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’ at 150–​53, where he cites a pre-​publication version of Bowers’s
‘Fixed Points’ as dating the motet ‘c. 1380, although he too acknowledges the problems that this date presents
for the identity of John Aleyn’. Bowers evidently withdrew this dating in the final version. I have no new ar-
chival information to add to the excellent work of Trowell, Bowers and Wathey. However, Bowers continues to
insist on the death of a John Aleyn in 1373 as a terminus ante quem for the motet, regardless of musical stylistic
considerations and the anomaly of a late dating for Blithe, most recently in Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable
Songe” ’. He does not address my questioning of this early date, most recently formulated in Bent, ‘The Earliest
Fifteenth-​Century Transmission’.
28 Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’ at 150–​55 and 167–​74.
29 I have signalled this issue in Bent, ‘Transmission’, Bent, Two 14th-​Century Motets, and Ch. 22. David

Fallows agrees: ‘but an even later date becomes possible once it is accepted that the composer may not have
been the man who died in 1373 and that some of the musicians were already dead when the work was written’
and ‘Bent, “Transmission” drew attention to its classical 15th-​century structure, . . . three levels of diminution,
and rhythmic overlapping between upper voices and tenor in the final section’ (NG1, 276; Grove online, s.v.
Alanus). Lefferts, ‘Motet in England’, 28, observes: ‘The discrepancy in suggested dates for the composition of
the motet Sub Arturo plebs reaches 50 years.’
30 Harrison Music in Medieval Britain, 22.
31 The register of John Trefnant, 190; Fasti ecclesiae anglicanae, ii, Hereford, 43. Stow, ‘Richard II’s Interest in

Music’, cites CPR 1391–​96, p. 664 and CPR 1396–​99, p. 17.

32 Fasti ecclesiae anglicanae, x, Lichfield, 56. Not ‘John’ (as Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’, 326).
33 As Stow reports (‘Richard II’s Interest in Music’), Somerset Medieval Wills, 75–​76. See also Ford, ‘Some

Wills’, 82.
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 385

Chapel Royal from 1392 and was a clerk of the chapel under Henry IV in 1402–​3.34
In either case, there is a long gap between the last recorded documentation before his
death, and the matter must remain uncertain. A date much before 1400, and a for-
mation in the 1360s, seems too early for the musical style, with its consonant coun-
terpoint, tripartite structure, ingenious rhythms and extensive coloration; the fact that
both careers started so early may cast doubt on either being the OH composer. If either
J. Excestre or W. Excestre was the composer, their service respectively under Richard II
and John of Gaunt increases the possibility that Pycard and Mayshuet are indeed to be
identified with the French musicians hired by John of Gaunt in that decade, and that the
compositions of this group around and after 1400 could have formed the nucleus of the
OH repertory. (See Ch. 24.)
Because Bowers assumed that it was John of Exeter who died in 1419, he thought that
‘he could well have been of the same youthful generation as Richard Blithe, with whom
the text of the triplum closely associates him’.35 ‘Ricardi Blith’ was already identified by
Trowell as Ricardus Blithe, a member of Henry V’s chapel, who lived until 1420, though
Trowell and Bowers admitted he would have had to be very old by then if praised in a
work of 1370, let alone of 1358.36 He is named together with Excestre in stanza 4; but the
names do not seem to be in any kind of chronological order.37 A younger Blithe would
fit well with a later compositional date: the motet’s roll of honour is already recognised
as historicising, and a later dating simply extends the period of retrospection.38 The fact
that the motetus of Sub Arturo covers such a long range gives some credence to a long-​
range retrospective reading of the identities of the musicians named in the triplum text.
That the triplum names are largely unfamiliar to us is hardly an objection to such an
interpretation.
By contrast with the earlier musician motets, which were often unspecific about
whether the musician being praised was composer, theorist, singer or instrumentalist,
Sub Arturo plebs is highly specific. It names ‘J de alto bosco’, a latinisation of J Hauboys,
presumably as the theorist we know (probably mistakenly) as Hanboys (active c. 1375).

34 Stow, ‘Richard II’s Interest in Music’, cites TNA E.101/​404/​21, f. 50.

35 Exeter and Blithe post-​date the focus in the 1360s of Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’ article. Wathey
(email of 28.12.2016) reports new material on Richard Blithe (or Blich) relating to the payment of his pen-
sion from the parish of West Kington, Wilts., which he was granted on 9.4.1419 (as noted in Trowell, ‘Later
Plantagenets’). The payment suggests that Blithe died after Easter 1420, and—​as was already known—​
before 8 September that year. The new material consists of entries in the Wiltshire Sheriff ’s accounts in the
Pipe Rolls (National Archives, E 372) and a set of letters in the King’s Remembrancer Memoranda Rolls (E
159) instructing the Exchequer to make allowance in the Sheriff ’s accounts for these sums. Wathey further
clarifies: ‘The pension was payable by either the Sheriff of Wiltshire or the Vicar of West Kington, and it may
be that they alternated (there is no entry in the Sheriff ’s accounts for Michaelmas term 2019).’
36 Long before Trowell and Bowers, Bukofzer, Studies, 76–​77, had already pointed out that the John Aleyn

who died in 1373 was too early to be the composer. Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​Century Ceremonial Motet’, 65.
37 Stanza 2, John of Corby; stanza 3, John Hauboys, Thomas Marcon; stanza 4, Richard Blithe, John

of Exeter; stanza 5, William Mugge, Edmund of Bury; stanza 6, William Oxwick, John Ipswich; stanza 7,
Nicholas ‘of Hungerford’, Edmund de Miresco; stanza 8, William of Tideswell, Simon Clement; stanza 9,
Adam the Deacon.
38 See Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’ and Wathey for summary identifications. David Fallows makes the point of

generational spread in ‘Alanus’, NG2, i. 276. Fallows notes that four songs ascribed to him in Stras are hard to
compare with the motet. The virelai S’en vous pour moy and Min herze wil all zit (also with the contrafactum
text O quam pulchra) ‘could just be aligned stylistically with the English song repertory of the years around
1400; but Min frow, min frow es tut mir we . . . seems thoroughly German in style and its text fits the music
well. Of the fourth song only an untexted incipit survives.’ For another example of retrospective historicising
see Ch. 3.
386 The Musician Motets

As composers it names John of Corby, royal chaplain 1358–​66, who may be too early;
Richard Blithe, clerk of the Chapel Royal 1406, 1413–​19, d. in 1420, adding another
composer to the chapels of Henry IV and V; John of Exeter, royal chaplain 1372–​1402,
d. by 1419, who may be the OH composer William Oxwick (past tense, last referred to in
1363); and maybe Thomas Marcon, Chapel Royal chaplain, 1384–​1403, 1405, d. 1407.39

J. Alanus

Certainly, most of the musicians named can still be plausibly identified with the
fourteenth-​century candidates proposed by Trowell and amplified by Bowers and
Wathey, though these may not in all cases be the only possibilities; but it is the latest,
not the average dates that must count, and the retrospective character of the listing may
have to be extended forward over a longer period.40 The fact that the named musicians
do not include those we would have thought of as front runners is surely a reminder of
how little we know and how much has been lost. I would now go further than Bowers,
set aside the Alanus who died in 1373, argue that the motet was retrospective from the
position of its latest named musicians and, on grounds of compositional techniques and
comparands, move the composition date forward to c. 1400 or into the early fifteenth
century. Bowers indeed showed that some of the musicians were already dead when it
was composed, not still living, as Trowell had assumed; a later date becomes possible if
the composer was not the man who died in 1373.
If the composer J. Alanus is correctly identified with the Chapel Royal member and
King’s clerk John Aleyn who died in 1373, Sub Arturo can be no later. As a canon of St
George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1363 he went to Salisbury together with one of the vicars
choral to correct the Windsor chant books against Salisbury exemplars, and at his death
in 1373 he bequeathed ‘unus rotulus de cantu musicali’ to St George’s.41 Despite these
musical credentials, there are no compelling reasons to identify the composer with this
rather than some other, later, J. Alanus, such as (but not necessarily) the John Aleyn who
became a minor canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and died in 1437, or some other undocu-
mented Alanus, as suggested by Manfred Bukofzer.42 Even a proposed identification

39 Using datings from Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’, it requires more than a stretch to assume that Marcon (d.

1407), Blithe (d. 1420) and the John Exeter who died in 1419 had made their reputations in time to be praised
by a man who died in 1373. G. de Horarum Fonte could alternatively (although the translation is less literal
than ‘Tideswell’) be the William Bonetemps documented as a chorister in the chapel of Richard II from 1384,
a fellow of King’s Hall 1388–​94. He served in the chapels of Henry IV and V and held a number of benefices,
including a canonry at Windsor until his death in 1442 (Stow, ‘Richard II’s Interest in Music’, 40–​41).
40 Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’, 211, asserts that ‘Although there may be anomalies, it appears

that this aggregation of names could not have been compiled much later than the early 1370s, and that the
motet was composed toward the end of his life by one John Aleyn, a chaplain of the Chapel Royal of Edward
III from 1360 × 1362 until his death at the end of 1373.’ Anomalies indeed! Bowers leans to an earlier iden-
tification for Exeter, without taking into account that the later man is specified as a composer, which surely
favours him as a candidate for the OH composer.
41 Bond, Inventories, 34, 103; Wathey, ‘Lost Books’, 13, no. 133. Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’, 167–​68.

Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’, 333.

42 Bukofzer, Studies, 76f. Trowell, ‘A Fourteenth-​C entury Ceremonial Motet’, 65: ‘Now Dom Anselm

Hughes had tentatively identified Aleyn with John Aleyn, canon of Windsor, who on his death in 1373 left
“unus Rotulus de Cantu musico” to St George’s Chapel there. Bukofzer brushed this aside: it would not tally
well with the other known dates concerning OH composers; and furthermore, Sub Arturo names a certain
 Sub arturo/Fons citharizancium 387

with the Old Hall composer Aleyn can probably be discounted, not only because of
the impossibility of cross-​generic comparisons with the simple style of Aleyn’s Old Hall
pieces, but also because his (erased) initial there seems to be ‘W’ not ‘J’.43 Alanus/​Allen
is a very common name, and musical style gives no reason to link the two composers.
Four songs in Strasbourg ascribed to ‘Alanus’ without initial are likewise rather simple
in style. Roger Bowers himself has warned against assuming that identity of names can
be aligned with composer identity,44 and the recently uncovered multiple owners of the
name John Dunstaple should serve as a caution. The motet surely cannot be the only
clever and exciting piece by J. Alanus, but we know of no others. In any case, if he were
the Old Hall composer, this would have dating implications for the motet.

Comparands and Dating

Everything about the musical style and technique of Sub Arturo suggests a dating in the
early fifteenth century. Only two other motets, both English, both in OH, have the un-
usual overall proportions 9:6:4, likewise achieved by mensural change: Cooke’s Alma
proles regia (OH 112) and the anonymous and incomplete motet Carbunculus ignitus
lilie (OH 143; see Ch. 25), of which only the triplum survives. The latter is in the main
corpus of OH (composed before c. 1413), the former a later addition by one of Henry
V’s chaplains to that manuscript when it came into their hands. In both of these, the
texted parts change mensuration to accommodate the tenor changes and do not attempt
the ambitious mensural conflict or artful irregularity of Sub Arturo. For these other
motets, see Chapter 25.
Rather than casting doubt on the younger identifications, I challenge the proposal
that the composer was the Alanus who died in 1373. The 1370s now carry some pre-
cious datings around which chronological proposals can be suggested. The motet Ferre
solet carries the date 1373 within its text;45 the main body of the Trém index carries a
terminus ante quem of 1376; and the motet Rex Karole celebrating Charles V (d. 1380) is
dated by Günther 1375, by Carolann Buff 1378 (see Ch. 27 n.8). Sub Arturo would be
inconceivably precocious to be earlier than these. I am therefore suggesting that Sub
Arturo sits most comfortably after 1400, perhaps even as late as 1410, on grounds of
musical style and notation, comparands, its latest identifiable named musicians, and the
dates of its sources.46

“Ricardus Blich”, whom Bukofzer equated with Richard Blithe, a member of Henry V’s Chapel Royal in
1419—​forty-​six years after the death of John Aleyn of Windsor. Bukofzer then repeated the reference to
Jean Alain quoted above, and went on to identify the composer with the John Aleyn who became a minor
canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 1421, and who died in 1437. Here the matter has been allowed
to rest.’

43 For the jolly but rather simplistic Gloria OH no. 8 only ‘Aleyn’ is visible; but for an erased Agnus on f. 102,

no. 128, the initial seems to be W.

44 Seminar on Dunstaple, All Souls College, 21.2.2019.
45 Louviot, ‘Uncovering the Douai Fragment’.
46 If it were even a few years later than that, the valiant fights of the English under ‘Arthur’ could possibly

be added to the number of motets that refer to the military successes of that decade, with ‘Arthur’ referring to
Henry V, though such a suggestion probably stretches the dating of Chantilly and Yox too far.
388 The Musician Motets

Appendix
Variants in Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium/​In
omnem terram

Except as noted, dots of division and ligatures are entered from any source where they
appear, but are not individually specified. The delayed arrival of the motetus at the final
cadence is not dissonant, but an adjustment in Q15 nevertheless makes the motetus
coincide with the tenor; it omits the rest and breve, and gives the last two notes as void
(coloured) longs, the stem on the first of which appears to be partially erased; this so-
lution to the ending is given in Example 20.1. On non-​coincident endings, see also
Chapter 1.
Triplum: Q15 has ligatures at 73.2–​3 and 74.1–​2; but the word ac is omitted; that syl-
lable needs to be accommodated, so the ligature in 73 is not indicated in the transcrip-
tion; Chantilly triplum 5.2 d; 22.4 g; 32.2 d; 49.2 c; 54.1 f; 60.3 M; 70.4 g; 73–​4, 90, 97–8
ffd ; 99.2 b; 102.2 b; 109.1 f; no ligs; 115 s; 121 s; 121.2 f; 141 s; 143.1 a; 121 dot in
f
Chantilly. Chantilly 121.2–3 f f; 152 and no rest; rest in Chantilly only, no dot, so it
f
appears to imperfect the . Both sources at 76 have b a, which I have emended to c b to
avoid the uncharacteristic parallel seconds with the motetus.
Motetus: C3 clef; 9, 33, 57 Q15’s void coloration is preceded by (redundant) , and c
Chantilly’s red coloration is preceded by (incorrect) v; 113 Yox and Q15 c: Chantilly e;
Chantilly 6-​line staff; bb signature first three staves; 2 no s; 3.4 g; 4 erased S stem on liga-
ture?; 11, 20 Chantilly s; 19.2 d minim erased above g; 40 s placed before f; 42 dot mis-
placed after rather than before rest; 6 dot moved from after to before rest; 68 no s; 73–74
g e f d; 85 s present; 89–91.1 a d c d d; 93.3 g; 95.1 e; 102 L; 104 no s; 113 s; 115–18 a third
too high; 125.3 e omitted; 146 f s; 151 no f s; final written as . In Yox most altered
g d a
minims have swallowtails; 11 no s; mo 19.2, 43.2, 67.2: red; 20 s; 24 clef change to C2 to
end of line, C3 restored at 35.2; 40 s; 42 dots before and after rest; 60.1 a instead of g; 13,
37, 61, major S rest, intersecting the line; 72.2 d; 85 s; 102 f; 113 c; 125 s; 146 s; 151 s. Q15
11 no s; 40 s; 49 s; 68 no s; 85 s; 104 s; 113 c; 125 s; 146 s; 150 bs; 151 f s and no rest; final
notes are two void longs f s g; ligs. 73.2–3 and 74.1–2; but the word ac is omitted and that
syllable needs to be accommodated; 152 S and no rest; 113 Yox and Q15 c: Chantilly e.
Tenor: 13 Q15, Chantilly, bs; Yox cs, here treated as applying to preceding b, but it is
cancelled on the next c (22) by letter ‘c’.
 21
Fragmentary Motets and Other Possibly
Linked Compositions

1. Arta/​Musicus est ille

All that survives of this highly intriguing work in the English fragment LoTNA is the
motetus, Musicus est ille, and its ‘Contratenor de Arta’. Arta must refer to the first word
of the missing triplum. These two surviving voices directly follow, on the same page,
Psallentes zinzugia (see above, Ch. 16), an additional triplum to Apollinis, together with
a new contratenor to that motet, so labelled, making a unique five-​part version.1 This
cements the connection between the two motets as progeny of the original version
of Apollinis. The text of Psallentes zinzugia refers to hemiolian rhythms and epogdoic
forms, a preoccupation with proportions present also in the text of Musicus est ille and
its musical realisation. See Example 21.1.
Text and translation by David Howlett:

MVsicus est ille qui perpensa racione non tantum cognouit opus sed qui speculari
gaudet et arte magis /​splendet quam uoce serena limite suppremo libri primi canit erus
do[ . . . ]mira uirtute boecius ista carmen /​epogdoice cane presens artis.[..]inde emioli
prodasquam dulci ter istius odas sicque leouns fieri iubet hortator nisi /​ueri. contratenor
de Arta.

It can be laid out thus:

Musicus est ille qui perpensa racione 6 14

non tantum cognouit opus sed qui speculari 7 14
gaudet et arte magis splendet quam uoce serena; 8 15
limite suppremo libri primi canit erus 6 14
doctrina mira uir-​|-​tute Boecius ista. 5 14
Carmen epogdoice cane presens artis et inde 7 16
emioli prodas—​quam dulciter—​istius odas 6 15
sicque Leouns fieri iubet hortator nisi ueri. 7 16
total 118 syllables

1 This and Pantheon abluitur in Stras are the only five-​part versions.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0022
390 The Musician Motets

Contratenor de Arta.

A musician is that man who by carefully assessed rule

has not only learned a work but who rejoices to observe closely (i.e. to theorise)
and shines more from art than from a serene voice;
in the last limit of the first book the noble Boethius sings
those things with power in his wondrous teaching.
Sing the present song of epogdoic art, and thence
you may uncover—​how sweetly—​odes of that man’s hemiolus,
and so Leouns the inciter orders that there be nothing except of the truth.

Instead of Genesis, Apocalypse or the psalms, the author of this motetus directly cites
the first book of Boethius’ De institutione musica, giving the precise location for the def-
inition of a musician, I.xxxiv (the last chapter of the first book):

Is uero est musicus qui ratione perpensa

canendi scientiam non seruitio operis
sed imperio speculationis adsumpsit.

The Arta/​Musicus text consists of two sentences in eight lines of dactylic hexameter
verse, with one false quantity in ille. David Howlett has uncovered several instances of
ingeniously counted proportions in this text, which I hope he will report elsewhere.
Most simply, the eight lines are divided into two sentences of which the first, ending
at ista, occupies five lines, and the second, beginning at carmen, occupies three lines.2
Ratios at or close to the golden section are not uncommon in textual composition, as
Howlett has shown in some incontrovertible divisions between triplum and motetus
syllables, as in Musicorum.3 As in Apollinis and Sub Arturo explicitly, elsewhere implic-
itly, Boethius is placed in the motetus, as is the Apocalypse in Musicorum and Genesis in
Sub Arturo. He is named at the end of the fourth line (just before the midpoint), exactly
as in Apollinis, pointing again to Apollinis as the model. ‘Leouns’ may be an authorial
signature, placed at the end of the motetus, as J. Alanus is in Sub Arturo. ‘Leouns’ is a
little too far from ‘Leonel’ to permit a confident attribution to Leonel Power of what
would be his only extant motet with isorhythm. The name is placed at the epogdous
(8:9) by word count (46.6 of 52 words) in this ‘song of epogdoic art’.

Ex. 21.2 Arta/​Musicus est ille: contratenor with three isorhythmic taleae

2 As tenth and last in a list of means, Boethius, De institutione arithmetica, II. 53, 168–​69, gives the three

terms 3: 5: 8, which form part of what would later be defined as the Fibonacci series, where each number is
the sum of the two preceding ones, or extreme and mean ratio. In this case: ‘medius terminus ad parvissimum
comparatur, quali extremorum differentia contra maiorum terminorum differentiam proportione
coniungitur’. The ratio of the middle to the smallest number (5:3) is the same as the ratio of their sum to the
larger of the two (8:5).
3 See Ch. 18 n. 10.
 Fragmentary Motets and Other Compositions 391

The music presents a most intriguing concept. The upper parts are in imperfect
tempus throughout. The contratenor notation with its three isorhythmic taleae is
shown in Example 21.2, a modern-​notation transcription of the two surviving parts
in Example 21.1. As with Alma polis, the two colores are to be read in different
mensurations. If there were instructions applying to both lower parts, they are lost with
the missing tenor. Their mensurations cannot be unambiguously explained, but clearly
involve syncopation.
The maxima is hard to explain. Everything would be simpler if it were a dotted
long. The upper-​voice talea is 14 breves in color 1, 17 semibreves in color 2. With a
normal interpretation of the maxima, the talea length in color 1 would be 15 breves,
18 semibreves in color 2. The parts only fit together if these are reduced to 14 breves
and 17 semibreves; a creeping shift as in Sub Arturo does not work. In color 1, the
maxima must be imperfected by the breve rest before or after it; breves and longs are
imperfect. In color 2, the now-​reduced longs are perfect, the breves imperfect, and
the maxima must again be imperfected, this time to the same length as the longs.
Color 1 thus has, in both voices, three taleae (each of 14 breves), color 2 three taleae
(each of 17 semibreves). 14:17 =​0.8, or 8/​9, consistent with the text identifying this
song ‘of epogdoic art’, an echo of the proportional statement ‘bis sub emiolii’ in Sub
Arturo, and here applied to both text and music. The setting is strictly syllabic, with
118 syllables, 118 notes, 63 in C1, 55 in C2, divided between the colores again at the
epogdoic ratio of 9:8. Some words are broken by rests. In order to fit the parts as in
Example 21.1, only one pitch correction was needed. In C1, T2, breve 2, e appears
against the written d, but the e is in fact written high, almost above the line, so I have
emended it to f.
The irrational relationship between the two colores amounts in minim count to a
total of 271 minims, divided between the colores 168:103. There is an extra minim
at the end of the final talea to accommodate the final syllable. Since the composer
is playing with ratios that are not whole numbers, it is just possible that this extra
minim was also introduced in order to bring the relationship between the two colores
as close as possible to the golden section of 271, which is 167.47: the first color has 168
minims, the second 103 (102 +​1). This irrational proportion is much rarer in a mu-
sical than a textual relationship. No doubt even more proportional art would emerge
from the complete piece.
To add Arta/​Musicus to the group of musician motets assumes that the missing
triplum would have listed names of musicians; but the subject matter, the place-
ment of Boethius, the apparent authorial signature, and the careful proportioning
all appear to echo the earlier compositions. I have not reconstructed an identifi-
able tenor, but it would likewise be subject to mensural transformation of its second
statement, as in Alma polis and Sub Arturo, and it shares the ‘irrational’ nature of
its talea length with Alma polis, possibly referring to that motet. Musicalis sciencia
opposes art and science, not in quite their modern understandings, but stressing
science, and mentioning art only once. Both Apollinis and Sub Arturo refer to art
once and only once each in both triplum and motetus; the motetus Musicus est
ille uses ars twice (in the forms arte and artis), at carefully spaced intervals. While
arta derives from artus rather than ars, a punning intent would be well within
the toolbox of these motets, as it is for tribum and ‘three’ in Tribum/​Quoniam
392 The Musician Motets

(Ch. 4).4 The status of ars here may echo the choice of artifex as one of the central
names for the Creator in the motetus of Musicorum, artica opposed to antarticus, in
the first lines of Axe poli, and Arturo in Sub Arturo plebs.
There is still much to be done in the matter of tenor reconstruction, identification
and choice. The investigation often rests at just that point where much of the inter-
esting work should begin. Just which and how many notes, to which and how many
syllables, from precisely which point in which chant, may carry rich significance.5

2. Non eclipsis atra ferrugine

Only the motetus, Non eclipsis atra ferrugine, the tenor Quorum doctrina fulget
ecclesia, and the end of the triplum of an otherwise unknown motet survive on the
verso (original recto) of Leiden2515, f. 1v : see Figure 21.1. This motet has not to
my knowledge received scholarly notice, but its cosmic reference and other features
have strong textual resonance with Apollinis, whose triplum is on the other side of
the leaf (see Chs. 15 and 16), and affinity with other musician motets. Here is the
text as emended and translated by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens, with his footnotes
(nos. 6–​12):

End of triplum Translation

. . . eluminant dum g . . . . . . when/​while they shine out . . .
... ...
ecclesie sacrum celum the holy heaven of the Church (?)
et quorum dirigit velum and those whose sail it steers (?)
iustorum sunt tutamentum, are the protection of the just,
firmi tanquam firmamentum. who are firm as the firmament.
hinc vox laudet canencium Hence let the voice of the singers praise
empireum palacium. the empyrean palace.

Motetus Translation
Non eclipsis atra ferrugine Let these luminaries not be enshadowed
tenebressent hec luminaria, by the black stain of eclipse,
qui rimantur dei sublimia who search out the sublime things of God
dum prepollent sensus accumine; being outstanding for acuity of mind;
albi celum docte cristallinum white?6 let them expertly make the shape of
effigiant speramque stellatam the crystalline heaven and the starry sphere
dum virtutum stellis trabeatam while leading a life robed by the stars of the virtues
vitam gerant iubarque divinum. and (bearing) a divine gleam.

4 Other occurrences of the word ars in the motet group are as follows: ‘fulget arte basilica’ (Apollinis, line

5); ‘artis practice cum theoria’ (Zodiacum, line 8); ‘arte suaque practicis’ (Musicalis sciencia, line 3); ‘arte cuius
multis annis’ (Sub Arturo, line 19); ‘artis uernant legem’ (Fons, line 9).
5 See Chs. 22 and 23.
6 Albus means ‘matt white’; in principle albi might be genitive singular agreeing with sensus (across a rest!)

or nominative plural agreeing with the subject of the plural verbs, but neither seems to make any sense.
 Fragmentary Motets and Other Compositions 393

hiis saturni gravitas est morum, They have Saturn’s gravity of conduct,
mira7 iovis in hiis benignitas, in them is Jupiter’s wondrous kindness,
in hiis martis viget strenuitas, in them is the strenuous vigour of Mars,8
in hiis phebi decor radiorum in them the beauty of Phoebus’ rays
exuperat9 in pulcritudine, exceeds in beauty,
suptiles10 sunt velut mercurius, they are clever as Mercury,
qui dyana micabunt apcius,11 they will gleam more aptly than Diana [the moon],
non eclipsis recti ferrugine. not by the darkness of the eclipse of righteousness.12

Although the final surviving lines of the triplum contain no names, ‘hinc vox laudet
canencium empireum palacium’ echoes a prayer for the singers’ heavenly afterlife
similar to that at the end of the triplum of Sub Arturo, ‘ut et illis, qua finita, porta celi
pateat’. The opening words of Apollinis, ‘Apollinis eclipsatur nunquam’ are echoed in
the negation of eclipse at the beginning and end of the motetus, ‘non eclipsis’. There
are many other instances of shared vocabulary or imagery with the complete musi-
cian motets. Most significant is a listing of heavenly bodies which in the other motets
stand for a specific number of musicians named in the triplum. This motetus names
six planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Phoebus (the sun is also thus referred to in Apollinis,
where Phoebus and Apollo stand both for the sun and music), Mercury and Diana
(the moon); Venus is absent, but would have made seven. Apollinis matched twelve
named musicians (‘bis sex’) to the twelve zodiac signs, Musicorum the seven named
musicians to the seven stars and seven candlesticks of the Apocalypse. Sub Arturo
placed its twice seven singers under the constellation Arcturus, and Alma polis/​Axe
poli ranges through the poles to the heavenly bodies. Shining or gleaming is common
parlance for praise in those texts, as in this motetus. ‘These luminaries’, I suggest,
might be six named musicians in the missing voice who are the singers at the end
of the triplum praising the empyrean palace, and with whose doctrine, in the tenor,
the church shines (‘Quorum doctrina fulget ecclesia’; cf. Apollinis: ‘quibus armonica
fulget arte basilica’). Given the tenor talea length of seven longs (see below), and the
cultivation of symbolic numbers within this group, it is just possible that a seventh
name might be in play, perhaps of the composer, perhaps for Venus; but without the
triplum this can only be conjecture.13 Richard Dudas calculated that with even text
distribution as in the motetus, the triplum would have had 40 octosyllabic lines. This
leads me to note that the motetus has 16 decasyllabic lines and that the proportion of

7 The scribe wrote mina, which makes no sense.

8 Literally: ‘the strenuousness of Mars is vigorous’, but that is hardly English.
9 The scribe absurdly wrote utesperut, which is here emended.
10 The scribe first wrote suptiles, then adjusted the spelling to subtiles. The sense is unaffected.
11 In the line ‘qui dyana micabunt apcius’, the future seems out of place and apcius is hardly apt. Holford-​

Strevens is tempted to suggest ‘micant apercius’, ‘twinkle more openly’, understood as ‘shine more brightly’,
supposing the crossbar on the p of ap(er)cius to have been overlooked in copying and micant changed to
micabunt to make up the syllable count, but all that before the music was notated.
12 This is highly obscure, and does not make a complete sentence.
13 The anonymous motet in Chantilly, Pictagore per dogmata/​O terra sancta, suplica/​Rosa vernans caritatis

(c. 1375) for pope Gregory XI, also names six out of seven planets, this time omitting Saturn. The sun is also
referred to as Phoebus. See Ch. 30, n. 45. But there is no linkage to musicians.
394 The Musician Motets

syllables was therefore 320:160. This must surely be a response to Apollinis’s 240:120
syllables: its triplum has 30 octosyllabic lines, the motetus 12 decasyllabic lines,
yielding the significant total of 360 (the number of degrees in the circle), the syllable
count likewise proportioned 2:1 (see Ch. 16).
The chant excerpt chosen for the tenor text, Quorum doctrina fulget ecclesia, may
have been selected precisely to echo those words in Apollinis (‘quibus armonica fulget
arte basilica’). It is the repetendum of the Responsory Isti sunt viri sancti quos for the
Common of Apostles, perhaps likening the musicians to the apostles as well as matching
them to the planets, as in the other musician motets. In the Sarum Antiphoner BnF lat.
12044, f. 227v, this Responsory follows the Verse In omnem terram, which ends with the
cue to the repetendum, ‘Quorum’.14 The different In omnem terram tenors of Sub Arturo
and Apollinis are for Apostles, often with a global missionary emphasis, which further
strengthens the case for this motet being related to Apollinis.
Whereas Apollinis is in French notation in Leiden2515 as in its other sources,
this motet is notated in what looks at first sight like Italian notation, but could pos-
sibly reflect a post-​Fauvel stage of French notation. Both texted parts are in perfect
time, and use semibreves and minims in breve groups marked off by dots, which are
also used for addition in the triplum. Breves or longs in initial positions are some-
times imperfected by semibreves or semibreve rests. Most breves have downstems
to the left. Altered semibreves preceding breves are shown as downstemmed major
semibreves. The tenor is in imperfect modus, notated entirely in breves and longs,
and consists of two color statements written out in full, each of four taleae of seven
longs, without diminution, and with an extra breve-​plus-​breve-​rest at the beginning.
This compensates for the omission of the imperfect long rest from the talea at the
final cadence. Thus the total length of the motet is 2 x (7 x 4) =​56 imperfect longs or
112 breves. The motetus follows the tenor’s seven-​long taleae in periods of fourteen
breves; in the upper parts, breves and longs, and many recurrent motives, appear in
the same place in each tenor talea. The minims and semibreves are not strictly iso-
rhythmic but are varied in order to achieve a nearly syllabic setting of the words on
semibreves, and sometimes on minims. Musically, this seems more simplistic than
the other musician motets, and there are no obvious musical allusions or citations to
set beside the striking verbal links. The text script has Italian features, and the prov-
enance is uncertain. Without more evidence it is not yet possible to place it chrono-
logically or geographically. Apollinis was clearly the starting point for the other four
complete motets. Its wide circulation stands in contrast to the sole and incomplete
survival of Non eclipsis atra ferrugine. I have here assumed that the affinities with
Apollinis are derived from it, but it is just possible, given its early and unrelated style
and notation—​all the other musician motets have upper parts in major prolation—​
that it could have preceded Apollinis, its six planets (and presumably six musicians)
prompting the ‘bis sex’ of Apollinis, just as the fourteen of Sub Arturo respond to the
seven of Musicorum. If an earlier motet, the other influences noted between the two
would also work in the reverse direction. Was it known to B. de Cluny, who took the

14 I am grateful to Richard Dudas for this observation and for refining the chant identification. In AS plate

P the Responsory follows a different Verse.

 Fragmentary Motets and Other Compositions 395

idea of attaching musicians to heavenly bodies, and of cosmic reference, and devel-
oped it into his much more successful and influential motet?

3. Fons origo musicorum

The following two fragmentary texts in Cu4435 may belong together:

Fons origo musicorum, laus et decus|

qui das sanos de insanis et|
languidum dites fugas dotas ..|

and:

-​ent musice|
ta fragran|
vibrancia et per|
estas tua qua|
dulces pho|

Although the fragments of the putative triplum part, and of a motetus that might pos-
sibly belong with it, have no sign of musicians’ names, this might well be related to
the complex, especially if it took its opening triplum word Fons from the motetus of
Sub Arturo, which must have been known to its author.15 It starts (like Sub Arturo) on
the g above middle c; see Example 21.3. Its opening rhythm differs from that of Fons
citharizancium by one extra minim only, just as the opening of the triplum of Sub Arturo
differs by having only one minim fewer than the opening of the triplum of Apollinis
(See Fig. 20.1). This is suggestive, given the borrowing of openings and other motifs we
have seen within this group.

Ex. 21.3 Opening rhythm in motetus of Sub Arturo/​Fons citharizancium and triplum of
Fons origo musicorum

Too little survives to say more, but this may well be a lost musician motet of c. 1420,
closely related to Sub Arturo, though no musicians are named in the surviving frag-
ment. Sub Arturo’s opening motetus word Fons is recapitulated at line 22 of that motet,
giving it particular prominence.

15 Cf. Tinctoris, Proportionale, 10 gives prominence to fons: ‘novae artis fons et origo apud Anglicos quorum

caput Dunstaple exstitit, fuisse perhibetur, et huic contemporanei fuerunt in Gallia Dufay et Binchois . . .’.
396 The Musician Motets

4. Other compositions

Other compositions, all unique, mostly on Latin texts, mostly song-​like, with possible
textual linkage or allusion, but lacking listed musicians, include:

• Musicorum inter collegia, Stras, no. 163, f. 94v (CMM 53, iii, no. 299)16
This low-​cleffed three-​part composition, labelled Rex rondellorum, is a rondeau,
not a motet, and despite the suggestive opening words has no further connections
to the motet group. The entire text is: ‘Musicorum inter collegia | musica nobilis;||
Praxi melos musa, theoria | vox variabilis’. It survives only in a corrupt copy in
Coussemaker, Strasbourg. It is cited in east European treatises for perfect tempus
and imperfect modus, which does not adequately describe its alternating sections
in perfect and imperfect time.17 It is in minor prolation throughout. Apel notes its
interesting use of patterns of 2 +​3 +​3 units.18
• Musicorum decus et species, Ox213, f. 70. Fallows, Catalogue, p. 586, describes
it as being in praise of a musical patron. It is an anonymous three-​voice ballade,
published in Polyphonia Sacra, ed. van den Borren, 232.
• Arte psallentes, ModA, ff. 37v–​38 (CMM 53, iii, no. 294), not in Fallows, Catalogue,
is ascribed to frater Bartolomeus de Bononia. The text indicates that it was sung be-
fore a pope (‘Patre summo pontifex coram [cantemus]’), for whom Apel suggests
either of the last two Avignon popes or the last two Roman ones before the councils
of Pisa and Constance.
• Veri almi pastoris musicale collegium, ModA, f. 36v (CMM 53, iii, no. 304); Frater
Coradus de Pistorio. The text celebrates a papal collegium musicum.
• Ore Pandulfum modulare dulci, ModA, f. 33 (CMM 53, iii, no. 300); a ballade
celebrating music and a journey to Jerusalem by Pandolfo III Malatesta in 1399.
• Furnos reliquisti quare? ModA, ff. 35v–​36 (CMM 53, iii, no. 295), Egardus (MS
furnis); laden with musical terminology, addressed to the singers’ absent singing
companion Buclare, who has gone to the Black Sea. The cantus is in canon; cantus
and tenor have different texts, all rhyming in -​are. At least one of the texts can be
presumed to be in the voice of the poet-​composer, Egardus.
• Letificans tristantes, Leiden2720, f. 1v (CMM 53, iii, no. 298); includes musical
terminology: ‘Astent armonizantes, Discordias vitantes’ (recalling the ‘discordie
carencium’ of Musicorum collegio).
• Febus mundo oriens is rich in astronomical, astrological and zodiacal references,
as recently discussed by Kévin Roger.19 Like Apollinis, the motet is 144 breves
long and has three non-​reducing tenor taleae: Apollinis has three non-​reducing
statements of the tenor color, but Febus mundo lacks other features that would
qualify it for attachment to the core group.

16 Not in Fallows, Catalogue. The music example in Wrocław16 (Wolf, ‘Ein Breslauer Mensuraltraktat’,

384) bears little relation to the composition preserved in Stras.

17 For example in Pra103: ‘Alii sunt de tempore perfecto et de modo imperfecto sicut musicorum inter col-

legia’. See Ch. 15.

18 CMM 53, p. xxix.
19 Roger, ‘Références astronomiques et astrologiques’. Febus mundo/​Lanista vipereus/​Cornibus equivocis,

unique to Ivrea, is published in PMFC 5, no. 3.

 Fragmentary Motets and Other Compositions 397

• Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, Washington1400, f. 2.20 Incomplete triplum

(upper half of a leaf, verso, with the motetus of Rex Karole on the recto) of what was
presumably a motet. RISM suggests French provenance, but the text is macaronic
(Anglo-​Norman and Latin), and the script English, as is the host volume. This
composition has been little noticed. As just two companions from ‘Cleremunde’
(Clermont), Gwillelmus ‘Malcharte’ and his brother Alebram, are specified and
named and praised, we are presumably not lacking a further listing in this triplum.
The presence of two companions suggests some analogies with Furnos reliquisti
quare?. The first-​person voice of the text is reminiscent of Musicorum collegio, but
otherwise there is little to link it to the core group.

The last-​named compositions stand outside the close-​knit motet tradition to which the
chapters of Part IV have been devoted. The remarkably tight network of links between
the five motets of the core group affirms their ingenuity, the conception of text and
music together, and the playing out of ludic elements in related compositions over many
decades. The way in which all the motets echo the text and music of Apollinis supports
its primacy, as does its widespread and long-​term dissemination, rather than that of
Musicalis, as has been claimed. In addition, the extent to which they allude to each other
identifies this as a possibly competitive genre. Given the unique preservation of three of
the five motets, we may well be lacking other members of the genre, and other factors
which could link them even more closely.

20 See now Bent, ‘Washington, Library of Congress, M2.1 C6 1400 Case’.

 PART V
ENGL ISH MOT ET S C. 1 4 0 0 –​1 4 2 0
400 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

Part V addresses English motets from around and after 1400. My work on earlier
English motets has been incorporated in or superseded by Bent, Hartt and Lefferts,
The Dorset Rotulus: Contextualizing and Reconstructing the Early English Motet (2021).
Chapters 22 and 23 describe the Yoxford fragment and its two remarkable unica;
Chapter 24 revises an essay on two motets in the Old Hall manuscript (OH) and their
composer, Mayshuet; Chapter 25 surveys the other motets in OH and revisits its top-
ical motets and dating, affirms the identity of Roy Henry as Henry V and reviews the
place of Dunstaple in a reconstructed fragmentary choirbook that may have been
produced for the Duke of Bedford.
 22
The Yoxford Manuscript and the Motet
O amicus/​Precursoris

Among the significant English manuscript discoveries of recent decades is a fifteenth-​

century archival volume from Yoxford, Suffolk, whose parchment endpapers include
one bifolio of chant and two of polyphony. Each polyphonic bifolio was a centre gath-
ering, and contributes a new complete composition of major interest to the English rep-
ertory c. 1400: the motet O amicus/​Precursoris (this chapter), and a Credo included here
(Ch. 23) for its motettish ingenuity. But first, a short description of the source is in order.
The host volume is a manuscript Extent of the manor of Yoxford, Suffolk, dated 11
Edward IV (1471–​72).1 The front bifolio (‘I’, ff. i–​ii) has twelve red staves per page, each
of 14 mm gauge, and contains three motets in full black notation, the middle one new
and complete. The rear bifolio (‘II’, ff. 159 and 162, flanking a bifolio from a thirteenth-​
century noted breviary, ff. 160–​61) has three Credos in black void notation, the middle
one likewise new and complete. It has the same rastrum gauge as the motet bifolio, but
the staves are brownish. Each bifolio was therefore at the centre of its gathering; they
now measure 320 × 230 mm but have been trimmed and were originally larger. There
is a slight difference in the written area, which is wider for ‘II’, but given the similar size
and rastrum, and despite their different genres (motets, Credos), script (textura, cur-
sive), and notation (black, void), it is likely that the two bifolios came from the same
original manuscript, perhaps respectively from a slightly earlier corpus of motets in
black notation and later additions to it of mass movements in void notation. That two
polyphonic bifolios were available for a local binding of a local manuscript suggests
common rather than independent provenance, especially as their musical sophistica-
tion is anything but provincial.
Both bifolios combine music of the highest ingenuity with old-​fashioned (and partly
redundant) notational elements. Both of the new complete or completable pieces
(the second of three Credos and the present motet) have a solus tenor and a mensural
scheme of considerable complexity; both invite a compositional dating around 1400.
These two new compositions considerably expand our knowledge of complex compo-
sitional activity in England at that period, outside but parallel to the repertory that is in
OH or sources related to it by concordance.

The original version of this chapter was published (with David Howlett) as ‘Subtiliter alternare: The Yoxford Motet
O amicus/​Precursoris’, in Peter M. Lefferts and Brian Seirup (eds.), Studies in Medieval Music: Festschrift for Ernest
Sanders, Current Musicology 45–​47 (New York, 1990); this revised version is published with the permission of the
editors of Current Musicology.
1 Yox: Ipswich, Suffolk Record Office, HA30: 50/​22/​13.15. Andrew Wathey originally drew my attention to

Yox, and Adrian Bassett sent me a copy of his unpublished paper delivered in 1983 to the Research Students’
Conference in Manchester. Yox has been at the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich from 1952, and was on deposit
at Keble College, Oxford in 1983–​90. It has meanwhile been described in Wathey, Manuscripts . . . Supplement 1
to RISM, 31–​33 (facs.) and now in EECM 62, with colour facsimiles. Images are also on DIAMM at https://​www.
diamm.ac.uk/​sour​ces/​374/​#/​ima​ges. In Lefferts, Motet in England, 300–​1, it is wrongly described as ‘not the center
of a gathering’; the four items listed should be reduced to three.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0023
402 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

Contents of Yox:

I: three motets in full black notation

1. f. 1r: Motetus and tenor of Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium (Ch. 20). The
(English) cauda hirundinis (swallowtail) is used for minim alteration. Red im-
perfection coloration is used in the motetus.
2. ff. iv–​iir: O amicus sponsi primus/​Precursoris preconia. Unicum, the subject of
this chapter. The upper parts are in imperfect time and minor prolation; with
lower-​voice ‘reverse’ coloration, red for perfect, black for imperfect.2
3. f. iiv: Triplum and tenor of Degentis vita/​[Cum vix artidici], one of the most
internationally widely circulated motets of the later fourteenth century. In im-
perfect time and minor prolation, its presence in an English source at this time
is striking and may raise questions about its origin.
II: Three Credos, all unica, in void notation. They are listed in Curtis–​Wathey as
C[redos]8–​10. Nos. 1 and 3 are edited as nos. 42 and 41 in EECM 55. No. 2 is EECM
55, no. 8, based on the transcription in Bent, ‘Yoxford Credo’, slightly modified here
as Example 23.1.
1. f. 159r: Credo in unsignalled perfect time, minor prolation, with many syllabic
repeated notes. An isolated upper part, probably the second, of a setting in
three parts, whose tenor must have been stated three times (see Ch. 23).
2. ff. 159v–​162r: Credo Omni tempore: complete, the subject of Chapter 23.
ç
3. f. 162v: Credo in [ ] with flagged semiminims, changing to at Et resurrexit; o
two cantus parts in score, probably the upper parts of a four-​part setting. Black
full coloration.

Ursula Günther, in her edition and study of the Chantilly and ModA motets, and
Harrison in his editions of motets of French and English provenance, both defined
the fourteenth-​century motet largely by French standards.3 Ernest Sanders and Peter
Lefferts, in a series of editions and writings, developed a case for an expanded definition
of the motet in England.4 The English motet, long neglected, is now attracting more
attention. PMFC largely excludes incomplete pieces; the number of complete English
motets, especially from the late fourteenth century, is still relatively modest, though
there are many fragmentary compositions.5 Any addition to their number deserves
study, especially when, as in this case, it has been fashioned with high ingenuity. Datings
are uncertain: Chapter 20 and the chapters of Part V (22–​25) attempt to situate some of
these compositions in relationship to their comparands, and to suggest datings closer to
1400 for some compositions that have been dated earlier.

Subtiliter alternare: The Motet O amicus/​Precursoris

O amicus/​Precursoris occupies the centre of the bifolio that now serves as the first pair
of flyleaves in Yox.6 It is transcribed as Example 22.1 in the Appendix to this chapter. It

2 Although first signalled in print as two pieces (Lefferts, Motet in England, 300–​2) it is in fact a single motet.
3 Günther in CMM 39 and Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’; Harrison in PMFC 5 and 15.
4 Sanders, ‘The Medieval Motet’; Lefferts, ‘Motet in England’ (1983) and Lefferts, Motet in England (1986).
5 See Lefferts, ‘The Motet in England’ and Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus.
6 This part of the chapter is revised from the original version published as Bent (with David Howlett),

‘Subtiliter alternare’ (1990) in a Festschrift for Ernest Sanders, and adapted here with permission from Current
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 403

qualifies as a motet by even the most rigorous of French standards, with its tenor dim-
inution, two different texts, and chant tenor. In addition, it undertakes many further
subtleties, to be set out below.

Lower Parts
The Plainsong Tenor and Its Text
In outward and most immediate appearance, O amicus is a motet about John the Baptist.
A cursory search of chants for John’s Nativity (24 June) and Decollation (29 August)
failed to yield any melodies beginning with the material of the present tenor, which,
although labelled ‘tenor’, is otherwise undesignated. The sharp eyes of John Caldwell,
however, noted the similarity of this tenor to a portion (beginning in the middle
of a word) from the Introit for the Nativity of John the Baptist, De ventre matris: see
Example 22.2.7

Ex. 22.2 Comparison of tenor of O amicus with proposed chant

Taken together with its psalm verse, Bonum est, the tenor excerpt is drawn from ap-
proximately the middle of the Introit (italic), whose full text is:

De ventre matris mee vocavit me dominus nomine meo: et posuit os meum ut

gladium acutum: sub tegumento manus sue protexit me, posuit me quasi sagittam
electam. Ps. Bonum est confiteri domino et psallere nomini tuo altissime.
The Lord called me by name from my mother’s womb: he made my mouth like a sharp
sword: he protected me under the shelter [tegumentum also means a roof] of his hand,
and made me like an arrow shaft. It is good to give thanks to the Lord and to praise your
name, O most high.

Two variants of pitch in such a short excerpt, coupled with the derivation of the tenor
from the middle of a chant, might discourage this identification. However, an in-
triguing web of musical techniques and affinities within these associated bifolios gains

Musicology, where it was simultaneously published. David Howlett contributed the textual edition, transla-
tion, and commentary. The performance instructions embedded in the text were teased out in collaboration.
Images are on DIAMM and in EECM 62. The first modern performance was given by members of the Queen’s
College, Oxford, on 20 May 1988 in the chapel of All Souls College, on the occasion of the 550th anniversary
of the College’s foundation charter.

7 GS, pl. l; GR, 570.

404 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

further substance from the unusual relationship of the tenor to its plainsong model in
each of the two complete compositions. In the case of the tenor of the Credo (Ch. 23),
the first two notes of its named chant are omitted; then textually pertinent words and
their associated notes are drawn from the middle of the chant, and subjected to fur-
ther liberties to the extent of casting doubt on the identification. But for its label Omni
tempore, that chant would never have invited a match with the tenor of the Credo but,
whether or not the identification stands, it provides a timely pun for the manipulation
of the tenor through six temporal permutations. Caldwell’s identification for the motet
tenor looks secure by comparison and gains strength by a similar appropriateness of
the words to the goal of the motet, in this case the solicitation of protection by a patron.
Perhaps this is a temporal patron John as well as the saint, who may also be the name-
sake of the author, presumably called John, and possibly the petitioning composer, like
J. Alanus in the adjacent motet Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20). The passage selected from
the chant includes the words most consistent with votive appeal for a patron’s pro-
tection: ‘he protected me under the shelter of his hand’. The tenor is taken from the
middle (the protective tegumentum or roof-​pitch) of the chant De ventre matris: ventre
is a bodily middle. The words of the derived tenor, the location of words and notes in
that chant, and their relationship to the words of the motet suggest dimensions of sym-
bolic play.

The Solus Tenor, Lower-​Voice Canon, and Tenor Lacuna

There are two colores, each of three taleae. The short talea consists of only six notes.
The second color is derived directly from the first statement at the next note-​level
down; it was not strictly necessary to write out the diminution. Since the breves and
semibreves are imperfect, the result in this case is the same as if the repetition had
been described as duple proportion, or halving of values, as often found in such
descriptions, then and now. The motet is provided with a solus tenor as well as a
tenor, but lacks the expected contratenor, although there is room for one on the page.
A solus tenor is a conflation of two lower parts where the composition has an essential
contratenor, always giving the lower note that provides necessary contrapuntal sup-
port.8 Here, the tenor, on its own, provides an incomplete support for the upper parts.
There must have been a contrapuntally essential contratenor, whose missing notes are
embedded in the solus tenor part. I shall here call it a contratenor, though it is likely,
as we shall see, that it was considered a second tenor to be derived from the notated
one, and hence not lacking. Instructions for the derivation or performance of two
lower parts often call them tenores even when one is labelled ‘contratenor’.9 The solus

8 I have made the case for the solus tenor being a compositional aid. Bent, Counterpoint, Composition, and

Musica Ficta, Introduction, 38–​46 and chs. 8 and 9. See also Ch. 1.
9 Paris14741, one source for Vitry’s Ars nova, refers in the plural to the ‘tenors’ of Thoma tibi, i.e.,

they must have been equal tenors or tenor and contratenor. The lower parts of the incomplete motet in
Paris934 f. 79v fit this description and are labelled Tenor and Contratenor. See Dudas and Earp, Four Early
Ars nova Motets.
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 405

tenor permits a simplified but grammatically complete performance of the motet with
a single accompanying voice that leaves no unsupported fourths or other solecisms.
Its ungainly line is due to telltale upward leaps during tenor rests to provide notes
from the missing derived part, all higher in range than the tenor, and sounding while
the tenor rests (see Ex. 22.3a below).
The extent of those notes supplied during the lengthy tenor rests takes us most
of the way towards reconstructing the contratenor. When the solus tenor coincides
with the tenor, the tenor must be the lowest part. When the tenor is resting, the solus
tenor reproduces the contratenor, which occupied a range consistently higher than
the tenor. The three consecutive contratenor notes embodied in the solus tenor in
the middle of each talea are notes 3–​5 of the tenor, but a fifth higher. The solus tenor
also yields note 1 during another tenor rest; thus fully four of the six tenor notes can
be accounted for in the solus tenor, transposed up a fifth. The general outline of the
contratenor can thus be recognised as being in canon with the tenor a fifth higher, but
artfully timed to avoid simultaneously occurring parallel fifths, although the parts
begin and end simultaneously. I use canon here in the modern sense; it would then
have been called fuga. This may be the earliest known lower-​voice canon on a pre-​
existent chant. To construct such a canon poses considerable constraints, here as-
sisted by plentiful rests. By the standards of modern notation the canon appears to be
rhythmically free, but not by theirs: it is a mensuration canon, the two voices reading
the notation according to different ground rules. Most significantly, the contratenor
is indeed not missing: it is to be derived from the homographic tenor and does not re-
quire separate notation.10
This is also one of the earliest known examples of canon at the fifth; canons at the
unison and octave are much more common. Landini’s madrigal De dimmi tu, in which
the two lower parts are in canon at the fifth above, competes with the present piece for
the status of being the earliest canon at an interval other than unison or octave, as well
as being perhaps the only precedent for a lower-​voice canon other than voice-​exchange
tenors of the kind found in the Summer canon, a pes possibly based on the Regina
celi chant.11 The present instance in O amicus may thus be the first use of a plainsong
presented in canon as the foundation of a motet; it is one of very few combinations of
canon and isorhythmic structure, and perhaps the earliest; it is one of the earliest canons

10 Another canon on a chant from this period is Pycard’s incompletely preserved Sanctus (OH, no. 123).

In that case it is an upper-​voice canon for two voices, which squeezes its chant rhythmically into repeating
segments that can be reconciled as harmonically constant over the free tenor. Canonic lower parts of any
kind are not common. Landini’s madrigal De dimmi tu is mentioned in the text below. There is one such mass
movement in Old Hall (Gloria no. 27, ff. 22v–​23; see CMM 46, i, pt. 1, 70), which is actually a double canon.
See Bent, ‘Pycard’s Double Canon’. The OH double canon carries for the lower canon the instruction ‘tenor
et contratenor fugando quinque temporibus’, indicating that the canonic parts could be thought of (at least
in England) as a tenor–​contratenor pair derived from a single notated part. Lerch, Fragmente aus Cambrai,
no. 13, i. 49–​52, ii. 88–​108, gives a very rare combination, also in a mass movement, of a canonic motetus with
isorhythm in all parts. In Du Fay’s canonic songs the upper-​voice canonic parts function mutually as discant–​
tenor. No part is labelled tenor, and further added parts are called contratenor(s).
11 Then there is Ciconia’s canonic Quod jactatur, presumably from the first decade of the 15th c., evidently

intended by its clefs and rubric as a canon 3 in 1 at the fifth. It only works in two parts and is still not satisfacto-
rily solved despite various published attempts and an ingenious proposal by Martin Just, Review of PMFC 24
in Die Musikforschung 41 (1988), 193–​95.
406 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

at an interval other than the unison; and it may be one of the earliest mensuration
canons. O amicus is certainly the first known piece to do all those things. Its lower parts
share with other canons mentioned here, and with the mensurally transforming tenor of
Sub Arturo, its neighbour in Yox, the capacity to be read from a single notated part; the
challenge of the present piece is to reconstruct a solution that permits such a derivation,
either with or without verbal instructions.
All pieces that are provided in one or more manuscripts with a solus tenor have a
contrapuntally essential contratenor; these include the few compositions with lower-​
voice canon.12 In O amicus, the powerful constraints of chant and canon in the lower
voices determine that they must have been worked out first, then collapsed to a solus
tenor as a scaffold or basso seguente upon which the upper parts could be erected.13
As confirmed and corrected in the solus tenor, a major lacuna renders the tenor
unperformable as it stands. The omission of the equivalent of two longs (breves in re-
duction) at the same point in all of the six tenor taleae must be interpreted as rests of
that value. This omission is all the more striking because, as noted, the tenor is written
out in full to show the color repetition in reduced note values. It is unlikely that the
replication of this omission can be explained by the copying of the tenor rhythm from
a single notated pitchless talea which was then reproduced for the two subsequent
taleae that make up the color.14 More likely, the repeated error results from a misun-
derstanding or omission of coloured rests. Either the scribe assumed that his exem-
plar had an error of duplication (successive red and black rests) which he consistently
eliminated, or he misunderstood the performance instructions. But is the tenor lacuna
in fact an error? As noted above, the piece could be musically complete as it stands. All
that is missing are clear instructions.

Texts

But are the performance instructions in fact missing? By hindsight it may be possible
to scent them, albeit camouflaged in obscurely formulated hints, hiding in plain sight
in the text of the motetus. Both texts and David Howlett’s translations are given in
Table 22.1, the double meanings in the motetus glossed by both of us.15 The triplum
text gives a fairly straightforward biography of John the Baptist: the biblical references
are also in Table 22.1, which italicises the rhyme words, and shows where rests fall (al-
ways between words). The rhyme scheme is further discussed below. The repeated final
rhyme -​ota ends both triplum and motetus.

12 See n. 10.
13 Although not involving canon, the ingenious construction of the second Yox Credo (Ch. 23) also needed
the crutch of a solus tenor, fashioned from its tenor and essential contratenor.
14 Another instance of an anomaly repeated in each tenor talea is the pair of minims requiring ‘improper’

alteration in Musicalis, Ch. 17. Whether such cases shed any light on compositional procedure has yet to be
investigated.
15 His further commentary, together with my transcription, Example 22.1, and its musical commentary, are

in the Appendix to this chapter.

Table 22.1 Texts and translation of O amicus/​Precursoris

Talea Line | =​musical rest; Translation Gospel references

|| =​stanza end;
rhymes italicised

Triplum text, color 1

Ia [O A]micus sponsi primus,a O, the first friend of the Bridegroom, John 3: 29
en zakarie filius, Lo! the son of Zacharias, Luke 1: 5–​13
baptista domini | purus, the pure baptiser of the Lord, Matthew 3: 1
ut dicam | quod finit ausus. that I may tell the crime that ended his life.
Ib 5 Antequam | puer nascitur | Before the boy is born Luke 1: 41–​44
renatus ipse creditur, | he is believed reborn
sed et propheta dicitur | but he is also called a prophet
cum dat plausus | alvo clausus. || because he gives applause enclosed in the womb.

IIa 9 Senex mutus substituit The old man, mute, cut short his speech Luke 1: 18–​22
ac prophetab convaluit and regained his health as a prophet Luke 1: 67
ex quo circumsisus | fuit from the time when the little boy was circumcised Luke 1: 59
parvulus, | qui in desertumc who into the desert, Luke 1: 80
IIb 13 sedulus | iam a tenero | attentive now from a tender age,
cum victu cultu aspero | with rough food and clothing Mark 1: 6, Matthew 3: 4
dirigit reged superno | directs his certain journey towards Him Luke 1: 79
in expertum | iter certum. ║ who has been tested by the Supernal King.
(continued)
Table 22.1 Continued

Talea Line | =​musical rest; Translation Gospel references

|| =​stanza end;
rhymes italicised

IIIa 17 plusquam propheta merito More than a prophet deservedly Luke 7: 26

fit, agnum promens digito, he becomes, pointing out with his finger the Lamb, John 1: 36
quem baptizat, et sic | sito whom he baptises and thus quickly Mark 1: 9–​11, Matthew 3: 16–​17, Luke 3: 21–​22
sonitum | patris audivit. heard the sound of the Father.
IIIb 21 spiritum | sanctum meruit | He deserved to see the Holy Spirit Luke 3: 22
videre quod nullus fuit | because none was Matthew 11: 11, Luke 7: 28
maior, Christus asseruit, | greater, Christ asserted,
ut qui scivit | diffinivit, ║ so that he who knew stated definitively,

Triplum text, color 2

i 25 Forciorem prophetavit He prophesied and roared out Mark 1: 7, Matthew 3: 11, Luke 3: 16, Luke 3: 2–​8
venturum, et increpavit | that a stronger man was to come
quam plures, | et quos | vocavit and very many people whom he called
limpha, verbo, | lavit, | pavit.║ he cleansed with water and fed with his word.

ii 29 tandem quod dampnat incestum Finally because he judges that Mark 6: 17, Matthew 14: 3–​4, Luke 3: 19
non licere, non honestum, | incest is not allowed, not honest,
puelle | caput | in questum an ill-​omened feast gives his head Mark 7: 22–​28, Matthew 14: 6–​8
dat abscisum | festum mestum.║ cut off on the request of a girl.

iii 33 O Johannes, cum devota O John, with a devout mind

mente cano voce tota, | I sing, with my whole voice
precando | pro me | scemata praying for myself, take my compositions,
36 labe sume | nota vota.║ my noted offerings with their defect(s).
(continued)
Table 22.1 Continued

Motetus text, color 1 Translation Comments

I [P]‌recursoris | preconia | Let the preachings of the precursor,

mellisona | concordia | in sweet-​sounding concord
uti prona | memoria | as from a ready memory. It is hard to make any other sense of this line;
pronus is literally ‘prone’, and memoria can also
mean historical tradition or a monument.

promant | gaudia | previa, ║ make known the harbinger joys This alludes to John the Baptist’s announcement
of the coming of the Messiah as foretold by
the Prophets. But as the rest of the text bristles
with musical terminology it might also be
construed: Let the declaimings of the one who
runs ahead (the canonic dux) bring out from
concealment (i.e. the hidden conceit of the musical
canon (fuga) notated in a single statement and
expressed in hidden language) delights that lead
the way from sweet-​sounding concord (the fifth
that starts the canon) as from a ready memory.

II 5 alternatise | coloribus, | with alternating colours

epogdois | plenis tribus | in three full epogdoi Perhaps whole tones? There may be a further
pun on ‘colour’; red and black colours/​colores
alternate, as do the alternating colores in the
canonic statements. There are three taleae in each
color but nothing about them suggests 9:8.
atque scemo | scandentibus | and by a scheme with accelerating modi Presumably meaning the tenor color repetition in
diminution.f
modis | paribus | pascibus. ║ and with paired [foot]steps Tenor and contratenor mutually reversing the
order of notes and rests, red and black; passibus
may also include a play on the English usage of
pes for tenor, especially when there are two pedes
on equal terms.
(continued)
Table 22.1 Continued

Motetus text, color 1 Translation Comments

III 9 Alternareg | subtiliter | one of two [i.e. each] can alternate subtly This stanza does not make grammatical sense.
It could refer to the alternation of notes and
rests, of black and red notation, or canonic
alternation.
possit duum | viriliter,| in manly fashion
currens suum | simpliciter | running his own course simply
cursum | vel iter | breviter. or his journey briefly With musical play on brevially, at the transition
from the simple statement as notated, to the
diminution of color 2.

Motetus text, color 2

i 13 Sic patronum | meum | tota | Thus do my noted offerings. Noted: both written and famous.
ii 14 vi laudare | laudis | nota | demand by right to laud my patron Patron saint John and possibly also a
temporal lord.
iii 15 iure poscunt | mea | vota. ║ with the whole power of praise.
a O as well as A is needed for the syllable count.
b MS prophetas
c MS deserto
d MS regi
e MS alternensis.
f Thomas Walker suggested treating scemus as an alternative spelling of semus (=​imperfectus): by imperfection with accelerating modi. The acceleration of the diminution
section, however, does not particularly involve imperfection.
g MS Alternatibus.
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 411

Coloration

The modus relationship of red to black notes and rests throughout the motet is 3:2, per-
fect to imperfect longs, a reversal of the more common relationship of black to red,
whether connoting perfection to imperfection, or a hemiolic proportion. Tempus and
prolation are imperfect throughout. A red (perfect) long is worth three (imperfect)
breves, a black long two. The scribe not only spelt out the rhythmic reductions of the
second color; he also provided dots of addition after each red note in the tenor and solus
tenor (long and maxima in color 1, breve and long in color 2) to confirm the note values
as being, unusually, half as long again as their black counterparts. This proliferation of
dots violates the elegance of the notation and renders the redness of the notes, though
not of the rests, redundant—​a clumsy expedient.
The original notation surely used both black and red, as now, and as the different rest
evaluations require, but without dots. The red notes meant what dotted (black) notes
would have meant, that is, they were perfect, and needed no dots. In the first (and origi-
nally the only) notated color, red notes would yield:

imperfect maximodus (maxima =​2 perfect longs)

perfect modus (long =​3 imperfect breves; perhaps the ‘plenis tribus’ of motetus line 6)
imperfect tempus (breve =​2 imperfect semibreves [of the upper parts]).

Black notes are imperfect throughout; it is only at the modus level that red signals
perfection. This reconstruction is supported by the rests; both red and black rests are
required. Rests cannot receive dots of addition except, paradoxically, in some English
practices lamented by the author of the Quatuor principalia.16 The scribe failed to make
the adjustment that would have been necessary (if inelegant) for his spelling out in
duple values (which could as well have been monochrome), namely, to give the tenor
rests that were originally red as perfect long rests spanning three not two spaces each.
Breves, being duply subdivided, are not affected, hence the red–​black tenor–​contratenor
hocket upbeat to each new talea statement (perhaps another representation of ‘paribus
pascibus’, set illustratively to equal rhythms, in motetus line 8).
This projected use of red corresponds to one of the alternative meanings given in the
earlier Vitriacan ars nova treatises, whereby red notation can change modus or tempus
(or both) to become imperfect or perfect. The normal practice by around 1400 was for
red imperfection coloration to yield minimum imperfect values for all levels within per-
fect black notation (as in the motetus of Sub Arturo plebs, which immediately precedes
O amicus in Yox). O amicus uses so-​called ‘reverse’ coloration, but not all levels are
affected; in the first color, only the modus relationship (long to breve) is made triple
(perfect) by red coloration.17 Maximodus, tempus and prolation remain imperfect (in
relation to the wholly imperfect upper parts) whether red or black. The red maximas

16 Anonymous, Quatuor principalia, quartum principale, ch. 37, CS iv. 271b, and Aluas, ‘The Quatuor

principalia’.
17 Imperfection coloration by c. 1400 usually reduces all coloured notes to their minimum imperfect value;

here the coloration applies only to modus. Most coloration is of this type, but by the later 14th c. coloration
was also used for sesquialtera proportion 3:2, applied at duple levels, imperfect time, minor prolation. See
examples in the OH motets in Ch. 25.
412 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

contain two perfect longs; the red longs contain three imperfect breves. This usage
corresponds to that described for a Vitry motet: ‘In arboris empiro, nam in tenore
illius moteti de rubeis tria tempora pro perfectione sunt accipienda, de nigris vero
duo’.18 In arboris differs only in using major prolation; O amicus is in minor prolation
throughout. Yox furthermore spells out the second color statement in diminished
values, thereby at this level making just the tempus relationship (breve to semi-
breve) triple by red coloration. (It could have been derived by diminution without
renotation.) In arboris is again cited at the end of the short coloration chapter in the
ars nova treatises not only for using red notation to yield a perfect (triple) red long
before another, but also a perfect red breve before another such. In other words, it
spells out for the second section of that motet the same translated diminution (in
terms of the lower note values) that is written out in O amicus. The other examples
in the ars nova treatises of at least partially reversed coloration (in which some but
not all levels in red notation are perfect) include the lost motet Thoma tibi obsequia,
in whose tenoribus black notes were to be sung in perfect modus, imperfect tempus,
and red notes in imperfect modus, perfect tempus. Although lacking its beginning,
the second anonymous motet in Paris934, on f. 79v, now provides an anonymous in-
stance of the same usage, where black notes are in perfect modus, imperfect tempus,
and red in imperfect modus, perfect tempus.19 Lawrence Earp has suggested that this
could be the missing motet; however neither the tenor chant (Offertory Ave Maria)
nor the surviving portions of the texts (which include an amorous French triplum)
seem to relate to Thomas, whether Thomas of Canterbury or the apostle. Another
non-​extant motet, Plures errores, is cited as the converse usage of Douce/​Garison, in
turn one of the few surviving pieces cited to illustrate the use of black for perfection
and red for imperfection in both modus and tempus.20
The unique motet by Johannes Vavassoris in Douai74, Ferre solet/​Anatheos, dated
1373, offers an unprecedented instance of alternating blocks of partly reversed color-
ation. The lower parts are notated only in longs and breves. In the tenor, black and red
notes are in perfect modus, but in color I red notes are sung at half the notated values.
This is reversed in color II, with the black notes at half values. In the contratenor red
notes are in perfect modus, black in imperfect. In color I, both sing at half values. In
color II, the black sing at notated values, the red at half their previous values (i.e. one
quarter).21
The motetus texts of both Sub Arturo (Ch. 20) and O amicus include hemiola in their
musical indications. Yet another hemiolic relationship is present in O amicus: the first

18 See CSM 8 (Vitry, Ars nova), 28–​29, also for the larger discussion of coloration on which this paragraph

draws. The early treatises describing coloration to change modus allowed for reversibility of black and red
meanings on equal terms.
19 Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars nova Motets.
20 Thoma tibi obsequia and In arboris are listed in the 1376 index of the largely lost Trém. See Bent,

‘Trémoïlle’, here Ch. 31, and Dudas and Earp, ‘Paris 934’. The only one of the three Yox motets to be cited in
that index is the widely copied Degentis vita/​Cum vix artidici, which follows O amicus in Yox. Machaut’s Motet
23 specifies that the black tenor notes are perfect, the red imperfect. This yields imperfect modus and tempus
but aligned with the major prolation of the upper parts. Other use of ‘reverse’ coloration, licensed by early ars
nova theorists, include Vitry’s Tuba/​In arboris, Alpha vibrans/​Cetus venit, and Alme pater in Fountains (see
Ch. 30).
21 Presented by Manon Louviot in a seminar at All Souls College on 20.11.2020. See Louviot, ‘Uncovering

the Douai Fragment’.

 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 413

four reconstructed contratenor notes occupy eighteen breves to the corresponding

twelve of the tenor, leaving respectively twelve and eighteen breves for the remaining
two notes.

Reconstruction of the Original Notation

Example 22.3a gives the first talea of the solus tenor, Example 22.3b that of the tenor,
as now notated. Disregarding rests for the moment, the contratenor can be assigned
the same note values as the tenor but with the colours reversed, as in Example 22.3c. Its
colours are consistent with those of its embedded notes in the solus tenor, saving only
the first a, left black in the solus tenor to reflect that it is the continuation of an already
sounding note.

Ex. 22.3 Solus tenor, tenor and contratenor of O amicus: (a) Talea 1: solus tenor, with
redundant dots removed. Tenor notes marked *; (b) Talea 1: tenor. The two black long rests
following the red rests are omitted; (c) Contratenor: derived from the tenor by reverse
coloration prior to solution of the rests; (d) Contratenor: as derived from the tenor, with
rests, and showing the reverse coloration. Brackets show reversals of note and rest in
relation to the tenor; (e) Tenor in its presumed original form, with black not red long rests,
permitting contratenor derivation with reversed colours

Ex. 22.4 Contratenor and tenor in talea 1. The red rests in T 5–​6 have no counterpart in
the Ct; they should probably have been the omitted black rests in T 7–​8, realised as red in
the Ct 9–​10
414 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

The adjacence in the solus tenor of notes 3–​5 (b g a in talea 1, up a fifth from the chant)
of the six canonic pitches shows that no rests can have intervened in the contratenor at
a point where the tenor has red rests and where a like pair of black rests must also be
inserted.22 This appears at first to be an insuperable obstacle to achieving a notation
from which both parts can be derived. If, however, the canon that is so clearly embedded
in the solus tenor is to remain strict with respect to its pitches, notes 2, 5 and 6 of the
contratenor must be followed by the rests that precede them in the tenor.23 Ignoring for
the moment the omitted pair of rests necessary to complete the tenor, this proposed re-
versal of the order of notes and rests for the derived contratenor removes the obstacle
posed by the ‘restless’ adjacence of notes 4 and 5 in the solus tenor and therefore in the
reconstructed contratenor, shown in Example 22.3d.
It is clear from this example that everything that is black in the tenor is red in the
contratenor, and vice versa, with the exception of the pair of long red rests, which are
red in both parts. Given the omission of a needed pair of long black rests in the tenor,
I suggest that the red tenor rests at Example 22.4 bars 5–​6 should be black, as at 7–​8, en-
abling them to be reversed as the red contratenor rests at 9–​10, and that the tenor was
required to insert a pair of black rests that are not needed in the contratenor. (These
would probably have preceded the red rests, but I have placed them after, to simplify
transcription.) This would achieve a perfect reversal of colours in the canonic parts.
The contratenor must have been spelt out in notated form at some point, its colours
thus made tangible, and the solus tenor derived from it, presumably by the com-
poser after fixing the canon to meet the constraints of a homographic notation. None
of the refinements devised here to permit the contratenor to be derived from the
tenor’s notation is helped or hindered by musical sense. Further variations and
refinements may be possible. The composer’s strategy, put at its simplest, was to create
a harmonic foundation of sounding fifths (his ‘sweet-​sounding emiolic concord’, the
fifth having a ratio of 3:2) from the canon at that interval, and to avoid direct par-
allel progressions between the two supporting parts by manipulating their mensural
values and the location of rests. By assuming a single notated part as the basis for
the canon, dotless colour-​coding of perfect and imperfect relationships in red and
black, and unwritten derivation of the color repetition in reduced values, we can re-
store an elegant original notated form to the tenor that earns the motet’s textually
self-​proclaimed subtlety.
There are two possibilities for the contratenor. Either it has to be imagined with
colours reversed from the tenor (everything that was black becomes red, and vice versa)
and with reversals of rests and notes as prescribed here. (This is suggested by the nota-
tion of the solus tenor, which uses red for what would be red in such a reversal in the de-
rived part; i.e. the solus tenor is notationally consistent in making red longs perfect and
black imperfect.) Or are the meanings of the coloration to be reversed, as in a mental
derivation? This yields the more elegant solution of a presumed rubric that would re-
verse the meanings of black and red in the contratenor.

22 On contrapuntal grounds the contratenor needs no rests. Each note as reconstructed could be sustained

through the ensuing rest. Such a solution, however, defies a rendering in original note values that can be
accommodated to those of the tenor.
23 Not a necessary assumption for note 2, but applied for consistency.
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 415

Missing Performance Instructions?

The original instructions to derive the canon from the notated tenor and to make the
tenor itself performable may have gone something like this:

The contratenor is in fuga with the tenor, beginning together with it at the fifth above. Red
notes and rests in the tenor are in perfect modus, black are imperfect. In the contratenor
the colours are reversed. Tempus and maximodus are imperfect throughout. (Assuming
that the tenor’s red rests should have been black), the tenor (but not the contratenor) must
insert two red long rests after (or before) the black rests. The contratenor should sing all
notes before and not after the rest(s) following them.24

This may seem an excessive number of qualifications for a six-​note canon, but they
are certainly shorter and less extreme than some surviving examples of verbally quali-
fied canon that permit performance from a single notated part, notably the extraordi-
nary three-​part mensuration canon of the Credo OH, no. 75; or what would have been
necessary for the unexplained tenor of Inter densas (see Ch. 1) had it not been solved by
the provision of a tenor ad longum.
The rests omitted from the tenor are needed only in the tenor and may therefore have
been prescribed verbally to enable the same notation (without them) to serve both tenor
and contratenor. But the Yox scribe may have compounded our confusion by mistaking the
instruction and inserting the red rests in place of the black rests which must directly have
preceded note 5. These red rests preceding the (omitted) black rests were not needed for the
contratenor; they may have been instructed to be inserted mentally by the tenor. Thus note 5
in the tenor should be a red maxima immediately preceded by two black (not red) long rests,
as in Example 22.3e. The solus tenor shows that note 5 in the contratenor was not preceded
by rests; it must have been a black maxima followed by two red (not black) long rests.
From this point to the end of each talea there is a very straightforward, and not so
subtle, alternation (subtiliter alternare) both of sound and silence and of red and black
within and between the two ‘virile’ parts (low-​pitched? viriliter, motetus lines 9–​10).
Example 22.4 shows how the parts fit together in talea 1. The solution to note 6 also
reverses note and rest in order to maintain the alternation; the tenor is reconstructed as
red rest plus breve, the contratenor as black breve plus rest. The colour difference is here
cosmetic because the breve value is not affected by coloration, the breve (tempus) being
imperfect throughout the first color.

The Final Cadence

Tenor and contratenor must obviously end on the fifth, f and c. The solus tenor
approaches the final f stepwise at the end of the first color with two semibreves a g.

24 Rendered in Latin by David Howlett: ‘Contratenor incipit cum tenore, fugando in diapente (3:2) super

tenorem. Rubee note et pause in tenore debent cantari de modo perfecto, nigre de imperfecto; in contratenore
e converso. Tempus et maximodus semper imperfecti. Tenor (sed non contratenor) debet inserere duas
pausas longas rubeas post quartam notam. Contratenor debet cantare omnem notam ante pausam que se se-
quitur et non post.’
416 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

In the second color these are replaced with a semibreve rest and semibreve g, to be
hocketed between tenor and contratenor, but these cannot be accommodated in the
canon at the final cadence.25 While the concluding figure of each talea in color 1 of the
solus tenor does not match the canon, it is, on the other hand, appropriate to the adap­
tation needed (and supplied in this transcription) for the final cadence, whose reso-
lution lies outside the canonic and rhythmic structure. The inconsistency between the
two written-​out colores within the solus tenor part is no less problematic than that be-
tween both of them and the reconstructed contratenor. All this could simply be due to
a late compositional decision about placing the last note of the canon; such anomalies
in solus tenor parts sometimes suggest that they were made from a premature version
of the conflated parts.26
It could even have been applied to the internal cadences by a copyist who did not
realise that what he was looking at was in fact a draft for the end of the piece. The rests
in the first two taleae of color 2 coincide, in the motetus, with notes that duplicate the
pitch of the canonic contratenor. No attempt has been made here to prescribe the final
cadence in the proposed qualifying verbal canon.
The necessity of a final chord on f c f is corroborated by the solus tenor, which makes
the rhythmic adjustment needed for a final cadence outside the canonic and rhythmic
structure, while the diminution in the tenor is written out literally, with no provi-
sion either for the final chord or for a satisfactory approach to it. The reconstructed
contratenor must and can have c on the antepenultimate semibreve, but the tenor needs
an interpolated g on the penultimate, not f as notated in the tenor (consistently with the
canon), descending to its final resolution on f, as in the solus tenor. If the tenor must
bend to approach the cadence, so may the contratenor. The final note of the canon, a
fifth apart, is thus delayed in both lower voices for the final simultaneous cadential ar-
rival. Non-​coincident final cadences occur in some Machaut motets (Ch. 12), and in
Vitry’s Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8) and are also discussed in Chapter 1; I suggest that such
final cadences often required initiatives from performers.27 Some of these dissonant
endings have been claimed as intentional, but I am inclined to see most as the result of
a diminution written out too mechanically from a homographic tenor, failing to adjust
the final cadence to consonance as would have been obvious to performers accustomed
to making such adjustments. The explicitly adjusted notation of the present solus tenor
encourages some scepticism about allegedly intentional dissonant endings. The adap-
tation required to the cantus and tenor as written and the contratenor as reconstructed
could have been devised by the performers, as it has been at the end of Example 22.1 fol-
lowing the clues of the cadential formulas of the solus tenor and cantus II.
The triplum has a ligature of two semibreves, a e, and no resolution, where strict
isorhythm would demand a semibreve and a semibreve rest. At least one part, possibly
two, must supply b–​c in a four-​part cadence whose tenor proceeds from g to f. This need

25 On the penultimate breve or semibreve of each talea, except the last time, the motetus sounds the

contratenor note a fifth above the tenor. The only anomalous place, where the upper parts do not go well
with the reconstructed contratenor, is at the end of the first color, b. 45, which is only marginally acceptable
with the solus tenor. Given the exact correspondence of the motetus at the end of talea 1, I have emended the
triplum in bars 44–​45 from gabb fgaa down a step to fgaa efgg. Both triplum and motetus now correspond to
bars 14–​15.
26 Notably in Bent, ‘Pycard’s Double Canon’, reprinted in Bent, Counterpoint, ch. 9.
27 Sub Arturo plebs likewise has to be ‘fixed’ at the end, but no dissonance is involved; see Ch. 20.
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 417

can be addressed by a cadential adjustment in the reconstructed contratenor. The top

part’s a e must be followed by [f] ( ffs
). Musically more pleasing, but hard to defend by
manuscript evidence or part range, would have been a triplum reading that doubles the
contratenor progression at the octave, a [b c] ( ffs
). Readings are given in the musical
commentary at the end of this chapter.

Upper Parts

The tenor of color 1 is laid out in three taleae each of fifteen imperfect longs (=​thirty
imperfect breves), in color 2 in three taleae each of fifteen imperfect breves, following
the tenor’s simple diminution to the next level down (which at imperfect levels is in-
distinguishable from duple proportion). The upper parts operate in duple tempus and
minor prolation throughout, though they partake in the triple shift that is fundamental
to the lower-​voice design, a shift (of meter, not of mensuration) that is made prominent
and audible in the second color. The upper parts maintain strict duple time with minor
prolation throughout, and have no coloration. Even when, at each talea midpoint, the
supporting tenor and contratenor assert a triple pattern (bb. 7–​9 and corresponding
places), the duple regularity of the texted upper parts is not only maintained but given
deliberate sequential emphasis. This is, of course, especially noticeable in the second
color, where the reduced values claim attention more aggressively.
At the end of each talea of the first color (bb. 14–​15, 29–​30 and 44–​45), the insistently
duple pattern of mensuration and syllabification is broken in two ways which serve to
prepare the next talea: the clearly audible sequence (‘cum dat plausus | gaudia | alvo
clausus | previa’) is in both texted parts ‘displaced’ so that two groups are presented,
each of three semibreve beats, while at the same time the eight-​syllable lines of the
motetus are at this moment divided not by fours but (again audibly) as words of 2 +​3 +​3
syllables (‘promant | gaudia | previa’). The effect of rhythmic repetitions at cor­
responding positions in the talea repetitions is intensified by rhythmic and melodic se-
quence and by alternating dialogue between the two texted parts. Within color 1, both
upper parts have an exact rhythmic repeat across the middle of the talea at triplum bars
6−8 =​9−11, motetus bars 5−7 =​8−10, and at the corresponding places in the subse-
quent two taleae.28 In color 2 at the corresponding points a different device is used. The
shorter musical span of each talea would have been overwhelmed by a comparable
rhythmic repetition. Instead, the composer juxtaposes the two audibly perfect lower-​
voice breves, produced by the color diminution, with the continuing duple tempus of
the top parts. The triplum maintains duple measure throughout. After the spondee on
(incre-​)pavit (and corresponding places) come three rhythmically identical groups of
minims separated by rests.29 The motetus, although still subject to duple mensuration,

28 One could also count this simply as a repetition of both parts in bb. 6–​8 and 9–​11, but this cuts across

words and is a cruder way of counting.

29 Although these are actually each of three, two, and three minims =​syllables, the second group is notated

with two minim rests preceding the two minims, instead of the semibreve rest used elsewhere, which would
have sufficed here. This apparent notational anomaly (unlike the others) must be taken not as a coarsening
by the scribe but as expressing the compositional intent of presenting this second group also as a unit of three
minims (i.e. syllables), the first of which is, in this case, silent, though signalled by its visual separation.
418 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

has breves 7–​9 of the talea (bb. 49–​50 and corresponding) arranged in two equal triple
groups. In addition, many local repetitions contribute to a sense of careful planning and
economy. These include repeated notes,30 a falling fourth figure,31 falling fifths,32 and
sequences.33

Relationship of Words and Music: Priority and

Order of Composition

The two texts of O amicus/​Precursoris were clearly designed as a related pair, not as a
single text to be divided. There is some alliteration, notably at the motetus’s opening
Precursoris preconia, but this English predilection is less pervasive than in some other
motets. Here the sonic concentration is more obviously on the end-​rhymes, often in
adjacent words and treated with musical rhyme. The lines are octosyllabic throughout.
In what order might we suppose the texts and music to have been conceived and
united?
The adjacent Yoxford motets Degentis vita and O amicus belong to a small number
of motets in imperfect time, minor prolation, that observe a strict relationship between
notes and syllables, characterised by a patter at the minim level with many repeated
notes, also a feature of the Credo Omni tempore (Ch. 23). Here, the triplum is entirely
syllabic, the motetus likewise but for a few short melismas and isolated textless notes.
The two texts of O amicus were surely written at the same time by the same person, who
must have known already the intended details of the musical construction in order to be
able to build the descriptive wording, albeit not precisely prescriptive, into the motetus
text. Certainly the texts here are very closely tailored to each other and to the musical
plan by:

1. Relentlessly syllabic setting in the triplum, and in the syllabic portions of the
motetus. The motetus has some short melismas, whose notes were ligated where
possible. The sounding of different text at the same time in those two parts is
kept to a minimum; presentation of syllabic text in one part against melismatic
ligatures in the other contributes to text audibility, as does the cursiva technique
used for the Yox Credo (Ch. 23). Syllabic text setting is almost a commonplace in

30 Color 1, triplum: repeated notes: ut dicam (fff); parvulus (eee); sonitum (ggg); nascitur (eee); tenero (ggg);

meruit (aaa): (‘puer nascitur is the inversion of ‘iam a tenero’). Color 1, motetus: b. 7, mellisona (eddd); b. 22,
epogdois (aggg); b. 37, possit duum (feee); b. 10, uti prona (eccc; emend to dccc?); b. 25, atque scemo (eddd);
b. 40, currens suum (feee); bb. 14–​15 gaudia previa (ffc fff); bb. 29–​30, paribus pascibus [rhythmically this can
be treated as word painting, linked by iter in the triplum, even if not in pitch ‘equal’ steps (ccb and eee)]; bb.
44–​45, vel iter breviter (ffc fff).
31 Falling fourth figure: antequam (ggd), creditur (aae), sedulus (aae).
32 Color 2, motetus: melisma-​hocket at end of each talea is ad, gc, ad, falling fifths, mirroring the descending

fifth heard in the canonic lower parts.

33 Sequences: ‘sed et propheta dicitur, dirigit rege superno’ (but ‘maior Christus asseruit’ is different rhyth-

mically as well as melodically). Sequences also end each triplum talea: ‘cum dat plausus alvo clausus’ (fgaa
efgg); ‘in expertum iter certum’ (efgg deff); ‘ut qui scivit diffinivit’ (gabb fgaa), starting respectively on f, e, and
g, exact sequences to point the section ends. The first and third of these are over the same tenor note but a step
apart; the first and third taleae in the motetus (‘gaudia brevia, vel iter breviter’) respond at the same pitch (ffc
fff), a clever correspondence. Color 2, triplum: ‘vocavit limpha verbo lavit pavit’ (aaae defga ag); ‘in questum
dat abscisum festum mestum’ (gggd cdefg gf); ‘scemata labe sume nota vota’ (aaae defga ba).
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 419

English fourteenth-​century composition.34 The dotted semibreves in the second

color (motetus, bb. 52–​53) are evidently intended to have no text, despite the
manuscript underlay to them of vi laudare, here matched to the second and
third talea statements.
2. Most of the many word breaks that fall at textually and musically corresponding
places in successive taleae are articulated by a musical rest. And conversely, not
only is the triplum strictly syllabic, but no word is broken by a rest; this requires
close coordination of text and music.35 The triplum rhythms gggg gggg
and the
motetus rhythms gg f gg f
at the end of each of the first three taleae required two
groups, respectively, of words of four (2 +​2) and of three syllables, given prom-
inence by double rhymes, similarly planned. The texts must have been planned
together with the music, written with a syllabic discipline that would fit rest
placements in the intended stanza–​talea correspondence. Although there are no
hockets as such, short syllabic motives, conspicuously rhymed, are tossed between
the two texted parts.
3. A secondary rhyme scheme which receives musical prominence in conjunction
with some word-​breaks. Some other subsidiary rhymes are not maintained in
each talea. Not only are musical rhythms exactly and prominently matched to
each other but also to the text rhymes subtiliter, viriliter, and simpliciter. In addi-
tion, interestingly, those same rhythms, in the diminution section, are used for vel
iter and breviter, interspersed with similarly matching music for possit duum and
currens suum. The obsessive repeating rhymes are given musical emphasis, often
occurring before rests.
4. Text lengths that are exactly tailored to the musical requirements. The final
motetus stanza has only three lines, one for each talea of the second color, breaking
for a compelling musical reason the otherwise observed four-​line integrity of the
texts. Although to us an obvious thing to attempt, the rigorous correspondence of
stanza to talea found here was by no means ubiquitous. Each of the half-​stanzas
of the first triplum color is set to fifteen breves (half the talea). The stanza division
(without a musical break after ausus, desertum, and audivit) occurs exactly at the
midpoint of the talea (bar 7½), just as the two ‘full threes’ (plenis tribus) of the
contratenor red notes are audibly exposed to straddle the middle three units of
the talea. Plenis tribus, moreover, is set in the motetus to three imperfect breves.

The text of the motetus both advertises the compositional conceit and adumbrates,
sphinx-​like, how the performer is to retrieve it from the notation. This text must post-​
date the construction of the lower voices; it is a more complex case than the ‘bis sub

34 Examples include Patrie pacis in PMFC 15, and the majority of settings in PMFC 16 and 17. Tight syl-

labic tailoring is present in many Latin-​texted motets of French provenance, less so in French and French-​
texted motets of the later 14th c.
35 In few other pieces does this kind of planning occur in such a sophisticated way. The English motet

Suffragiose virginis (PMFC 17, no. 54), for example, has twenty units each of six breves all rhythmically iden-
tical, overlapped with seven colores. The text of the upper parts is in simple rhythmic canon throughout,
with alternating five-​and three-​syllable groups punctuated by rests. Other motets that avoid breaking words
with rests include Musicalis (Ch. 17), following the advice in its own text. Instances noted in Ch. 13 include
Machaut M9 (Ch. 9) and M18, Carbunculus ignitus lilie (OH, no. 143, Ch. 25), and Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8). In
those cases, the syllabification of the texts was planned precisely for, or together with, the music that would
clothe it.
420 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

emiolii’ of Sub Arturo plebs, whose stated proportions could have been decided ahead
of their implementation. The simpler explanation for O amicus is that the musical
composition proceeded hand in hand with the composition of the texts. First, a clever
constructional conceit was in place together with its notated form—​the chant-​based
lower-​voice canon. Then a solus tenor was drawn from that foundation, and the upper
voices erected upon it: either their strictly patterned rhythmic figures and repetitions
provided a straitjacket into which the words were chosen to fit syllabically or, more
likely, words and music were planned together, as suggested above.
Such close interconnection of words and music leads to the unavoidable conclusion
that text and music are by a single author and conceived as an entity (as in Sub Arturo
and others of the musician motets, Part IV; also Machaut M9 and M18, Chs. 9 and 13,
the Marigny motets in Fauvel, Chs. 3–​5, Carbunculus ignitus lilie, Ch. 25, and Vitry
motets including Vos/​Gratissima, Ch. 8). Indeed, the author of this text seems to iden-
tify himself as the musical composer by first-​person formulations such as mea nota and
cano. The mutual accountability of text and music, and a concomitant reconstruction
of the disciplines of construction faced at each stage by the creator, give us access to an
authorial intent that we as editors may have recovered more fully, and may value more
highly, than did the scribe through whose dim glass we see—​and recover—​the verbal
and musical text.
The ‘fore-​running’ choice of subject predetermined the chant tenor and the sym-
bolism of its manipulation. The entire motetus text, starting with the word precursoris
to denote both John the Baptist and the canonic dux, plies an elaborate double
meaning in counterpoint with the canonic tenor on an Introit for this saint, introduc-
tory if not precursive. Clearly loaded with musical terminology as well as allusions to
John the Baptist, it appears by hindsight to contain performance instructions—​albeit
vague ones—​for unlocking the concealed riddle of the double tenor, whose mutually
prefiguring constituents play out graphically, audibly, and differently, the complemen-
tary, harmonious roles of the prefiguring Baptist and the prefigured Christ. The four-​
voice piece is supported on the symbolic structure of a chant-​based canon two in one;
the texts of its upper parts (permeated by fourfold counts of lines, rhymes, syllables,
and musical rhythms) are a cento drawn from all four Gospels (as noted in Table 22.1),
that counterpoints the Baptist story, in the triplum, with the musical performance
indications (framed by Baptist allusions Precursoris and patronum) in the motetus.

Neighbouring Compositions

The unique copy of O amicus is sandwiched in Yox between two possibly significant
neighbours, both of which are known from other sources. The first recto of the first
bifolio contains the motetus and tenor of Sub Arturo plebs, not hitherto known from an
English source. The last verso contains the triplum and tenor of the motet Degentis vita,
hitherto widely distributed in Continental sources only, which now for the first time
comes under suspicion of an English career if not of English origin.36 The succession

36 Degentis vita is in Chantilly, Barc971, Nürnberg9, Brussels758, Stras and Trém, as well as being cited

in a number of treatises. See Ch. 15.

 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 421

of these three pieces in Yox is highly suggestive. O amicus has (different) affinities with
each of the others that may point to mutual knowledge, common provenance, or at least
shared technical concerns.
We have already observed that Degentis vita shares with O amicus the feature, less
common in French motets, of a strictly syllabic text in imperfect time and prolation.37
Degentis vita further shares with Sub Arturo plebs some syncopes, albeit in ‘easier’
duple mensuration, like those in the Yox Credo Omni tempore (Ch. 23). It is structurally
simpler, with two non-​reducing color statements, each of two taleae. Degentis vita does
not appear to be ‘signed’, despite some first-​person references. It must antedate the
main body of the 1376 Trém index in which it appears (Ch. 31); its presence there, and
in eastern European circulation, make an English origin less likely. Neither of its two
companions in Yox is in that index; I believe both date closer to 1400.
The use of Yox in the binding of a local administrative document may betoken local
origin. The superficial appearance of awkward script and the unpractised musical no-
tation and its inconsistent ductus conspire with textual and musical infelicities to show
that the scribe was out of his depth, or at least at the limits of his understanding. The text
includes spelling errors and obvious grammatical slips, though this is not unusual in
transmitted motet texts.38 Sub Arturo plebs is provided in the Yox copy with redundant
swallowtails to confirm minim alteration, an Anglicism that died out soon after 1400
and was purged from the OH repertory, although present in some of its concordant
sources, including the important Fountains fragment. Similarly redundant are the ad-
dition of dots to the red notes in the tenor of O amicus and the superfluous dots of syn-
copation within wholly duple mensuration in the Yox Credo Omni tempore (Ch. 23),
although copied in another hand. It is quite surprising that compositions of the highest
sophistication, stylistically consistent with a date close to 1400, are here furnished
with superfluous elementary reading aids in a manuscript of provincial appearance. O
amicus, moreover, uses the major semibreve rest, a distinctive form peculiar to English
fourteenth-​century sources which, equivalent to a ‘dotted’ rest, straddles its staff line; it
is not here always graphically distinguished from the minim rest, but musical sense and
regular rhythmic repetitions leave no ambiguity in its evaluation. Such rests are usu-
ally associated with major prolation, but here, unusually, it stands for a semibreve plus
minim rest in minor prolation. (See Ch. 8, n. 14.)
O amicus shares with Sub Arturo plebs, its immediate predecessor in Yox, mensurally
significant coloration, unusual in English music before OH.39 There is strict cor-
respondence between stanzas and taleae; a motetus text that embodies information
about the musical technique of its lower parts, and a personal statement by the poet/​

37 The overwhelming majority of French 14th-​c. motets are in major prolation. One exception in minor

prolation is the Post missarum in Ivrea, which, however, is less syllabic than the OH setting. Another with
minor-​prolation syllabic patter is Alpha vibrans/​Cetus venit (only in Chantilly), not as completely syllabic as
Degentis vita; it respects word divisions by virtue of textless hockets, as in Musicalis (Ch. 17).
38 For example, tripharii for triplarii, and gwydo in Sub Arturo plebs, prehenda for prebenda in Degentis vita.

It has not been established whether they (a) give support to any of our emendations, or (b) suggest that the
three motets, or at least the first two, had been copied from a source that habitually made the same kinds of
errors. The latter would suggest that they might have been copied from the same source, thus firming up by a
notch their claims to sibling pedigree.
39 An early exception is in Lwa12185: see Ch. 4 n. 38, and for OH, Bent, ‘Principles of Mensuration and

Coloration’.
422 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

composer, in both cases with self-​conscious cleverness. Musically, their styles seem
different because their mensurations are different; Sub Arturo is musically a more bril-
liant piece, though the technical verbal–​musical challenges posed are of different but
parallel ingenuity. Both are so different from anything else in England at the time that
the personalisation of both texts by their makers, the likelihood that the author wrote
text and music in both cases, that the author of O amicus seems to be saying in the text
that he wrote the music and that his name is John, and that he has a barely concealed if
unctuous pride in his own work—​all this suggests that O amicus might be considered
in some ways a companion piece to its neighbour Sub Arturo plebs, though there is in-
sufficient evidence to suggest common authorship.40 Each is a unique, cleverly posed
and brilliantly solved technical essay that exceeds in self-​conscious hubris (signed and
advertised in the text) any known English work and most non-​English works of the
period around 1400. O amicus is an important addition to a small but significant rep-
ertory; it certainly calls for revisions to existing views of the English and Anglo-​French
motet at this time.

40 See Ch. 20 for the date, authorship and musical technique of Sub Arturo plebs.
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 423

Appendix
Musical Transcription of O amicus/​Precursoris (Ex. 22.1),
with Musical and Textual Commentary

Ex. 22.1 Transcription of O amicus sponsi primus/​Precursoris preconia

424 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

Ex. 22.1 Continued

 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 425

Ex. 22.1 Continued

426 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

Ex. 22.1 Continued

 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 427

Ex. 22.1 Continued

428 English Motets c. 1400–​1 420

Musical Commentary (by MB)

Voices are referred to as I, II, T, Ct, and ST. The references in the left column are to bar,
voice, and note of the bar when applicable.

2.1.5 minim
4.II.2 a not g
6.I rest and dotted semibreve are missing
7–​9.T The rests are omitted here and in all corresponding taleae, as
discussed above
10.II.1 e; all appearances of this figure are now given as intervallically
stepwise
12–​13, 27–​28,
42–​43.II the first two pairs of semibreve ligatures are written close together to
indicate single syllabification
13.I.2 e (emendation to the triadic figure used elsewhere)
18.II.4 followed by extra minim d
29.I last semibreve rest omitted?
37.T clef changes to F4, with custos
42.ST dot present?
44–​45.I was a step higher. Its first note appears to have been changed in the
manuscript from one a step lower, leading to scribal confusion
46.ST breve should be long (other taleae are correct)
58.II minim rest after 58.1 omitted
62.T c, recte d

Final cadence:

ST After dotted maxima, semibreve rest and semibreve g, respecting isorhythm;

final long f outside the structure, correctly.
I Final long omitted; semibreve ligature a e makes parallel octaves with II. II
correctly provides a final long outside the structure.
T Last note omitted; f semibreve mechanically reproduced from color I, its pitch
here transferred to the final long outside the structure. Cadential approach a g
supplied from the corresponding ST place at 45. The Ct must have provided c b c
at this cadence.

Textual Commentary (by David Howlett)

Text I has (for color 1) three (double) stanzas each of 8 lines × 8 syllables, then (for color
2) three stanzas each of 4 lines × 8 syllables. Text II has (for color 1) three stanzas each of
4 lines × 8 syllables, then (for color 2) a stanza of 3 lines × 8 syllables.
In text I color 1, the last line of each a-​stanza is linked to the first line of each b-​stanza
by rhyme in the third syllable or the second and third syllables. The first three lines
 The Yoxford MS and O amicus/Precursoris 429

of each a-​stanza share end-​rhyme, and the first three lines of each a-​stanza share end-​
rhyme. One rhyme at the end of each a-​stanza is echoed twice at the end of each b-​
stanza. In color 2, by a simpler scheme, one feminine rhyme, which ends the first three
lines of each stanza, is echoed twice in the fourth line. The last two lines of the third
stanza share a further rhyme in -​me.
Text II color 1 has the same rhyme scheme as text I color 2, five feminine rhymes in
each four-​lined stanza, but two lines in each stanza share a further rhyme. In color 2, the
end-​rhyme -​ota is repeated from the last stanza of text I color 2, and the rhyme -​um is
repeated from the last stanza of text II color 1. More than one-​third of the syllables of the
entire composition belong to rhyme schemes.
In text I there are 144 words, 88 in color 1 and 56 in color 2, arranged in the ratio 11:7.
In text II there are 33 words in color 1 and 12 in color 2, arranged in the ratio 11:4. The
numbers 88 and 56 are the major and minor parts of the Golden Section of 144.
In text I John the Baptist is described as baptista in Ia3, who circumcisus fuit in IIa3,
who baptizat in IIa3, and limpha lavit in the fourth line of color 2. Note propheta in Ib3,
IIa2, IIa1, and prophetavit in the first line of color 2. The Baptist is filius in Ia2, puer in
Ib1, parvulus in IIa4, a tenero in IIb1. But in IIa1 he is plusquam propheta, nullus maior
in IIb2–​3, who forciorem prophetavit in the first line of color 2.
 23
The Yoxford Credo

The musical flyleaves of the Yoxford manuscript were described in the preceding
chapter, as was the motet on John the Baptist on the front flyleaves. The central opening
of each of the two bifolios contains a complete, unique and ingenious composition. The
bifolio at the end of Yox contains three Credos in void notation, all so far unique.1 Both
in composition and copying, they must be slightly earlier than or roughly contemporary
with the OH and Fountains manuscripts. Musically, they are innocent of many stylistic
and technical features that mark the mature work of Leonel and Dunstaple of the first
two decades of the fifteenth century, but they exploit to the full the musical language of
the immediately preceding generation, less in evidence after OH, whose repertory they
extend. Similar compositions are found neither in contemporary English fragments nor
in Continental sources of English music. The first recto of the end flyleaves (f. 159r)
presents an isolated texted upper part (presumably a second cantus), in unsigned per-
fect time and mostly in C3 clef. This part is in nine sections (abc abc abc), which can be
aligned in such a way that the same tenor color must have been repeated once for each
equal-​length third (abc) of the piece.2 Several anomalies of rhythm and pitch in one
or other of these three iterations need to be accommodated to each other and to the
demands of the missing tenor. It seems that the repeating sections have been freely and
somewhat roughly adapted to their differing text; both the cleffing and the number of
minims provided are erratic. The last verso of the bifolio contains two upper parts of an-
ç
other unknown Credo, in unsigned mensuration with flagged semiminims, changing
o
to (signed) time. The parts are in approximately aligned score with the text under the
lower part. In extent it is nearly complete, lacking only from ‘regni non erit finis’ to the
end. The cadences are to a unison; the texture is nearly complete as a two-​voice piece
as it stands but, as Peter Wright points out in his edition,3 a number of unsupported
fourths require at least one and possibly two lower parts. In addition, only alternate
sections of text are set. The text provided corresponds to that in telescoped Credos by
Dunstaple, implying completion from other parts; but this unique and puzzling pre-
sentation of two upper parts in score with implicitly the same text discourages a similar
solution.4

Original version published in 1990 as ‘The Yoxford Credo’. The present adaptation is published with permis-
sion from the American Musicological Society.
1 Meanwhile these have been published in EECM 55, respectively nos. 42, 8, 41, with commentary.
2 Such a repeating form has English precedents. These include two Glorias in score, in various fragmentary

versions, first reported in Bent, ‘Transmission’, 69, and now published in PMFC 16, the first as nos. 39 and 40,
the second as no. 35. The first has the form aax, bbx, ccy, ddy (in Lo36579, Ox27, Lo24, and more recently in
RC, no. 2). The second (in Lo40725): abb′ cc′ dd′ ee′ ff′ gg. Similar forms with sectional repetition occur in
some north Italian compositions, notably Ciconia’s Gloria, PMFC 24, no. 8 (abcbd) and a possibly spuriously
attributed Credo, no. 11 (abc def bcg).
3 EECM 55, no. 8.
4 The missing text could have been provided in chant, though this is early for an alternatim setting. See

Peter Wright’s commentary to EECM 55, no. 41, and Wright, ‘A New Attribution’, 213 n. 47.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0024
432 English Motets c. 1400–1420

The complete Credo to be described here is on the central bifolio ff. 159v and 162r
(the music on ff. 160v–​161 bound between them is not polyphonic). It is not tech-
nically a motet, although the strategy of this Credo places it high on the panoply of
individual motets that follow no existing template. The six statements of its tenor
and contratenor reduce successively in paired iterations by mensural reinterpreta-
tion within each pair and by diminution between each pair. It is also a striking and
ingenious instance of upper-​voice structures whose periods are quite independent of
the tenors.5
It shares with the motet O amicus a compositional procedure (essential contratenor)
requiring or required for a solus tenor, and a degree of mensural ingenuity found other­
wise at this time only in OH. It alternates text and melisma between equal upper voices
(a technique known as cursiva; see below); because of this equal range and activity
the upper voices are here called cantus I and cantus II. The tenor is structured to this
individual movement rather than designed to support a unified cycle, and it makes
advanced use of mensural transformation and diminution. The majority of English
polyphonic Credos up to and including OH are homophonic settings in score. OH
and Fountains between them present almost the only surviving examples of more
elaborate essays in setting the two longer-​texted Ordinary movements, the Gloria and
Credo. The only hitherto known Credos not notated in score from the period around
1400, in the Fountains and Princeton103 fragments, have OH concordances, while
the present three do not—​a notable absence. Credos are grouped in succession, as
in OH and RC, not presented in pairs or cycles. (RC is a reconstructed fragmentary
royal choirbook of the early 1420s; see Ch. 25 and Table 25.1, adapted from the full
discussion in EECM 62.)
The script, and the appearance of the void notation, are similar to Fountains; this
bifolio can hardly be dated much later or earlier than the first decade after 1400, a
judgement of the script confirmed orally by Malcolm Parkes. The new Credo is pro-
vided with syncopation dots, redundantly, since they are here used with wholly duple
and unambiguous mensuration. (Redundant dots also appear in O amicus; see Ch. 22.)
Comparable provincial or accidental notational signs, including the cauda hirundinis
for alteration in Fountains and in the Yox copy of Sub Arturo, are absent from OH, and
virtually disappear thereafter.
This long and ambitious Credo, transcribed in modern notation as Example 23.1,
deploys unique structural strategies. With its compact text setting, duple time
throughout the upper parts, transparent texture, and absence of mensurally florid
writing, it does not at first seem to match the ingenuity of the more complex settings in
OH. In fact, it combines the apparently irreconcilable elements of mostly equal-​length
segments in the upper parts with non-​coincident mensural transformation and suc-
cessive diminution in the lower parts. Imaginative use is made of audible accelerations
and palindromic elements. Figure 23.1 shows some of the main features in diagram-
matic form.

5 Tucked away in a Festschrift for Alvin Johnson, the original publication of this essay has been little

noticed; it provides a virtuosic instance of the independence of upper-​voice structures, a subject which is the
focus of Zayaruznaya, Upper-​Voice Structures.
 The Yoxford Credo 433

Fig. 23.2 Responsory Omni tempore, AS, pl. 317

Tenor Chant

The tenor on the recto (f. 162) is not so designated, but is labelled Omni tempore (through
all time). These words replace a longer, erased inscription that cannot yet be deciphered,
but presumably gave instructions for the tenor iterations. The words open the second
Matins responsory of the first nocturn for the Sunday following 11 September, a week
known as ‘Peto Domine’, from the first responsory of Sunday Matins, or ‘Tobias’, from
the source of the daily readings; see Figure 23.2.6 In the spirit of directives to take for
a motet an appropriate tenor from the Antiphoner (in the treatise attributed, per-
haps wrongly, to Egidius; see Chs. 1 and 16), this choice of tenor text might have been
harnessed to do double duty as a generalised instruction to perform the tenor in all
mensural permutations.
Other identified tenors of English Gloria and Credo settings of this period are mostly
antiphons, several of them for Lauds. But for the manuscript designation, this respon-
sory would not have been a candidate for identification with the Credo tenor, as it
differs extensively from available versions of the chant. The Credo tenor is notated with
bb, begins and ends on f without returning to that note in between, and remains en-
tirely within the soft hexachord; the chant is a clear mode 8. It appears at present that
the Credo color may have been more freely derived from the Salisbury version of the
chant than would qualify as an identification. Until a closer match is found, we might at-
tribute the very substantial differences to compositional intervention by the composer
(see Ex. 23.2).

6 AS, 317; also in WA, 176. There are slight variants between these two, and our Credo is different again; its

tenor seems to be somewhat closer to the Salisbury version of Fig. 23.2.

Ex. 23.2 Tenor of Yoxford Credo, with relevant portions of chant

Talea 1: some correspondence to the first phrase of the responsory Omni tempore benedic deum, but omitting the first two notes (d d, for Omni);
Talea 2: freely based on the beginning of the repetendum (‘Et omni tempore’), but omitting the first two notes (for Et). The verbal association with omni
tempore is the same as for the first talea. In addition, only this part of the responsory rises to the upper d used in the tenor;
Talea 3: attempts to show a derivation from the chant are forced and unconvincing. However, the third talea is, unlike the chant, a retrograde form of the
first, and save for the changed position of its first g.

The end of talea 2 and the beginning of talea 3 might be seen as a free play on forward and retrograde elements of dirigat, the melismatic phrase directly
preceding the repetendum. The retrograde of talea 3 is underlined by the restraint of confining f to the beginning and end of the color. Other palindromic
aspects of the Credo will be discussed below. Another retrograde manipulation of a Credo tenor is in OH, no. 90 (f. 77v, completed in Fountains), where the
color (comprising three taleae) is to be stated three times, of which the second is to be read in retrograde, prescribed by a verbal canon, and then the entirety
has to be repeated in unspecified diminution. The retrograde reading in that case, unlike the present, can be derived from the same notated part, albeit with
improper brevial alteration in both forward and backward readings. No chant tenor for that Credo has been identified; without a label, it would be hard to do so
if it had undergone a manipulation similar to Omni tempore.
 The Yoxford Credo 435

For the moment, we must conclude that the composer, for symbolic reasons, took his
starting point from the chant words that would serve his purpose, whose number and
arrangement of pitches he then shaped freely for his own purposes. The tenor notes are
selected in a highly capricious way from the chant, using mainly the notes that go with
two appearances of the words omni tempore, presumably to signal his mensural games
with time. Other chant-​like but unidentified tenors may well be similarly camouflaged.

Tenor Disposition

The tenor color’s thirty notes are arranged in three taleae of ten notes each, disposed
in eight modus units (i.e. longs), and notated in longs and breves only. The six color
iterations are read from the single notated statement and grouped in three pairs, each
pair consisting of one in perfect (triple) and one in duple (imperfect) mensuration, de-
rived by different mensural interpretations of the same notation.7 Diminution then takes
place between each of the three pairs, read at the next note-​level down. The method of
derivation is not proportional, but the combination of mensural change and diminu-
tion results in the unprecedented overall proportions 12:8, 6:4, 3:2. Tenor, contratenor
and solus tenor are each followed by a custos and six vertical strokes, diminishing in
size from two spaces on the staff to a mere intersection of the middle line, a graphic in-
dication of the number of accelerating repeats. The sixth color statement is one-​sixth the
length of the first (see Fig. 23.3).
The main tenor divisions fall between the three pairs of color statements as follows:

Section I, bb. 1−60: (3 × 12) +​(3 × 8) =​60

Section II, bb. 61−90: (3 × 6) +​(3 × 4) =​30
Section III, bb. 91−105: (3 × 3) +​(3 × 2) =​15

Fig. 23.3 Tenor talea of Yoxford Credo as notated, with ligatures resolved, followed by the
reducing derivations

7 The Glorias OH, nos. 19 and 23 have alternation of text and melisma in irregular periods, only one level

of diminution, 2:1, and mensural change within, not of, the color, effected by coloration. Alteration marked
here by swallowtails applies only to the triple mensurations.
436 English Motets c. 1400–1420

As determined by the tenor, the overall proportions are thus 60:30:15 =​12:6:3 =​4:2:1, a
geometric series of twice duple proportion. Although many motets have a single dimi-
nution that is most often duple, occasionally triple, a resulting double diminution in geo-
metric proportion is rare, and unprecedented before c. 1400.8 Depending on a resolution
of its date, one of the earliest motets with two levels of acceleration is also a neighbour of
O amicus (Ch. 22) in Yox: Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20). Although its motetus text embodies
the resulting tenor proportions bis sub emiolii, twice applying the proportion 3:2 to yield
the harmonic proportion 9:6:4, the acceleration is achieved in that motet not by diminu-
tion (to the next note-​level down) but by a succession of tenor mensurations ( ) in øçc
which the breve is worth respectively 9, 6 and 4 minims, the full range of minim units
represented by the ‘quatre prolacions’.9 Technical kinship of various kinds adds interest
and perhaps significance to the survival of all three compositions in flyleaves of the same
manuscript. There is even a verbal kinship, and possibly play, between the tenors of Sub
Arturo plebs (In omnem terram) and the Yoxford Credo (Omni tempore).
In the Credo, the unaltered breve remains constant within each pair of statements:
relative breve value for all statements can be expressed as 4:4:2:2:1:1. The different lengths
of paired colores based on those equal breves are due to the operation of alteration and
perfection upon the same notated symbols in perfect mensuration, or their absence in
imperfect, and account for the different overall proportions within each pair (3:2) and
between pairs (2:1). The three pairs of colores could have been notated ad longum re-
spectively in the modus, tempus and prolation corresponding to the upper-​part values,
with a shift to the next note-​level down for each pair. These relationships had to be dis-
covered empirically from the single notated color, unless they were prescribed in the
line of now illegible erased text below the tenor. Since the tenor color uses only two
adjacent note-​values, breve and long, only one level of mensural relationship operates
at any given time within the tenor itself, reducing the variables that would arise if
combinations of modus and tempus, tempus and prolation, or all three, were in simul-
taneous effect.10 This was also the strategy for the mensural acceleration of the tenor
of Sub Arturo. Adjacent levels are all imperfect as measured by the upper parts. The
c
equal-​range upper parts are in time throughout; their 105 longs govern the barring of
the accompanying transcription. The final long is simply a prolongation of the last semi­
breve of the talea, and is for present purposes counted as a semibreve.
The series 12:8:6:4:3:2 includes the proportions of the simple consonances, the oc-
tave, 2:1 (12:6, 8:4, 6:3, 4:2); the fifth, 3:2 (12:8, 6:4, 3:2); and fourth, 4:3 (8:6, 4:3). It
also includes the simple (i.e. multiple) ratios 3:1, 4:1, 6:1.11 For Boethius, proportions

8 The resulting overall proportions 3:2:1 or 6:4:3, respectively in arithmetic and harmonic proportion,

are much more common, as in the motets of Dunstaple (Ch. 25). With one exception, reduction in OH mass
movements is confined to a single level and to diminution resulting in duple proportion, 2:1, as in the Glorias
nos. 23 and 30; and also the Credo OH, no. 90, which includes a retrograde statement. The exception is OH,
no. 28, with four sections in the Pythagorean proportions 12:9:8:6 or, if the final section is performed as
notated rather than in the apparently implied diminution, 12:9:8:12.
9 ø , though differently constituted, also has six minims to the breve. This double hemiola also results in a
geometric proportion. For this relationship in Cooke’s motet, OH, no. 112, see Ch. 25.
10 Such an exploration of multiple mensural combinations is the primary strategy of the late 14th-​c. motet

Inter densas, uniquely preserved in Chantilly and edited in CMM 39, no. 15. See Ch. 1.
11 For a different example of such a series, see Boethius, De institutione musica, II.xvi. With the addition of

9 to the series, the epogdoic whole tone (9:8) could have been added to these basic intervals. That interval is
musically emphasised elsewhere, as for example in Psallentes zinzugia, Ch. 16, and Musicus est/​Arta, Ch. 21.
 The Yoxford Credo 437

proceed from equality; equal proportion, 1:1, is followed most closely by 2:1 and then by
3:1. Our progression yields several proportioned series using the three means Boethius
favoured for music: the arithmetic mean, with equal differences: 12:8:4, 3:2:1, 8:6:4:2; the
geometric, with terms in equal proportion: 12:6:3, 8:4:2, 9:6:4, 4:2:1; and the harmonic,
where the proportion of the outer terms equals the proportion of their differences from
the mean: 6:4:3, 12:8:6, 6:3:2, 12:6:4. The series also includes, adjacently, the disjunct ge-
ometric proportions 12:8 =​6:4 =​3:2, and 8:6 =​4:3.
Contratenor and solus tenor follow the tenor; their structure is not separately
described here. The contratenor provides harmonically essential support to the upper
parts when it descends below the tenor; see bars 12, 14, and corresponding places. The
solus tenor has no irregularities; it is a simple basso seguente conflation of contratenor
and tenor, presenting the lower-​sounding voice at all times. As such, it offers no fur-
ther evidence for or against the view that solus tenor parts were a convenient aid in the
composition of complex pieces without the visual control of aligned score. While inci-
dentally providing an alternative to tenor and contratenor for reduced performance, it
should be omitted when they are performed.
Text and melisma alternate between the twin upper parts in a manner that has come
to be known as cursiva, a term known only from the index of Ox213, where it is ap-
plied to a Gloria by Loqueville whose distinctive feature is that the text, as Hans Schoop
explains it, ‘runs’ from one voice to the other.12 The alternating sections in the few
Continental examples neither follow an obvious numerical scheme nor are combined
with tenor repetition. In the English repertory, on the other hand, alternation is fun-
damental to the fourteenth-​century voice-​exchange motet, where the paired sections,
having the same content, are necessarily identical in length. The texture facilitates au-
dible projection of the text over one, or more usually two, slow-​moving lower parts, be-
cause only one of the two upper voices at a time is texted, albeit often densely, while the
other recedes from prominence with slower-​moving melisma.
Some mass movements of the OH period extend such alternation of equal-​length
sections to a number of successive statements coordinated with tenor repetition. Their
musical content may no longer be identical, but is sometimes matched by rhythmic
parallels or by pitch content so as to fit color repetition. This Credo adopts the estab-
lished English voice-​exchange texture of two upper voices sharing text, arranged
in balanced sections of equal length and parallel rhythm that alternate text and me-
lisma, supported by two untexted lower ones. It boldly combines this model with an
ambitious scheme of mensurally reducing tenor statements, unknown in earlier voice-​
exchange motets. When a tenor is repeated in either equal or duple proportion, it is
easy, indeed obvious, to arrange things so that upper-​part sections corresponding to
one or two tenor repetitions will themselves be rhythmically similar, if not identical.
Queldryk’s Gloria (OH, no. 30) has a tenor to be restated in diminution,13 and is so

12 Folio 68v, CMM 11/​3, no. 8. Schoop, Entstehung, 49–​51. See Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Canon. Misc.

213, ed. Fallows, and Fallows, Dufay, 13 and n. 24 for further adoption of the term, also Bent, ‘The use of cut
signatures in sacred music by Binchois’, 295 n. 25.
13 This Gloria punctuates the ends of taleae with short passages texted a2. There are some delays and

overlaps in making the transition from one sub-​segment to the next. There is some motto allusion, especially
at beginnings of the melismatic phrases, though cantus I’s characteristic rhythm differs from that of cantus II.
The diminution is unspecified; there is only a repeat sign. The notes are read at the next level down, but be-
cause the mensuration is wholly duple, this results in a 2:1 reduction.
438 English Motets c. 1400–1420

arranged that the alternating texted and melismatic periods of the upper parts coincide
with one unreduced or two reduced tenor statements. The first two taleae each contain
two double segments (each of 2 × 9 breves); then the two duply reduced taleae each con-
tain one double segment (of 2 × 9 breves). The closest parallel to the Yoxford Credo, al-
beit a much simpler design, is Fountains Gloria no. 1.14 One of the remarkable features
of the Yox Credo is the non-​coincidence of the upper-​and lower-​part periods.
The number of reducing sections is unprecedented, except in the presumably French
anonymous motet Inter densas (Ch. 1), which must probably be dated before the death
of Gaston Phebus in 1391, making it as worryingly precocious as the debate on the
dating of Machaut’s Motet 18 (Ch. 13). But the Yox combination of paired mensural
transformation applied to three levels of diminution may be unique in mass composi-
tion.15 One branch of its pedigree surely lies in the interest of late fourteenth-​century
English theorists in an extended panoply of note-​values, in one case from the irreduc-
ible minima through the minuta, semibrevis, brevis, longa and larga to the largissima.16
Another derives from the purely English fourteenth-​century tradition of large-​scale
voice-​exchange motets, pieces with two slow-​moving lower parts that support a pair
of upper parts with alternating text and melisma, now augmented by the discovery of
Dor.17 It is a small compositional step from that to bond members of the pair by texture
and rhythm, and to extend the procedure to a strophic continuation without exact mu-
sical repetition.
Not only does the plan for the upper voices need to be distinguished from that for
the tenor, but also from its own realisation. Just as a labelled chant is strikingly departed
from, so the structure of the upper parts has a clear underlying strategy, but one with
calculated irregularities of execution. Up to the Amen, the upper parts were planned as
nine non-​reducing double periods, notionally each of ten longs duply divided into two

14 The Fountains Gloria no. 1, f. 9, ed. Kershaw and Sandon in The Fountains Fragments, is tentatively

attributed by its editors to Pennard. The upper voices alternate text and melisma in periods of 2 × 7 breves
(of perfect tempus, major prolatio) that coincide with the fourteen-​breve tenor talea length. The untexted
portions of the upper parts use only breves and breve rests while the Gloria text is present (first two colores);
the note values of both upper parts in the melismatic Amen are matched, with semibreves and minims. Two
non-​reducing tenor color statements of three taleae each accommodate the Gloria text; the Amen presents
the same double color statement in diminution. The first color is in imperfect modus, perfect time and major
prolation; the diminution section is in imperfect time, major prolation. This results in 3:1 reduction. The
upper parts of this Gloria are isoperiodic and only isorhythmic for the Amen, where the three upper part
periods coincide with pairs of tenor taleae but overlap with the two colores. Pennard’s Credo OH, no. 89, also
ç
in Princeton103, has twenty non-​reducing statements, each of eight breves of time, supporting upper-​part
alternation in periods of the same length.
15 The second section of Machaut’s Motet 2 is in diminution as well as with mensural transformation from

perfect to imperfect (Ch. 13). Mensuration and diminution are also applied in Portio/​Ida capillorum, present
in Ivrea, Chantilly, Stras, and the main part of Trém, therefore datable before 1376. The tenor is read first
in perfect modus, then in imperfect modus, then ‘per semi’ of those statements. Zazulia, ‘A Motet Ahead of
its Time?’, highlights its precocity. Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’, 38, noted that it is the only motet in
Ivrea to use semibreve syncopation in major prolation. Despite having four sections it has only one level of
reduction. Mensural transformation apart, no motet clearly datable before 1400 has more than one such level.
Sub Arturo has three levels of mensural reduction, and Omni tempore may be the earliest to have three levels
of diminution. Zazulia (p. 349) also discusses an anonymous motet-​style Gloria in Ivrea, no. 47 (ff. 28v–​29,
CMM 29, nos. 21, 23–​25) with a homographic tenor that must be interpreted in a similar manner to Portio/​
Ida, except that its upper voices change mensurations at the same time as the tenor, whereas the upper voices
of Portio/​Ida remain in imperfect tempus, major prolation throughout. The upper parts of Omni tempore re-
main in imperfect time and minor prolation, pitted against changing mensurations in the lower parts.
16 See Reaney, Willelmus.
17 For extensive discussion of the early 14th-​c. voice-​exchange repertory, see now Bent, Hartt and Lefferts,

The Dorset Rotulus.

 The Yoxford Credo 439

segments of five longs. These are relentlessly counterpointed against the reducing pro-
portional scheme and paired threefold structure of the tenor, whose only tenfold feature
is that each talea contains ten notes. The underlying plan for the upper parts would have
related to the tenor as follows:

Section I, bb. 1–​60: six double segments of ten longs, spanning the first pair of tenor
colores, (3 × 12) +​(3 × 8) =​6 × 10;

Section II, bb. 61–​90: three double segments of ten longs, spanning the second pair of
tenor colores, (3 × 6) +​(3 × 4) =​3 × 10;

Section III, bb. 91–​105: Amen, occupying the last pair of tenor colores. These two
sections are fully melismatic and isorhythmic within each color, with full coinci-
dence between the parts, and complementary hocketing of upper and lower parts,
(3 × 3) +​(3 × 2).

However, this was not what happens. The composer chose to sacrifice the rigorous
neatness of this underlying scheme to the gratuitous flourish of a structural ‘rubato’.
See again Figure 23.1. The ten-​long segment that would have occupied bars 41–​50
(Et resurrexit) was shortened to nine longs, dividing in half at four and a half longs and
ending in bar 49; the segment bars 50–​59 (Et iterum) is again ten longs, causing the fol-
lowing ten-​long segment at bars 60–​69 (Qui cum patre) to anticipate and camouflage,
rather than to reinforce, the structural tenor join that falls between bars 60 and 61. The
‘robbed’ long is recovered in the eleven-​long segment bars 80–​90 (Et vitam; itself fur-
ther subdivided, as we shall see), allowing the two patterns to coincide for the Amen
starting in bar 91.
Why did the composer avoid bringing the upper and lower parts together at bar 61?
The irregularity serves no apparent formal purpose. Rather, it seems to meet an extra-​
numerical consideration that we might call aesthetic: while respecting the underlying
numbers and acknowledging their force, the composer saved the full power of their si-
multaneity for the beginning of the climactic Amen (b. 91). Dynamic considerations of
sounding energy were allowed to bend the numbers. At bars 60–​61, a sustained tenor f
bridges two tenor colores that are still in relatively long notes; momentum would have
been lost if the rhythmic hiatus that divides the upper-​voice segments fell at just the
same point. Nowhere else does a similar stasis of tenor pitch and upper-​voice rhythm
threaten to coincide. That is no longer a problem for the juncture with the Amen,
where the strategy for the upper parts is different and the tenor f is of shorter duration.
Examples of demonstrable deviations that invite such explanations are rare indeed;
and the rarity is compounded in this case by the inevitability of the ground plan.
One effective strategy in this Credo is the graduated acceleration of the melismatic
part towards the texted voice’s motion in minims and semibreves until, in the final color,
the two upper voices as well as the tenor operate simultaneously. Although structur-
ally and numerically yoked to the non-​diminishing text-​bearing voice rather than to
the lower parts, the melismatic voice speeds up in a way that echoes the diminution in
the lower voices. The upper-​part ten-​long double segments are maintained without ex-
ternal diminution until bar 90, but diminution is present or simulated internally, always
occurring stepwise with a new segment and never changing within it.
440 English Motets c. 1400–1420

This diminution is accomplished in part by the discipline of restricting note-​values.

Not only does the tenor confine itself to longs and breves, but no single segment in
the upper parts uses more than two adjacent values. The first twelve single melismatic
segments (bb. 1–​59) use only breves and longs, flanked by two breve rests; the next four
(bb. 60–​79, Qui cum patre) only breves and semibreves, flanked by semibreve rests; the
next four (diminished, bb. 80–​90, Et vitam) only semibreves. Meanwhile, the texted
sections and the Amen use exclusively semibreves and minims, except for the breve that
comes at the cadence of each of the first twelve segments.
The first stage of diminution just anticipates the start of section II, at bar 60 (Qui cum
patre). The upper parts’ first two double periods of ten longs are arranged as they were
in section I, alternating text and melisma in five-​long segments, with the difference that
the accompanying (textless) upper voice now starts and ends each statement not with a
breve but a semibreve rest, followed by syncopated breves and semibreves. To simulate
duple diminution by this means at the audible beginning of each phrase gives a clear
sense of accelerated motion, although the segment itself is not yet shortened.
The next diminution occurs within section II at the third segment (bb. 80–​90,
Et vitam); its ten bars are extended to eleven (compensating for the long dropped in
bb. 41–​49, Et resurrexit), and the segment is divided not only in half but in half again;
thus, each of the two five-​and-​a-​half-​long periods is itself a diminutive form of a whole
double segment with its own alternation of text and melisma. In each of the four ‘mel-
ismatic’ segments, each of eleven semibreves, nine semibreves are flanked by two
semibreve rests—​a 2:1 diminution of the opening melismatic segments, where eight
breves are flanked by two breve rests—​while the ‘texted’ part has a chain of syncopated
semibreves initiated by a minim rest, which prepares for the full diminution effect of
minim hockets, minim rests, and successive minims in the Amen. In cantus II from bars
80–​90 the ‘melismatic’ segments are both eleven semibreves; the ‘texted’ segments start
alike with semibreve–​semibreve–​minim rest, followed by a syncopated semibreve that
continues to simulate diminution.
The originally sharp distinction between text and melisma, which defined the upper-​
part periods, begins to blur at bars 80–​90. At first sight, too little text seems to have
been left for this section; Et vitam venturi seculi is stretched over eleven longs. Despite
scribal confusion, the intention (as shown in the transcription) is clearly that Et vitam
venturi should be even-​handedly repeated successively in each voice for the first half of
this section and seculi for the second, thus maintaining the alternation.18 There is no
other textual duplication in the Credo. Each of these five-​and-​a-​half-​bar segments is
divided into diminished versions of the text and melisma alternation, grouped in cantus
I in four strictly alternating phrases of eleven semibreves each, but playfully dislocated
and overlapped in the second voice as eleven semibreves of melisma, twelve semibreves
texted, eleven semibreves of melisma, and ten semibreves texted. The rhythms of cantus
I segments for this passage in Example 23.1 are marked x and y (from b. 80), each of
11 semibreves; x +​y is isorhythmically repeated. Cantus II has rhythmically identical y
sections of 11 semibreves while cantus I is doing x, a kind of voice exchange, for which

18 In cantus I, Et vitam was placed too early, in bb. 77–​80; only venturi was moved, correctly, to b. 81, and

the ‘A’ for Amen to b. 91. In cantus II, Et vitam was originally placed earlier; it has been erased and respaced,
still not quite accurately.
 The Yoxford Credo 441

there is a long English tradition. In addition, the rhythm of the syncopated passage
within x (©ffffgff ) is repeated within the intervening Cantus II segments not of 11
semibreves, but of 12 semibreves and 10 semibreves. This non-​functional irregularity
provides a kind of camouflaging syncopation or rubato to the eleven-​semibreve units
that avoids tidy joins, analogous to the long that is dropped in bars 41–​49 and made up
in the Et vitam section.
The acceleration gets seriously under way once textual constraints recede, as they
do partially in Et vitam and wholly in the Amen. As the melismatic voice accelerates
towards synchrony with the faster-​moving texted voice, the latter loses its text and thus
permits full mutual assimilation of their initially contrasting characters. The tenor fi-
nally matches the duple mensuration that the upper voices have maintained throughout,
while the upper voices accommodate to the threefold dimensions and strict rhythmic
repetitions that have been constant in the tenor.
By these means the texture is progressively transformed from the opening, where
a single, fast-​moving textual patter of minims and semibreves is projected against a
slow-​moving harmonic support, until the extremes of motion are mutually assimilated
and resolved in the Amen. Each of these accelerating stages is dovetailed to avoid si-
multaneous structural joins. We have already observed this in the relation of the upper
voices to the lower, and suggested that deviation from the plan was motivated by dy-
namic considerations. Structural coincidence is also avoided tonally: because the re-
peating temporal units of the upper parts are independent of the reducing proportions
of the lower, the upper parts’ tonal adaptation to the repeating pitch cycle and caden-
tial opportunities of the lower parts is independent of that temporal cycle. Only for the
Amen, once again, are the cycles synchronised.
In the upper parts, rhythmic motto tags are used to mark or to punctuate periodic
repetition, even to simulate rhythmic duplication. Changes in the motto figure often
mark major structural changes. The tags define and punctuate the segments audibly,
anticipating the full rhythmic repetitions of the Amen. Each of the first nine texted
sections begins fgg and ends with gfgd , or slight variations thereof, creating musical
rhyme. The beginning motto is sometimes maintained even when it does not fit the text
very well, such as at bar 11 for Et ex patre, as if the supratextual aspects of the motto are
given priority. At other times declamation seems to evoke a variant, as at bar 21 ( gggg ),
for Genitum non, bar 45 for Et ascendit, and bar 60 for Qui cum patre. Bars 45 and 60
have considerable structural weight. Bar 45 is close to the midpoint (at it in theory, just
anticipating it in practice) of the texted first two pairs of color statements, bars 1–90. Its
rhythm (first in cantus II), f f ggf , commands attention by its novelty. This is the first
appearance of a figure that is then used with significance in bars 75, 80 and 85; in the
last two instances it forms part of a pattern where voice I is strictly isorhythmic. Bar 60
heralds the juncture of the first and second color pairs; it divides the whole composition
at the proportion 4:3, as well as bridging two color statements that are related in 4:3 pro-
portion. Its ggf is the first appearance of a figure that also takes on increasing palin-
dromic importance from this point to the end.
The motto that ends most texted sections is gfgd , which occurs in that form, or
a close variant of it, in each of the first twelve segments, up to bar 59. In the next six
segments (i.e. in bb. 64, 69, 74, 79, 82 and 87), the breve consistently becomes two ligated
semibreves. Sometimes the first minim is extended from a preceding syncopating
442 English Motets c. 1400–1420

semibreve (at bb. 15, 20, 44, 74, 82 and 87), or expanded to gg gg d (bb. 25, 35 and 54).
None of these minor variants weakens the effect of cadential rhyme. Sometimes the gfg
figure is extended backwards, as at bars 4–5 in cantus I and bars 57–58 in cantus II, to set
an extended three-minim pattern of alternating semibreves and minims ( fgfgfgfg )
against the prevailing two-minim grouping of minor prolation. Again, it is at structur-
ally significant points that the end motto is noticeably changed. gfgd is replaced in
the texted voice of bar 79 by f gg f f, closing a segment and preparing the new section.
Cantus I at bar 80 starts and cantus II at bar 90 ends with the f f gg f figure, so that bars
80–90 are framed by the retrograde of the new figure from bar 79, and a link between
opening and closing mottoes is forged. The figure is immediately turned around again
in bar 91, to start the Amen with f gg. In the final color, each talea in cantus I and II and
the tenor is framed by this same rhythmic palindrome, fgg gg f
– . The entire Credo thus
ends with the retrograde of its opening rhythm, fgg . This is in turn a diminution of the
tenor’s opening sdd , which is retrograded to dds to frame each talea, ensuring that the
third talea’s melodic retrograde of the first is also a rhythmic retrograde. (The only two
tenor occurrences of the pitch f frame the color and reinforce the retrograde.) Nested
palindromes in local segments, spanning the whole piece and further linking the lower
and upper parts, thus contribute powerfully to the unifying strategies.
Calculated noncoincidence of rhythmic periods between upper and lower voices
happens on a microscopic level in the final section of Sub Arturo plebs, which pits the 16
breves (=​64 minims) of each duple-​time tenor talea in c against the 21 major semibreves
ç
(=​63 minims) of the triplum, creating a creeping difference between them of a minim
in each of the final three taleae. This slight difference enhances excitement and surprise
in the final color, whereas in the Credo the irregularity is effected and recovered before
the Amen (from b. 91), achieving climax by synchronisation, all parts moving at a sim-
ilar rate, jubilant hocketing, and an audible pitting of c in the upper parts with minim
ç
equivalence against the lower parts, now reduced to . However, the upper parts of Sub
Arturo plebs are isorhythmically organised within each color, while the Credo’s alter-
nating periods invoke the very different tradition of voice exchange.
Descendit descends; de celis ascends. There are no other obvious responses to direc-
tional mimetic opportunities. The text distribution, shown in summary in Figure 23.1,
is fairly even up to bar 79; the amount of text allocated to each section conditions the
distribution of semibreves and minims. Far from miscalculating the amount of text for
bars 80–​90 (Et vitam), it seems that the composer used this section as a bridge from
the brisk textual patter of the preceding sections to the melismatic Amen, in which all
distinction between text and melisma is finally dissolved. At the same time, the melis-
matic sections have, through the steps outlined above, approached by graduated steps
the motion in semibreves and minims of the texted part, so that there is little distinc-
tion between the upper voices in bars 80–​90 and none in the Amen. At the opening,
one upper part projects compact and clear textual declamation soloistically against its
slow-​moving partner as well as against the slow-​moving harmonic support of the lower
voices; this extreme contrast to the equal motion and textless homogeneity of the Amen
is gradually reduced both by increased motion in the melismatic voice and by the sys-
tematic acceleration of the tenor statements. The seams are camouflaged until the Amen,
where we are faced with a perfect and perfectly timed coming together, not only of co-
incident rhythmic repetition in all parts, but also with the tenor, by its own inevitable
 The Yoxford Credo 443

plan, having speeded up to match the motion of the voice that was texted. At the same
time, the melismatic voice accelerates towards the texted voice as the tenor sections be-
come shorter. By the time these voices, in their different ways, have approached the
motion of the texted voice, that voice has passed beyond text and textual constraints in
favour of joining a purely musical jubilation governed by the final tenor diminutions.
Each tenor talea contains ten notes, but that is, as already noted, its only ‘tenfold’ fea-
ture. The underlying arrangement of the paired upper parts in periods of ten longs (duply
divided, 2 × 5, and non-​diminishing up to b. 80) is boldly pitted against the tenor, with its
three taleae to each color and the threefold diminishing structure (twice 2:1) of the paired
colores. Each of the three final taleae contains ten notes not only in the tenor, but also in
each of cantus I and II; in all voices, each talea contains five notes in each of its two imper-
fect longs. The tenor has come to match both the duple time and the motion in semibreves
and minims with which the upper texted part opened; the upper parts, in their turn, have
adopted the scheme of the tenor and even its number of notes. The first and last three
notes of each talea in cantus I, II, and the tenor are not only palindromic, as noted ( – fgg
gg f ); they pick up and resolve two of the most distinctive rhythmic mottoes of the earlier
texted segments, as well as mirroring the palindromic elements of the tenor color itself.
This final color is a brilliant summation of the numerical strategy that is the ultimate aes-
thetic goal of the piece, a true symphony of numbers within the decad, devised to recon-
cile tens and fives with the more conventionally musical combinations of twos and threes,
while rounding off both rhythmic and melodic palindromes in upper and lower parts.
I know of no other piece that so cunningly avoids any alignment of upper-​voice taleae
with those of the lower parts.19 Only in the Amen, the final two colores, do the taleae
come into alignment, giving a sense of resolution and climactic arrival. This Credo joins
Sub Arturo plebs and some of the mensural, proportional and canonic tours de force in
OH as another beacon of English achievement and adventure, belying the impression,
drawn from some simpler music of the period, that English composers cultivated so-
nority at the expense of structure and intellectual challenge.20

Appendix
Notes to Credo Transcription ( Ex. 23.1)

The syncopation dots throughout are redundant in this mensuration. The following
minims, all in cantus I, are flanked by syncopation dots: 14.1; 24.3, 5; 34.1, 3; 71.7; 72.1,
8. The semibreve 73.1 in cantus I is preceded by a redundant minim with dots.
Oblique ligatures are often carelessly drawn; such cases are not noted here unless
clearly wrong. Ligature brackets are not marked in the lower parts, but occur for the
following notes of each talea: Ct: 2–​3, 4–​6, 8–​9; T: 3–​4, 5–​6, 8–​10; ST: 3–​4, 5–​7, 9–​11.
Accidentals:
Cantus I: 9–​10 f s for c; 48.2 gs for f; 51.6 cb for b; 81 b for 82.2 but no rest; 92.2 cb
intended for 92.3 (b); 98 cs at beginning, intended for b or for 98.3.

19 But see the discussion of Carbunculus, Ch. 25, for a possible instance.
20 This chapter as originally published concluded at this point with a section on isorhythm, an early formu-
lation of the reflections that came into sharper focus in the essay now in Ch. 2.
444 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Cantus II: 21 es for f; 69.3–​69.4 bs for f.

Contratenor: 23 cb meant for bb; 8 c is preceded by large letter C, perhaps for ‘c natural’.
The following flat signs are provided with a serif: II.23; I.51.6; I.81.
Note in bb. 41–​42 the progression bb–​e.
Underlay:
II.8 filium dei: MS underlay has been adjusted to one minim later; I.33 natus est
added; I.76 The words Et vitam have been moved; see above.
Manuscript readings:
5 ST has c, Ct has d; parallel passages show that d must be correct. In view of this,
the e in II is emended to f; 16 II.4 d for e; 27 I.1 b for c; 53 I.3 oddly formed S with
apparently added stem looks like a b but must be ; 61 II.1–​3 coloured without sig-
g
nificance; also I 66.1–​3; the corresponding II.71 and I.76.1–​3, however, are not
g
coloured; 72 I.8 followed by an extra c; 75 I.1 written ambiguously: g or a; 79 II.5 g
for f; 81 I no rest, but cb, c perhaps mistaking exemplar; 83 II.1 is followed by S rest,
not M; 95 I first rest is S, not M; 96 I last rest is S, not M; 98 I first two rests are S, not
M; 103 II second rest is B, not M; 105 II S +​L.
 24
Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets in
the Old Hall Manuscript

The last two motets in OH declare themselves in their last lines as Deo gratias
substitutes for the end of Mass; they were almost certainly the final works in the
manuscript. The composer of the first one, Are post libamina/​Nunc surgunt in
populo, is named as ‘Mayshuet’. The two motets are so nearly identical in form
and style that the same composer is probably also responsible for its anonymous
neighbour Post missarum sollennia. Only the triplum and contratenor of Post
missarum sollennia survive in OH; the facing recto of Post missarum there is lost.1
Judging by the contratenor, the missing tenor also shared its formal structure with
Are post libamina. After publication of the OH edition (CMM 46), the two motets
turned up anonymously on both sides of an English half-​leaf, Ox32, that belonged
to RC, a fragmentary royal manuscript, apparently copied partly from OH in the
1420s, and with newer added repertory.2 Although likewise adjacent, the motets
are in reverse order. The recto of the leaf contains most of the missing motetus of
Post missarum sollennia, enabling an almost complete transcription of that motet,
leaving only the tenor to be reconstructed; the verso contains most of the triplum of
Are post libamina.

Mayshuet, Are post libamina/​Nunc surgunt in populo

This motet has rightly attracted attention on account of the striking claims of its
verbal texts:3

Revised and expanded from ‘Bent, ‘Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets in the Old Hall Manuscript’,
in Kirnbauer (ed.), Beredte Musik: Konversationen zum 80. Geburtstag von Wulf Arlt, Schola Cantorum
Basiliensis Scripta, 8 (Basel, 2019), with permission from Schwabe Verlag. This version differs mainly in
expanding on the relationship between the Ivrea and OH motets, in taking account of more recent work
by Anna Zayaruznaya and Zoltán Rihmer, and in proposing a little more confidently a possible identity for
the composer.
1 CMM 46, i, pt. 2, nos. 146 and 147.
2 RC has been pieced together over many decades. A revised and updated evaluation of this fragmentary

choirbook together with inventory and facsimiles is now given in Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’, in
EECM 62, including evidence for the direct copying of some pieces from OH. A simplified inventory is
given as Table 25.1. Ox32 was briefly described among ‘Notable Accessions’ by B. C. Barker-​B enfield
in Bodleian Library Record, 11 (1982–​85), 187 and an account of the musical yield up to that point given
in Bent, ‘The Progeny’. The Hilliard Ensemble recorded this motet from the then-​superseded editorial
reconstruction in CMM 46, but did not pick up this already published improved version using the new
source.
3 Translation by Leofranc Holford-​ Strevens. Textual emendations and commentary by Leofranc
Holford-​Strevens (LHS), incorporating suggestions by David Howlett (DRH); 9: Andrew Hughes
translated this as ‘it may be accompanied by stringed instruments’; 10: DRH suggests emendation to

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0025
 446 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Triplum Syllables Translation

OH, f. 111v, Ox32 verso
Are post libamina 7 After the oblations of the altar
odas atque carmina 7 let us sing odes
laudis iubilemus. 6 and songs of praise.
Cuius finis bonus est 7 Him whose end is good
5 ipsum bonum superest 7 it remains for us to praise,
totum ut laudemus. 6 the All-​good.

Vocis modulacio, 7 Let the music-​making of the voice,

sicut iubet racio, 7 as reason orders,
concinat cum corde. 6 be in harmony with the heart.
10 Prevalet ignorancia, 8 Ignorance prevails,
ceca arrogancia 7 blind arrogance
involuta sorde; 6 wrapped up in filth;

cantatores sunt plerique 8 there are very many singers

quorum artes sunt inique; 8 whose skills are unequal [to the task];
15 vanam querunt gloriam. 7 they seek vainglory.
Libens cane,—non inane, 8 Sing willingly, not worthlessly,
propter deum,—ut in evum 8 to the glory of God, so that in eternity
ducaris in patriam. 7 you may be led into your [heavenly] fatherland.

Armonias mellicas 7 Let us give forth honeyed harmonies,

20 demus, yperliricas, 7 highly lyrical,
tono cum iocundo. 6 with joyful tone.
Nullus nostrum properet 7 Let none of us hasten
aut sonum anticipet, 7 or sing his note too soon,
sed semper ascultando. 7 but always listening.

25 Practicus insignis 6 A skilled distinguished

gallicus sub gallicis 7 Frenchman composed this song
hemus hunc discantavit 7 on French verses;
cantum, sed post reformavit; 8 but afterwards he revised it;
latina lingua anglis (Ox32 angelis) 7 the Latin language is more often
30 sepius fit amena 7 pleasing to the English (or angels)
reddendo Deo gracias. 8 in rendering thanks to God.

preest; 21: Ox32 cito, which would mean ‘nor swiftly race ahead’, but this is grammatically impossible.
DRH suggests emendation to toto; 27: Ox32 henus, but neither is a Latin word. What may be intended
is neniis, though it does not fit the music; the Latin word has various meanings, not all complimen-
tary, but Horace applies it to poems, and that seems to be the sense here. LHS cannot make any sense
of hunc, masculine singular accusative; DRH suggests emendation to themis: sang (=​composed) this
song on Gallic themes; 29: Ox32 has angelis, and an extra syllable to go with it, demonstrating scribal
adjustment. It seems more likely that the English prefer Latin because they are losing their French, than
that the angels prefer it because it is one of the three sacred languages; 31: DRH suggests emendation
to dando.
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 447

Motetus4 Translation
OH, f. 112
Nunc surgunt in populo 7 Now there arise in the people
viri mercatores; 6 mercenary men;
aurum mutant optimum 7 they change the best gold
in stannum, et flores 6 into tin, and sweetly
5 odorantes dulciter 7 fragrant flowers
in pravos fetores. 6 into evil smells.
Hi dicuntur (ni fallor) 7 These men (unless I am mistaken)
plerique cantores. 6 are mostly called singers.
Cum vident in medio 7 When they see in the middle [of the church]
10 aliquem magnatum 6 some great person
cantum querunt optimum, 7 they seek their best song,
sibi valde gratum. 6 intensely pleasing to him.
Notulas multiplicant 7 They multiply the notes
et reputant cantatum 7 and they think it was sung
15 non amore domini, 7 not for the love of God,
puto sed magnatum. 6 I believe, but of great persons.
Vos, tales ypocrite, 7 You, such hypocrites,
numquid aspexistis 6 have you never paid attention
sanctum evangelium, 7 to the Holy Gospel,
20 [in] quo perlegistis 6 in which you have read
vere dictum domini 7 the true word of God
loquentis de istis? 6 speaking about these matters?
Amen, vobis dicitur—​ 7 Verily, you are told—​
mercedem recepistis. 7 you have received your reward.

The triplum text complains of singers who are incompetent but vainglorious; it
stresses the importance for singers to listen in order to keep in time together; and
most significantly, it is a self-​declared contrafact. The text announces that it has
been Latinised from a (non-​extant and perhaps entirely different) French original
by its French composer, which, together with the jaunty tenor (see below, Ex. 24.3),
may imply that its Deo gratias status was associated only with the contrafact (see
lines 25–​31).5

4 10: LHS: literally, ‘some one of the great persons’; 12: LHS: Classically, it would be ‘to themselves’, but

in medieval Latin it may also be ‘to him’; 13: LHS: Notulas is not necessarily diminutive; 14: DRH suggests
omission of et; 20: LHS: In makes better sense, also of the syllable count, but there is no note for it; 24: DRH
suggests emendation to cepistis.
5 Contrafaction is quite rare in this repertory. The French motet Se päour d’umble astinance/​Diex tan desir

estre amés de m’amour/​Concupisco, in Ivrea and Ca1328, expressing ceaseless love-​longing, is retexted in Latin
in its English source, Ox7, as Domine quis habitabit/​De veri cordis adipe/​Concupisco (PMFC 5, nos. 16, 16a).
The tenor is the verse of the 8th respond at Matins on the feast of St Agnes. It presents prayers to God, virtues
required for heaven (Ps. 15), and requests to Jesus for help. But this is an earlier motet of the mid-​14th c., a
448 English Motets c. 1400–1420

The motetus is even more scathing about singers who show off to important people.
The thirty-​one triplum lines of Are post libamina are metrically irregular. Its first
twenty-​four lines are arranged in six-line stanzas with somewhat irregular syllable
count. The final sentence, here lines 25–​31, is more like rhyming prose, and might
equally well be so construed. The motetus has three eight-​line stanzas, with alter-
nating lines mostly of seven and six syllables. David Howlett produced an emended
form of these texts correcting the syllable count. Even if these were the original
forms of the texts, they were not the ones set by our composer, as can be shown from
the almost entirely syllabic setting, and the care with which the few intended two-​
note melismas are notated. There is not even a note to accommodate the editorially
suggested in in line 20 of the motetus; Ox32 provides a note for the extra syllable in
the variant angelis for anglis. This is an old confusion: anglis in OH is no doubt cor-
rect, English rather than angels. If the text was indeed a contrafact it has been very
carefully tailored to the existing music.
Does the syllabic setting mean, then, that the original French text of Are post libamina
was similarly irregular, or that it had fewer repeated notes to accommodate a different
text? The two versions of the triplum are musically very close, and the few variants are
not such as to sustain or disprove a claim of direct copying from Old Hall. The only text
variants between the two sources occur in the last few lines. The upper parts are in un-
signed c throughout, though the notation is cunningly managed to coordinate with the
tenor rhythms, especially when these are diminished to the equivalent of in the final ç
statements. The setting is almost entirely syllabic at the minim level. Indeed, the duple-​
time patter with many repeated notes of both Are post libamina and Post missarum
sollennia has a strong affinity with the similar writing in the triplum of O amicus, except
that here words are broken by rests. The alignment of text and music by the main scribe
of OH is slightly better than Ox32, which, however, is not unclear, and has at least one
clearly shown difference of placement.

Post missarum/​Post misse: The Ivrea Motet

Before giving a further account of the similarities between the Old Hall pair of
motets, a precedent needs consideration. The texts of Post missarum sollennia/​Post
misse modulamina are adapted from an earlier motet in Ivrea, which is also listed in
the index of the mostly lost Trém. News of a new source in Aachen was published in
2001, but overlooked by other musicologists until Anna Zayaruznaya drew wider at-
tention to this important fragment.6 There can be no doubt that the Ivrea texts were

pious exhortational contrafaction of a motet on secular French texts over a suitably texted albeit chant tenor.
It is not impossible that other Latin-​texted motets in England may have been similarly adapted from French
originals. Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, has written extensively about the grouping and dating of motets in
Ivrea. He accepts Wathey’s identification of the OH composer with Matheus de Sancto Johanne (p. 86). He
does not give musical reasons for the presumably text-​based claim that the OH motets were modelled on the
Ivrea Post missarum.

6 Post missarum sollempnia is in Ivrea, ff. 7v–​8. The triplum and solus tenor are now in Aachen, f. 2v, in com-

pany with three motets attributable to Philippe de Vitry. See Lüdtke, ‘Kleinüberlieferung’ and Zayaruznaya,
The Monstrous New Art, 177–​89. The edited texts in her appendix 4 (pp. 256–​57) take account of the Aachen
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 449

designed as a pair, and that the Ivrea motet came first. Here is its triplum text from
Ivrea and Aachen.7 Boldface in this and the OH triplum (following) indicates shared
diction between them:

Triplum Translation
Ivrea f. 7v; Aachen f. 2v
Post missarum sollempnia After the solemnities of masses,
divina post eulogia: after the praises of God,

Presul, gregem rege tuum bishop, may you rule your flock
speculo bonum actuum, by the mirror of good actions,
5 rectos unire studeas, strive to unite the righteous,
malos pie coherceas. dutifully constrain the wicked.
Rex, apex fulgens apice, King, peak gleaming at the peak,
habenas rei publice may you excellently command
modereris eximie the reins of state,
10 canendus pater patrie; to be hymned as the father of your country.

Sana detis ut dogmata That you may give sound opinions

principi, strategemata to the prince, scroll through
historica revolvite, the stratagems in history,
proceres stirpis inclite. you nobles of a famous race.
15 Miles, predis non inhiya, Knight, be not greedy for plunder,
percipis qui stipendia, you who receive pay,
nec fuge nec dedecore neither flee nor disgracefully
te dedas tecto corpore. surrender with armoured body.

source. See also Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices’. In Bent, ‘Mayshuet’, I was only able to mention this in a foot-
note. Of the four motets represented on the two leaves of Aachen, the other three are all on good authority
attributed to Philippe de Vitry, which raises the question whether this might be also. This suggestion lacks any
authority other than adjacence in that fragment; there are no clear Vitriacan markers and no strong reason to
consider an attribution.

7 Variants and alternative modern readings: 1–​2, 7–​9 and other words in bold are also in OH; 5 rectos

Ivrea, sectes Aachen; unire Aachen: unice Ivrea; 8 rei publice Aachen, OH: zey pliblite Ivrea; 9 moderer[is]
Aachen: moderaris corr. from moderans Ivrea (cf. moderans OH); 12 principi Aachen: precipi Ivrea; 15
inhiya Aachen: inhyna Ivrea; 16 percepis [sic] Ivrea: principis Aachen; 17 dedecore Ivrea: decore Aachen; 18
te dedas Aachen: de detas Ivrea; 19 uis Ivrea: vis Aachen; lantibus Aachen, corr. Rihmer: laudibus Ivrea; 21
imbecillibus Ivrea: investilibus Aachen, Rihmer.
Spelling variants (the better first, which is not necessarily the poet’s): 6 coherceas Aachen: choerceas Ivrea;
11 dogmata Aachen: docmata Ivrea; 16 percepis: a common medieval spelling; corrected by Rigg, Rihmer,
LHS. 22 sed Aachen: set Ivrea, also a good classical spelling (LHS); 24 gratias Aachen.
Commentary (LHS): Both Ivrea texts (tr and mo) are in regular octosyllables. 4 The sense seems ines-
capable, but bonum genitive plural is a pre-​classical form one would not expect to find at this date except
in a very affected author. It is also the only instance in these texts of final -​m before a vowel, though that
was not unusual; emendation to the normal bonorum would require either an extra syllable at the start
of the verse or elision of -​um, neither of which is to be expected outside classicizing quantitative verse.
[MB: While there are enough notes to accommodate trisyllabic bonorum, this would be the only exception
to the completely regular octosyllabic lines of both Ivrea texts.] 7 i.e. head of the people, with a gleaming
crown on your head; 19–​20 Literally: ‘share in equal scale-​pans’; 21 Rihmer adopts Aachen’s investilibus,
translating it ’the unclothed [poor]’; this is ingenious, but I await evidence that an adjective investilis exists;
23 ‘Whoever you are’ is not to be understood as the insult it often is in English (though not Latin); the sense
is simply ‘whatever your station in life.’
450 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Iudex, equis ius lancibus Judge, dispense justice

20 utris partire partibus, fairly to both parties
ac inbecillibus fave, and favour the weak,
set ab iniuria cave. but beware of injustice.
Quisquis es, recte sentias Whoever you are, may you think rightly
post datas Deo gracias. after thanking God.

Below are the texts of the triplum of the English motet Post missarum from OH, and
of the motetus as in both Ivrea and Ox32.8 A transcription of the reconstructed Old
Hall motet is given as Example 24.1.9
Triplum text of Post missarum sollenia (OH):10

Triplum: OH, f. 112v Syllables Translation

Post missarum sol[l]‌ennia 8 After the solemnities of masses,
divina post eulogia: 8 after the praises of God,
voce cum dulciflua 7 let us sing songs
5 decantemus cantica, 7 with sweetly fluent voice,
flagitantes dominum, 7 beseeching God,
fontem bonorum omnium, 8 the fount of all good things,
ut nostrum gregem visere 8 that He be willing to visit
velit et dirigere, 7 and guide our flock,

8 English translations of the texts of the two Old Hall motets by Andrew Hughes in the only source

available at the time were given in CMM 46. The Ivrea texts were presented with a short commentary
and English summary by A. G. Rigg for Harrison’s edition of the Ivrea Post missarum/​Post misse in a
Supplement to PMFC 5. When the Ox32 motetus text came to light, Professor Rigg kindly provided a
tentative translation, given in Bent, ‘The Progeny’, 10. Improvements by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens to
the texts and translations of the Old Hall and Ivrea motets were then incorporated in Bent, ‘Mayshuet’,
which was written before access to Anna Zayaruznaya’s book, in which she discussed the Ivrea motet
and signalled Joachim Lüdtke’s overlooked 2001 publication of Aachen (Lüdtke, ‘Kleinüberlieferung’, and
Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art). In appendix 4 to that book she published Zoltán Rihmer’s ex-
cellent edition and translation of the texts of the Ivrea motet, with the benefit of the Aachen readings.
Leofranc Holford-​Strevens accepts most of Rihmer’s readings, but his emendations and translations differ
in a few respects and are given here with his commentary (LHS), together with his editions of the Old
Hall texts.
9 Music commentary to Ex. 24.1: No emendations. Notes cut off in Ox32 and supplied editorially are in

small type, as is the reconstructed tenor.

10 Variant readings: 7 vitere; 8 velud; 10 cavenda makes sense here, but may have been adapted from

Ivrea line 10’s canendus; 19 moderans, thus in Ivrea 9, there in error for moderaris, but sense is made of
moderans here; 20 patile.
Commentary (LHS): Irregular metre: syllable count by line is shown. 9: doruma is not a Latin word; if as
Andrew Hughes’s translation (‘the gifts of virtue’) implies the author had some notion of Greek δώρημα, ‘gift’,
the gifts would be those of the Spirit listed more than once by St Paul. But the line as transmitted contains a
syllable too many; 16: I have translated what the text says, nonsense as it is; one might emend ditamine to
dictamine, understood as the Word of God, but even then we should be missing a verb; 22: A confusing transi-
tion from an earthly to the heavenly king.
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 451

in nos dorumas inserere 9 to implant in us the gifts of the Spirit,

10 et ne nos abradere. 7 and not to rub us away.
Pie presul, studeas 7 Holy bishop, take pains
deliros ut corigas, 7 to direct those who have strayed,
obstinatos mollias, 7 soften the obstinate,
conversos et foveas, 7 and strengthen the converted,
15 et privatos lumine 7 and those deprived of light
caro ditamine. 6 by a dear enrichment.
20 Rex, fulgens in apice, 7 King, gleaming at the peak,
habenas reipublice 8 excellently commanding
moderans eximie, 7 the reins of state,
cavenda docens patule. 8 plainly teaching the things to be avoided.
Qui das iustis dindima 7 Who givest the heights of Heaven
salvatis agalmata, 7 to the just, and joys to the saved,
da nos ita psallere 7 grant us to sing
et laudis musas prodere 8 and bring forth the muses of praise
25 per odas iperliricas, 8 through highly lyrical odes,
ut demus Deo gracias. 8 so that we may give thanks to God.

Motetus of both motets (Ivrea and Ox32): Post misse modulamina:11

Ivrea, f. 8, Ox32, recto Translation

Post misse modulamina, After the music of the mass,
post verbi dulcis (Ox32: divini) semina, after the deeds of the sweet Word:
5 Cives graves, politia grave citizens, lest the well-​ordered state
ne vel aristogarchia or the rule of the best
cedat, prodeste liberis should be lost, be of profit to your children
et moribus et literis. in both morals and letters.
Mercator, emas utile Merchant, may you buy what is useful,
neque fuca vendibile; nor adulterate what is saleable;
pondere, metro, precio, in weight, measure, and price
10 periusta sit vendicio. let your selling be thoroughly fair.

11 Variants and alternative modern readings: 2 dulcis Rigg: dulci Ivrea: divini Ox32; 3 graves Ox32: gemes

Ivrea; politia Rihmer, spolicia Ox32, ploica Ivrea; 4 aristogarchia Rihmer: aristogorgia Ox32: arcato garchia
Ivrea; 5 cedat Ivrea: cedas Ox32; 7 emas Rigg: emat Ivrea: ei vas Ox32; 8 fuca LHS: fusca Ox32, Rihmer: fusta
Ivrea, Rigg; 11 vel Ox32: nec Ivrea; 13 peracue Ox32: per acrie Ivrea; 14 strenue Ox32: stranue Ivrea; 15 sulca
Rigg: sulfa Ox32, fulca Ivrea, sere Ivrea, sege Ox32; 16 lege Ivrea: le Ox32, which breaks off here; 19 quivis
Rihmer: qui vis Ivrea; 10 venditio, 20 gratias Ivrea.
Text commentary (LHS): 2 Hypermetric divini instead of dulcis has been retained. It makes sense, it has
its own note in this nearly syllabic setting and seems intentional, reflecting the divina of triplum line 2. Both
OH motets have a high level of metrical irregularity. 3 Rihmer is right to discern politia =​πολιτεία here, but
I suspect it has here not its general meaning of ‘state’ but the specific meaning Aristotle gives it in his sixfold
classification of constitutions, a blend of aristocracy and democracy (Politics 4. 9).
452 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Architector vel opifex, Architect or workman,

esto fidelis artifex; be an honest craftsman;
ingenium peracue, thoroughly sharpen your wits,
manibus age strenue. work hard with your hands.
15 Agricola, sulca, sere, Farmer, plough, sow,
mete, puta lege terre, harvest, prune by the law of the soil,
prout congruit tempori, as suits the season,
nec parce duro corpori. and do not spare your hardened body.
Tu quivis, bonum facias Whoever you are, do good
20 post datas Deo gracias. after thanking God.

Both texts of the Ivrea motet are in entirely regular octosyllabic lines; the twenty-​four
triplum lines are disposed in five four-​line stanzas, the twenty motetus lines in four
four-​line stanzas, in both cases framed by a couplet at the beginning and end. Both
texts begin with Post miss-​. . . . and end . . . Deo gratias, as do those of the Old Hall
Post missarum sollennia. The Ivrea triplum exhorts that, after Mass, the bishop (lines
3–​6), king (lines 7–​14), knight (lines 15–​19), and judge (lines 19–​22) should go forth
and perform their high offices fairly. The motetus text parallels the triplum, one stanza
shorter, but is addressed to social ranks of the middle and lower classes: citizens, mer-
chant, builder, and farmer are urged to work well and justly. Both texts devote a four-​
line stanza to each addressee (except to the king, who gets two stanzas). Zayaruznaya
has contextualised the social hierarchies of the powerful figures invoked in both texts as
instances of ‘estates satire’, a well-​known literary topos, even a genre, also suggesting a
link between this motet and the peasant uprising (the Jacquerie) of 1358, and a possible
connection with Se grace/​Cum venerint, the Ite missa est motet which ends the Tournai
mass, and which outlines a more limited social hierarchy.12 She shows how the relation
of the categories to each other in the Ivrea motet is managed in the mutual placement
of the simultaneous texts, the four estates of each voice coinciding approximately with
the four taleae, so that the higher and lower strata are presented simultaneously, as if
equal. In an interesting musico-​textual analysis, she demonstrates how syllable and se-
mantic ‘rhyme’ between the parts reinforces this potentially subversive message, also
by bringing the beginning and end of each part together as musical and textual unities.
Similar coordination of motet texts occurs quite frequently, for example in the musician
motets discussed in Part IV.
Musically, the Ivrea motet is in four parts including a contrapuntally essential contra­
tenor. It has been proposed that the tenor may be a hitherto unidentified Ite missa est

12 Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea. A primary reason is given as it having a middle-​voice tenor like Tribum, but

since this is true also of later motets like Apollinis, it is not a strong argument for such an early dating. Middle-​
voice tenors are reviewed in Ch. 1 and, for Apollinis, in Ch. 16. Kügle also suggests the possible dependency
of the Marchetto motet Ave regina/​Mater innocencie on Cum venerint, which would therefore be earlier; but
the dating and even the authorship of that motet is uncertain (Ch. 26). Having said that, the notation and style
of Cum venerint are entirely compatible with a dating alongside the most advanced motets in Fauvel. Kügle,
The Manuscript Ivrea, 163–​67, dated Cum venerint c. 1315. In reporting my earlier reconstruction of the OH
Post missarum motet, Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art (178 n. 10), wrongly states that it is adjacent to Se
grace/​Cum venerint in two sources, rather than that it is adjacent to Are post libamina.
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 453

Ex. 24.1 Transcription of Post missarum sollennia/​Post misse modulamina (OH)

454 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Ex. 24.1 Continued

 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 455

Ex. 24.1 Continued

456 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Ex. 24.1 Continued

 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 457

or Deo gratias chant.13 A solus tenor conflation of tenor and contratenor is provided in
Ivrea and Aachen. I have argued that solus tenors may have played a part in the com-
positional process, as they survive exclusively for works where the contratenor shares
the contrapuntal foundation with the tenor, as here, as a basso seguente on which
upper parts could then be erected in a compositional process without recourse to vis-
ually aligned score.14 The Ivrea motet (with two color statements, each of two taleae,
and no diminution) is in perfect modus with imperfect time and prolation. If Kügle is
right, it dates presumably, and plausibly, before c. 1360.15 There are many dissonances
and parallels between the texted parts, which are nearly equal in range. Zayaruznaya
observes that the upper voices cross occasionally, though, in this case, without special
textual significance.16
The Ivrea motet has two identical lower-​voice colores of twenty-​eight perfect longs
(each of three imperfect breves in minor prolation), each comprising two taleae of four-
teen longs. There is no regular isorhythm in the top parts, but a six-​breve isorhythmic
repetition in the triplum at the same place in each of the four taleae includes a hocket
that is briefly complemented in the motetus but not fully interlocked at the minim
level.17 In the first case it serves to separate the opening couplet from the stanzas de-
voted to the bishop in the triplum and the citizens in the motetus, as Zayaruznaya has
pointed out. The social hierarchy is also reflected in the fact that the triplum, with its
loftier addressees, is higher in range (clef C1) than the motetus (C2).

Post missarum in Old Hall and Ivrea

The triplum of the Old Hall motet Post missarum adopts the Ivrea motet’s first two
lines, the final two words (Deo gratias), and much intermediate diction, especially in
the four lines beginning Rex. But otherwise the triplum text differs significantly and
is only loosely based on the Ivrea original. It makes no attempt to retain Ivrea’s metre
or structure, abandoning the stanza form. It is metrically irregular: its twenty-​six lines
have mostly seven syllables, sometimes eight, and in one case each six and nine.
It eliminates Ivrea’s knight and judge and concentrates on the bishop and king,
in a much altered form which disrupts the hierarchy and parallelism of the paired
Ivrea texts. The Old Hall composer clearly knew the older French motet, but chose to

13 Harrison in PMFC 5, and Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia’, report it as unidentified.

14 It is often the case, as in Vos/​Gratissima (Ch. 8) and in Dunstaple’s Veni sancte/​Veni creator (MB 8, no. 32),
that a chant tenor cannot also fulfil the function of supporting the counterpoint of the upper parts, so that an
essential contratenor (and therefore a solus tenor, actually in Vos, potentially in Veni) is needed.
15 The most recent work on Ivrea suggests that the repertory was frozen in 1359, though copied later, in

the 1380s and 1390s, with only a few (unspecified?) compositions dating from those later decades. See Kügle,
Ivrea. The Ivrea motet is in perfect modus, imperfect time, minor prolation, like the opening of the Old Hall
motet; but there the musical resemblance ends, except that both cadence on f. For other uses of texts from
older motets in newer ones, see two by Hubertus de Salinis: Psallat chorus/​Eximie pater, which adapts St
Nicholas texts for St Lambert, and Si nichil/​In precio, whose texts are taken from a 13th-​c. conductus. See
Reaney in CMM 11/​7, 62–​64 and Q15, no. 247, with commentary in Bent, Q15, i. 222–​23. For more on Salinis,
see Ch. 27.
16 On voice-​crossing, see Ch. 9, also taken up in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art and Shaffer, ‘Finding

Fortune’.
17 As well as alternating semibreves and rests in opposite phase between the upper parts, the triplum

has ©g©g hockets against motetus semibreves without rests.

458 English Motets c. 1400–1420

adapt its texts and emphases to a new (or differently texted) musical setting. By con-
trast, the now-​discovered Ox32 motetus of the OH motet, Post misse modulamina, is
textually identical to that of the Ivrea motet, with only minor variants. Its fragmen-
tary half-​leaf breaks off before the end, but the text can be confidently completed
from Ivrea.18
Musically, the two Post missarum motets are quite different in style, though there are
a few parallels. Most conspicuously, both motets are in perfect modus with (unsigned)
imperfect time and minor prolation. The final color of the OH motet is in signed time ç
(in both the OH triplum and the Ox32 motetus) to align with the tenor; in this it differs
c
from Are post libamina whose upper parts remained in [ ]‌. The OH Post missarum
follows Ivrea in having colores of twenty-​eight units each of two taleae of fourteen units.
It differs in that there are three colores, not two, and that those are in successive dimi-
nution, whereas Ivrea has no diminution. In the case of other related motets (notably
those of the musician group, Part IV), later motets find comparable ways of going be-
yond their models. In both motets, the twenty-​eight perfect longs of the first color each
consist of three imperfect breves in minor prolation. But the second color of the OH
motet is twenty-​eight perfect breves and the third twenty-​eight major semibreves, with
corresponding changes of mensuration in the upper parts. Unlike the Ivrea motet, each
of the three pairs of taleae is fully isorhythmic in all parts within each pair, but there
is of course no isorhythm between the diminishing colores. The upper parts are equal
in range, in C1 clefs, again unlike Ivrea. Both motets are tonally on f, and both have
contrapuntally essential contratenors. The reconstructed tenor of the OH motet is uni-
dentified (see Ex. 24.2). Even if some alternative pitches are proposed, it is hard to turn
the Post missarum tenor into either a piece of plainsong or a popular tune, though it has
periodic phrases of 5 +​5 +​4, 5 +​5 +​4 units.19

Ex. 24.2 Reconstructed tenor of Post missarum

The tenor of the other OH motet, Are post libamina, appears to have been a secular tro-
chaic tune, popular in character, shorter, 2 × 7 units, and with overt and clos endings in the
paired talea statements (see Ex. 24.3). This tenor is similar to that of a motet in Durham20,
Herodis in pretorio/​Herodis in atrio/​Hey, hure lure, which has units of 6 +​6 +​5 and is texted

18 See n. 3 above for the readings, and Table 25.1 for an inventory of RC.
19 Other 14th-​c. motets of English provenance with French tenors are Solaris ardor Romani/​Gregorius sol
seculi/​Petre tua navicula/​Mariounette douche; Triumphat hodie/​Trop est fol –​Si que la nuit; Deus creator om-
nium/​Rex genitor/​Doucement mi reconfort; Pura placens pulcra/​Parfundement plure Absolon. Of these, the
first two have similar short, irregular phrases. Mariounette douche has unit groups of 7s and 4s; it is a virelai
with a Latin contrafact in the motetus of Caligo terre/​Virgo mater. Triumphat hodie in OxNC362 and Lo24198
divides the profane French song between the tenors: Trop est fol ky, Si que la nuit; the tune has the form
aabb abba aa, with irregular units (also 7 +​4). The other two French tenors, Doucement mi reconforte and
Parfundement plure Absolon, are longer-​breathed tunes. All these motets are in PMFC 15, and the tenors are
unidentified. Domine quis habitabit in Ox7 is a contrafact of a French original (PMFC 5, nos. 16 and 16a), but
the tenor is Latin and liturgical.
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 459

with secular French words (see Ex. 24.4).20 All three motets attest a lively tradition of sec-
ular tenors which retain their merry rhythms, albeit slowed down for use in motets.

Ex. 24.3 Tenor of Are post libamina

Ex. 24.4 Tenor of Herodis in pretorio/​Herodis in atrio/​Hey, hure lure from Durham20

The texts of the Old Hall Post missarum were thus adapted from an older French
motet with Latin texts, presumably, like the ascribed motet, Are post libamina, adjusted
for an English constituency. Whether the original texts of Post missarum were Latin or
French cannot be determined. We have seen that a different kind of adaptation, from a
French vernacular original, applied to Are post libamina. We might guess that the French
composer who adapted or contrafacted his motet from French into Latin as Are post
libamina could also have made the verbal adaptation of Post missarum, in view of their
comparable metrical insouciance: just as the triplum lines of Are post libamina are met-
rically irregular, so is the adapted triplum of Post missarum. In both Old Hall motets, the
poet was unconcerned with regularity, in contrast to the wholly regular octosyllables
of the Ivrea texts of Post missarum. It is also possible that Are post libamina’s near-​twin,
Post missarum, likewise a Deo gratias substitute on a non-​chant tenor, might have been
composed to secular French words, and a contrafaction contrived by borrowing and
adapting the ready-​made texts, but this cannot yet be proven.21 Both OH motets in-
clude the unusual word iperliricas/​yperliricas.
They share a similar tenor/​contratenor structure. Are post libamina has, and the
missing tenor of Post missarum would have had, a homographic tenor whose longs and
breves are to be repeated in two successive levels of diminution at the next note-​level
down, as breves and semibreves, then as semibreves and minims. Post missarum thus
has three tenor and contratenor iterations in successive diminution. Each color state-
ment comprises a pair of taleae which are isorhythmic in all parts. The first color state-
ment is 2 × 14 perfect longs, the second 2 × 14 perfect breves, the third 2 × 14 major
semibreves (14 units being the talea length). The lower parts of the shorter motet
Are post libamina are in fact marked for four iterations; the fourth tenor/​contratenor
statement is without further diminution from the third. The four color statements of
Are post libamina each have a pair of taleae, also isorhythmic in all parts within each
pair, and as in both the Post missarum motets, based on units or multiples of seven.22

20 I made this comparison in Bent, ‘Transmission’, 67. See now for another instance Plausu querulo,

Ex. 31.2 below.

21 The tenor of Are post libamina must indeed be a catchy secular tune, quite similar to the mid-​century

motet tenor in Durham20, f. 1, Herodis in pretorio/​Herodis in atrio/​Hey hure lure (Ex. 24.4 above). This would
seem to leave the shared basis of all three motets in units of seven unexplained, but they exist in Are post
libamina independently of any dependence on the Ivrea motet.
22 The color and talea length of the Ivrea Post missarum (28 and 14) recur in OH’s Post missarum.
460 English Motets c. 1400–1420

The first color statement is 14 (2 × 7) perfect longs, the second 2 × 7 perfect breves, the
third and fourth 2 × 7 major semibreves; as there is no further diminution between
these last two, their four taleae can be, and are, isorhythmic in all parts.23 In both Old
Hall motets the equal-​range texted upper parts for each successive tenor reduction
have no changes of mensuration. They are computed entirely in imperfect tempus and
minor prolation, but they fall into groups compatible with the mensural diminutions
of the tenor (in perfect time and then major prolation) with minim equivalence
throughout, and are so aligned in the accompanying transcription of the OH Post
missarum, Example 24.1. In Are post libamina the contratenor is contrapuntally in-
essential (i.e. it does not underpin any otherwise unsupported fourths), so it could
have originated as a three-​voice motet. In Post missarum the Old Hall contratenor
evidently provided essential support to the missing tenor. The two motets thus differ
in that respect. Are post libamina has an optional added fifth voice in OH. That voice
is unlabelled, textless, and low-​cleffed, with plentiful minim movement, and is quite
dissonant. With some deviations, it follows the isorhythm of the other parts within
each talea pair.24

Mayshuet, the Composer

Ursula Günther wrongly reported that Old Hall gives the composer’s name of these two
motets as M. or Matheus de Sancto Johanne. The OH ascription of Are post libamina is
to ‘Mayshuet’; Post missarum is anonymous.25 She, Gilbert Reaney, and others following
them, had assumed on the basis of similarity of names that these are one and the same
composer. ‘Mayhuet de Joan’ is named in Chantilly as the composer of a Latin-​texted
three-​stanza ballade Inclite flos orti Gebenensis for Clement VII as pope, referring in
its opening line to Robert’s Geneva origin; the tenor in Chantilly is labelled ‘pro papa
Clemente’.26 This composer is assumed to be the Matheus de Sancto Johanne credited
with three French-​texted songs in Chantilly.27
A supplication for a canonry to Pope Clement VII in November 1378 by presum-
ably the same Matheus de Sancto Johanne names him as a familiar of Louis I, duke of
Anjou.28 He may have joined Louis’s expeditions in 1377, and was still with his chapel

23 See Ch. 2. Isorhythm is used here to designate exactly replicated rhythms to different pitches, and not

applied to any form of diminution or mensural manipulation.

24 As the fragmentary concordance in Ox32 preserves only the top half of the verso with nearly all of the

triplum, it cannot be determined if this source had the optional extra part, which is on f. 112r in OH. It seems
to me likelier that this voice is unique to OH.
25 Günther in NG1, and Günther, ‘Zur Biographie’, 180–​85: ‘sein Name in lateinischer Form als M. bzw.

Matheus de Sancto Johanne’, citing Reaney, ‘The Manuscript Chantilly’, 71–​72: ‘He is also the only French
composer named in OH, which contains two works by him.’ Thus Reaney assumes the identity but does not
actually cite the less explicit form of the name (‘Mayshuet’) in Old Hall.
26 In Chantilly, f. 41r, and in ModA, f. 15r, where it is anonymous. See Ch. 30.
27 The rondeaux Je chante ung chant, f. 16 and Fortune faulce, f. 59v, also in Ivrea, f. 21, and the ballades Sans

vous ne puis, f. 35, also in ModA, f. 15v, and Sience n’a nul annemi, f. 57. The songs are quite unlike the Old Hall
motets, but cross-​genre comparisons are dangerous.
28 For the biographical summary which follows, see Ursula Günther, ‘Matheus de Sancto Johanne’, NG1, ix.

820, and ‘Zur Biographie’; Andrew Tomasello, Music and Ritual, 252–​53; Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’,
144–​50; Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 47; Andrew Wathey in NG2; Nádas, ‘Secular Courts’, 194–​95;
reprinted in Nádas, Arte Psallentes, 382–​83. I am grateful to John Nádas and Andrew Wathey for checking my
reporting of their work.
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 461

at Avignon in 1380.29 Louis had been one of the group of noble hostages who sailed to
England in 1360 as guarantors of the ransom of his captured father King John II, but he
escaped, incurring the displeasure of the French king, who voluntarily returned to cap-
tivity to redeem his honour.
The same document also indicates that Matheus had indeed previously served Cardinal
Robert of Geneva. John Nádas dates this service at some time between 1371/​2 and 1378,
possibly for Robert’s legation in Lombardy 1376–​78, and preceding his service with Louis
of Anjou. In 1379 John, duke (subsequently king) of Aragon instructed his agents to seek
good singers in Avignon for his chapel. They were to be young, unmarried, preferably
able to play an instrument, and not to have been in the service of the duke of Anjou (see
Ch. 30). Whether this was intended as an ad hominem exclusion of Matheus we cannot
tell. By 1382 Matheus was a papal singer for Clement VII; thus, apart from his time with
Louis, Matheus de Sancto Johanne (also known in the documents as ‘Mahuetus’) was al-
most continuously (with a gap of two to three years) in the service of Clement, both before
and after his election to the papacy, as one of his singing chaplains in Avignon up to at
least 1387 and probably until his death, which occurred by June 1391. The 1378 supplica-
tion names him as from the diocese of Thérouanne, but of all the documents reported by
Nádas it is the only one to do so; all others state his diocese of origin as Noyon.30
Andrew Wathey reports that ‘The “Mahiet” who was a clerk in the chapel of the
duchess of Anjou from September 1370 cannot be identified with Matheus de Sancto
Johanne’.31 Nádas cites another document of November 1378, in which a Matheus,
clericus of Noyon, is reported as the duchess’s first chaplain. Despite the coincidence
of names, neither Wathey nor Nádas claims positive identification with Matheus de
Sancto Johanne; he appears to be just another clerk named Matheus from the diocese
of Noyon with no stated connections to music. There are indeed several clerics called
Matheus who lack further identification or beneficial overlaps with Matheus de Sancto
Johanne, who in turn may not be the composer of all the music attributed to him, or to
someone named Matheus but lacking further specification.
Wathey reported the presence of Matheus de Sancto Johanne in England, Anglicised
as ‘Matheu Seintjon’, in the chapel of the English queen Philippa during the mid-​1360s
and perhaps earlier; there was some blurring of the distinction between the king’s and
queen’s chapels. Nádas suggests that he may have arrived at the English court of Edward

29 He may therefore also be the composer of an unascribed ballade on Louis I of Anjou, Los prijs honeur.

He would have been a colleague in Avignon of the distinguished cleric Egidius de Aureliana, also favoured by
Clement VII in 1379–​93, who may perhaps be the composer thus named in the text of the motet Alma polis
religio/​Axe poli. See Ch. 19. For a documented account of what can be known about Louis and music, see
Clark, ‘Music for Louis of Anjou’.
30 Based on this document, Wathey gives his origin as the diocese of Thérouanne (‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’,

147 n. 46), but reported in NG2 the conflicting view that he came from the diocese of Noyon. The one instance
in which Thérouanne (Morinensis) is given as his origin is the supplication of November 1378 (cited from
Hanquet, ‘Documents relatifs au Grand Schisme’, 109, no. 347). John Nádas persuasively explains the anomaly
in favour of Noyon: ‘the papal singer is in every case but one cited as coming from (or at least ordained in) the
diocese of Noyon (noviomensis). I believe the scribe made a mistake in reading from his exemplar, given the
close similarity in the orthography of the Latin names of those two dioceses’ (email of 17.1.2018: morinensis).
Wathey argued that a Thérouanne origin could help to explain his English connections in view of the English
exercise of ecclesiastical preferments in northern France and of the Duke of Anjou’s recruitment of musicians
who, like Mathieu, had previously served English nobility, but this Thérouanne origin is now not favoured for
the papal singer.
31 Citing Paris, BnF, MS fr. 11863, f. 26, and Analecta Vaticano-​Belgica, 8 (1924), 175.
462 English Motets c. 1400–1420

III in the 1360s with Enguerrand de Coucy, in whose service he is reported as a clerk in
1366, in a document which names him as a canon of Laon. Matheus held preferments
at various French collegiate and parish churches, including further canonries between
1378 and 1391 at Soissons, Noyon, Cambrai, Narbonne and Tournai.32 Enguerrand was
also in England as one of the noble hostages who arrived in 1360. He married Edward
III’s daughter Isabella in 1365 and remained neutral during the Hundred Years’ War,
travelling widely, perhaps with Matheus, who left in May 1368 for France and did not
return again to England.33
Although there is no evidence of English contacts for Matheus after 1368, Wathey
considers that a past period of service in the 1360s could strengthen his claim for iden-
tity with the ‘Mayshuet’ of Old Hall, a claim I have questioned.34 He makes the case that
his English connection could have forged links which led to repertory being selectively
passed on through a succession of royal chapels before OH. That does not necessarily
require a dating of the motet during his English period in the 1360s; it could have been
produced after he left England. If the motets are by the Matheus de Sancto Johanne
who died in 1391, both motets, as well as the original and the contrafaction of Are post
libamina, must date from no later than the 1380s, but even a dating in the 1380s seems
to me too early on musical grounds, a dating in the 1360s much too early. The 1380s is
not entirely impossible, as they would not be the only innovatively structured motets
from that decade, though they would then be the earliest motets anywhere, and the only
ones clearly before c. 1400, to have three levels of tenor reduction.35 The presence of
three such levels is new in four first-​layer Old Hall motets including these two (for the
others, see Ch. 25); no other fourteenth-​century motet has more than two levels (that
is, just one diminution section). I have made the case elsewhere (Ch. 20) that the one
apparent exception, Sub Arturo plebs, might in fact date from after 1400. In any case,
its reducing sections do not involve diminution, but are rereadings of the same nota-
tion in different mensurations.36 The corresponding upper parts of the OH Deo gratias
coç ç
motets are successively in , , (unsigned except for the final in the triplum of Post
missarum). Both motets use syncopated minor prolation rhythms in a way reminiscent

32 Nádas, ‘Secular Courts’, 194–​95. The Cambrai benefice was reserved for him but became available only

after his death, which must have occurred by 12 July 1391 (Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’, 147). From an-
other document, Nádas, ‘Secular Courts’, 194, establishes a slightly earlier death date, by 10 June 1391 ‘outside
the Roman curia’. Nádas offers the cautionary note that the Belgian Academy, because of its highly nation-
alistic filter, regularly left out of its Vatican reporting documents that did not include reference to one of the
old dioceses now in present-​day Belgium—​such is the case generally with, for example, the many English
clerics contained in supplications and papal letters of the late 14th c., and here in the specific case of the two
Enguerrand de Coucy documents in RS 45 cited on p. 383 of his Arte Psallentes reprint.
33 Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–​1369’, 144–​45. There, Matheus would have met the musicians in the chapels

of King Edward III and the Black Prince, including some cited in what Di Bacco and Nádas call ‘the contem-
porary motet’ Sub Arturo plebs, Nicolas Hungerford and Simon Clement; John Nádas and Giuliano Di Bacco,
‘The Papal Chapels’, 44–​92 at 47.
34 Bent, ‘The Progeny’, 6; Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’, 10–​11, here superseded, and in EECM 62.
35 See Ch. 23. Diminution, reinterpretation of note-​values at the next level down, is not to be confused with

mensural rereading. See Bent, ‘The Myth’. Even the precocious motet Portio/​Ida (in Trém, before 1376) only
has one level of diminution; it states each color in perfect and then imperfect time before the entire tenor is
repeated at the next level of note-​values down. For Inter densas/​Imbribus see Ch. 1.
36 The first piece in ModA, Matteo da Perugia’s motet Ave sancta mundi, presumably after 1400, is on an

Agnus dei tenor notated once, to be stated three times in successive diminution. The equal-​range upper parts
are on the same text, but it shares few other features with Italian motets as defined in Ch. 26. The tenor is
notated as if unmeasured, all ‘breves’, and prescribed to be sung in second (iambic) mode.
 Mayshuet and the Deo gratias Motets 463

of Machaut, but on grounds of formal technique and rhythmic language, they seem to
be at least a generation later than the Ivrea motet.
There are no obvious stylistic connections with the songs in ModA and Chantilly.
Mathieu’s documented English involvement was so much earlier than a plausible mu-
sical dating that it offers no direct reason for him to have made a Latin adaptation of
one of his French motets a generation later. The triplum text of Are post libamina does
appear to attribute the contrafaction to the composer of the French original, though if it
is by this Mathieu, the later composition or adaptation of a motet to please the English
might depend on the strength of the personal connection and how long it endured. Is it
even possible that Mathieu was the composer of the anonymous Ivrea motet, and that
his name wrongly became attached to the later, textually related anonymous composi-
tion in Old Hall and its ascribed stylistic twin? I think not, and will explain why.
Wathey reports other candidates who have been implausibly identified with Matheus
solely on the basis of similar names or presumed compositional activity.37 Yet previous
authors have assumed, on a basis no stronger, that this composer can be identified with
the Frenchman Mayshuet who composed one and probably both of the last two motets
in Old Hall. None of the various forms of Matheus (Mahiet, Mahuetus, etc) contains a
central ‘s’. The question remains open. Without the biographical information attached
to this proposed candidate, I would have dated these motets around or a little after
1400, rather than twenty, let alone forty years earlier. A dating of Sub Arturo plebs be-
fore the death of another of Queen Philippa’s chaplains, John Aleyn, in 1373, would
seem to make plausible an early dating for the Mayshuet motet(s), assuming they are
by Matheus de Sancto Johanne, but if my arguments for a later dating of Sub Arturo
plebs stand (Ch. 20), and for doubting that a John Aleyn who died so early could be
the composer J. Alanus, it no longer provides supporting corroboration for an earlier
dating of the Mayshuet compositions.38 In this case, as with J. Alanus, I propose to set
aside a weakly supported identification on the basis of similarity of names in favour
of a dating around or after 1400 of the compositions so attributed, even though in the
case of Mayshuet this leaves us without a candidate to be the composer, unless he be the
Jacob Musserey documented in the early 1390s as one of a group of five French singing-​
men in John of Gaunt’s chapel, a long but chronologically plausible shot that has I think
not yet been suggested.39 Roger Bowers reports that Gaunt must have recruited these

37 Several identities that have been proposed for medieval composers remain questionable for lack of

supporting evidence. Of English composers soon after 1400, we have significant information for Leonel
Power and John Dunstaple, both blessed with distinctive names. There is also documentation in varying
quantities for the chapel royal composer-​chaplains Burell, Cook, Damett and Sturgeon, where their contex-
tual situation in the royal chapel, both archivally and in the Old Hall MS, corroborates the identifications.
For more on these men, see Ch. 25. Likely identifications also exist for Chirbury, Tyes, Typp, among others.
Identification is harder for composers with a common surname and no Christian name or initial, as in the
cases of Forest and Pycard. The identification of Forest with John Forest, Dean of Wells, is plausible but has
no corroboration from a Christian name in the manuscripts or a musical office in archival sources. Wathey,
‘John of Gaunt’, proposes that Pycard may have been the singer Jean Pycard in the chapel of John of Gaunt in
the 1390s, an identification confidently reasserted by Roger Bowers (paper at the Medieval and Renaissance
Music Conference, Prague, 6.7.2017). But although Pycard could equally well be one of a number of other
men, including the Thomas Pycard who witnessed a charter with the royal chaplain Thomas Damett in 1420,
I now lean towards agreeing with Bowers that Gaunt’s chaplain is a strong candidate, for further reasons given
at the end of this chapter. As for the composer of Sub Arturo plebs, Alanus is not an uncommon name, J not an
uncommon initial.
38 Bent, ‘The Earliest Fifteenth-​Century Transmission’, 86–​88, and Ch. 20.
39 Wathey, ‘John of Gaunt’, 35.
464 English Motets c. 1400–1420

men before returning to England from France in 1389. Each has a French name: Jean
(John) Pycard, Jean (John) Housy, ‘Peryn’ (Pierre) de Arcomonte, ‘Jacomyn’ (Jacques)
Mucherye, and Ivo de Bonefoye; this last man was successively replaced by others. They
were well rewarded, and the other four probably remained in Gaunt’s service in England
until his death in February 1399. Bowers proposes that the Pycard who heads these lists
may be the Old Hall composer of that name.40 The association may in turn strengthen
the candidacy of Musserey or, even closer in the form Mucherye, to be the phoneti-
cally plausible Mayshuet of Old Hall, a Frenchman living in England who adapted and
Latinised one of his French-​texted motets in order to accommodate to English taste
(as Are post libamina), and who adapted the Latin texts of the companion motet, Post
missarum.41
Although we cannot be certain, composers active as young singers in the 1390s could
have continued to compose after Gaunt’s death into the early 1400s. Moreover, the young
future King Henry V and his brother John the future duke of Bedford lived in Gaunt’s
household from 1392 to 1394, which would have exposed them to his chapel musicians,
where they could have formed both the tastes and personal contacts reflected in the
Old Hall repertory and the slightly later fragmentary royal choirbook (RC), which may
have been prepared for Bedford, and perhaps developed the skills underlying the OH
compositions by ‘Roy Henry’, Henry V.
Another name comes into play, a French musician known and loved in England. In
a little-​explored fragmentary motet datable c. 1400, with a macaronic text in Anglo-​
Norman and Latin, two fine singers from Clermont are affectionately praised by the
English writer: Gwillelmus nicknamed ‘Malcharte’ and his brother Alebram.42 It is to be
hoped that future discoveries may resolve the identity of this most intriguing composer.

40 Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’. Bowers further reports that ‘from Easter 1392 until Easter

1394 Bolingbroke’s first and third sons, Henry (later King Henry V) and John (later duke of Bedford), were
nurtured together in Gaunt’s household. Evidently the boys made a favourable impact on their grandfather,
being the sole two among Bolingbroke’s six children to whom later he made bequests in his will; and while
resident in his household doubtless they experienced the conduct of service by the staff of his chapel.’
41 I ended the previously published version of this paper: ‘On balance, I prefer to treat the composer as not

yet identified.’ I now advance this hypothesis with more confidence.

42 See Bent, ‘Washington, Library of Congress, M2.1 C6 1400 Case’.
 25
Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets,
and Dunstaple

Dating the Main Compilation of Old Hall

Before turning to the motets in the Old Hall manuscript, we need to revisit its dating.
I originally proposed that the principal layer was compiled c. 1413–​15 for an unknown
but probably royal institution; that the compilation was interrupted when the book was
sent for illumination; and that it did not return to the original scribe, who was there-
fore unable to enter the specific compositions for which he had prescribed illuminated
initials or, in one case, even a text incipit. At that stage it came into the hands of Henry
V’s singer-​chaplains who, instead of continuing the compiler’s intentions, entered
their own compositions, some of them autograph (where scribal and composer
identifications coincide), in 1415–​19, when they were all together in Henry’s chapel;
we will return to the reasons for this dating. Roger Bowers then discovered documenta-
tion that Leonel Power, the most strongly represented composer in OH, had served in
the chapel of Thomas Duke of Clarence in 1419, and probably since c. 1411.1 I readily
concurred that the original layer had very probably been prepared for Clarence, and still
do. But I now think I was wrong to accept his further proposal that the interruption was
occasioned by Clarence’s death in 1421 or his removal in 1419.2 This imposes much too
tight a timing for the later additions, which must have been made while those chaplains
were still serving in Henry V’s chapel. I therefore now revert to my original proposals
for the dating, but now with knowledge of the Clarence association. The organisation
and consistency of the original layer of copying suggests that most of the material was
assembled and planned before copying began, most of it composed in the first decade
of the new century (the more old-​fashioned pieces perhaps in the preceding decade)
and that because of the prior organisation, it could all have been copied in the space of a
year or two. In short, the first layer was probably compiled in the first two years of Henry
V’s reign, 1413–​15, presumably in and for Thomas’s chapel. The two compositions
ascribed to ‘Roy Henry’ must be by his brother King Henry V, probably also composed
in that first decade. It is barely conceivable that the ailing Henry IV could have had
the energy and ability to compose in an up-​to-​date style by then, even if he had shown

Much of this section is new. Parts have been updated and expanded from Bent, ‘Sources of the Old Hall Music’,
‘The Old Hall Manuscript’, and Dunstaple. Some (on RC) has recently been set out in more expanded form in
Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’ (in EECM 62), where the dating of OH is reviewed.
1 Bowers, ‘Lionel Power’. The Duke of Berry loaned Clarence MachautE in 1412 (it was back with the

Dukes of Burgundy at least from 1467). Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ludwig, ii. 10*–​11*, and 11* n. 1, and Earp,
Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, 93.
2 Bent, ‘The Progeny’. I thank David Fallows for prompting me to revisit the issue of dating and to revert to

something closer to my original proposal.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0026
466 English Motets c. 1400–1420

musical talent in his youth. His sons (Henry V and his brothers Clarence, Bedford and
Gloucester) all have at least some credentials as practitioners or patrons of music or
musicians. The inscription must, I believe, date from early in the reign of the new king.
He need not have been king when he composed them, only when the copy was made. In
a manuscript so close to the crown, Henry must have been ‘Roy’, king, when the scribe
made his ascription.3
Some English motets of this period have been discussed here, in other chapters or
sections: Sub Arturo among the musician motets in Chapter 20, O amicus in Chapter 22,
Are post libamina and Post missarum in Chapter 24. I have given reasons for dating all
those motets closer to 1400 (or even after) than had previously been suggested, notably
for Sub Arturo.

The Motets in the Original Layer of Old Hall

Only five motets from the original compilation survive at the end of OH (nos. 143–​47)
in a depleted section (gathering XVII) that originally held at least one more motet. We
can be sure, however, that the section began and ended with the motets currently in
those places: the first because it immediately follows the last Agnus setting and carried a
decorative initial (later cut out) of the type found only at section beginnings, and ended
with two adjacent motets for the end of Mass. Both the first and last of these are incom-
plete due to lack of a facing page but, as was shown in Chapter 24, no. 147 can be nearly
completed from another source. The motets are:

No. 143, f. 109v: Carbunculus ignitus lilie, on St Thomas (triplum only);

No. 144, f. 110: motetus (Mater munda) and tenor (Mater sancta Dei) only, on the
Virgin;
No. 145, ff. 110v–​111: En Katerine solennia/​Virginalis concio, on St Katherine, by
Byttering, complete;
Nos. 146 (Are post libamina) and 147 (Post missarum) are the two motets by Mayshuet
for the end of Mass that were the subject of Chapter 24.

We will first deal with nos. 144 and 145, before a lengthier discussion of no. 143.
No. 144: the motetus is texted Mater munda. The unidentified tenor melody is la-
belled Mater sancta Dei, but as there is no known chant of this name, this is probably the
incipit of the missing triplum. A text beginning with these words is in AH 24: 179, and
was used in CMM 46. This motet has just two sections. The long tenor color is divided
c
into two taleae each of 24 longs of perfect modus; the motetus starts in , its imperfect
breves aligned with the tenor’s.4 The tenor is marked for repetition, the second state-
ment in (unspecified) diminution, at which point the motetus changes to , its perfect o
tempus semibreves aligned with those of the diminished tenor. The red coloration in
both surviving parts is for imperfection.

3 Roger Bowers (‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’, 223) agrees that the main compilation was made in the

reign of Henry V, but maintains that Henry IV was the royal composer.
4 Including a syncopation which gives three periods of seven (3 +​4) breves.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 467

No. 145, ff. 110v–​111: En Katerine solennia/​Virginalis concio, on St Katherine, by

Byttering; this and Are post libamina (no. 146) are the only motets of this group in OH
surviving complete, and the only two with composer ascriptions.5 The tenor is the verse
of the responsory Virgo flagellatur for the second nocturn at Matins on the feast of St
Katherine (25 November), with slight variants from the chant in AS, pl. Y. Encouraged
by St Katherine and the tenor Sponsus amat sponsam (deliciously mis-​written as
sponsum), Bukofzer suggested that it could have celebrated the wedding of Henry V and
Katherine in 1420; but that is too late, given its position in the main compilation of OH.
This mensurally virtuosic motet survives here complete in three parts. The tenor color is
disposed in two taleae of 27 breves, with syncopation, alteration and coloration, and is
marked to be stated three times, the successive reduction unspecified. Coloration most
commonly denotes imperfection, but here, unusually, it is for sesquialtera proportion,
three in the time of two; the second breve in each case has to be altered before the final
long of the group, which would not happen in imperfection coloration.6 The dots (of
division) also indicate the triple grouping, and the proportional (as opposed to men-
sural) interpretation of the coloration is confirmed by alignment with the upper parts.
Figure 25.1 gives the numerical values of the notes in breves (albeit breves of different
lengths; the numbers for the red notes in sesquialtera are in italics). The three ‘1’s in bold
make up a split syncopation group; the first tenor breve and its rest form a perfection
with the last breve before the coloration. The semibreve count for each talea in relation
to the upper parts is 9 9 3 3 9 9 3 6 9. 3 for the black notes (three semibreves to the breve,
rests italicised), followed by 4 2. 2 4 6 for the red notes (two semibreves to the breve).

Fig. 25.1 Tenor of Byttering, En Katerine, tenor Sponsus amat sponsum [sic] in London,
British Library, Add. MS 57950 (OH), f. 111. Reproduced with permission of the British
Library. Number values of red notes are in italics

The first tenor color is in perfect modus and, although notated only in longs and
breves, must be construed in the perfect tempus and minor prolation of the upper
parts, to which its values correspond. The second color is to be read at the next note-​
level down (as if in breves and semibreves), in perfect time, but now assuming major
prolation to match that of the upper parts. The third color does not undergo a further
diminution of note-​levels, but is mensurally (not proportionally) reduced to be read
in perfect time, now coordinated with the minor prolation of the upper parts. This
requires the coloration (unusually) to be construed as triplets against the duplets in the
upper parts, i.e. it is still for sesquialtera, not imperfection. The three sections all have

5 The motetus text (Virginalis concio) is known from the motetus voice of an earlier incomplete St Katherine

motet in Durham20, f. 336. Its contratenor De sancta Katerina shows that the lower parts had two colores, the
second in written-​out diminution, each of four taleae with coloration.
6 On coloration usage in OH see Bent, ‘Principles of Mensuration and Coloration’.
468 English Motets c. 1400–1420

different mensurations between the two texted upper parts: in I, triplum is set against c
o ø ç
motetus ; in II triplum is against motetus ; in III, triplum is against motetus c
o .7 The coloration in the upper-​part major prolation sections is for imperfection, not
sesquialtera; red notation thus has different meanings within the same composition.
Although there is no temporal overlap at these sectional signature changes, it is clear
that minim equivalence applies horizontally, and that the upper-​part minim values con-
trol the tenor evaluations and successive reductions, even though the tenor contains no
notes shorter than a breve. The overall proportions of the sections are 6:3:2.
OH, no. 143 (f. 109v), Carbunculus ignitus lilie, is the triplum part of a motet on
St Thomas Becket. That a motet with this dedication heads the motet section (its elab-
orate initial was cut out), could add support to the destination of the manuscript as the
chapel of Duke Thomas. Two mass movements on Thomas chants lend further sup-
port: the Credo OH, no. 84, on Opem nobis, ascribed to Leonel, who is almost certainly
the composer of its twin, the anonymous Gloria no. 24, on Ad Thome. These are the
only other Thomas compositions in Old Hall, both with irregular isorhythmic elements
very different from the regularity of the motet triplum. Although the only documen-
tation of Leonel Power’s membership of Clarence’s chapel is later (the single surviving
account applies from 1418 to Clarence’s death in 1421), we have noted Bowers’s view
that it probably dates back to c. 1411, and at least to the beginning of Henry’s reign,
when Thomas increased his chapel, probably recruited in 1411–​13, during which time
he was created Duke of Clarence and became heir to the throne.8 This would be further
supported by Leonel’s composition of the Thomas mass movements by that earlier date,
in time for inclusion in the first layer of OH.
In November 1419 he is named as Lyonell and, as clerk and instructor of the
choristers, Lionell Power. He is listed second, so may have been quite senior.9 He is the
only composer in OH whose works are ascribed exclusively by a first name, usually as
‘Leonel’, but in the second-​layer ascription of a Credo, no. 73 (f. 61v), by an otherwise
unrepresented scribe, as ‘Lyonel’, closer to the spelling in the Clarence accounts, and
perhaps his own, as it is also the spelling found in the authorial attribution at the end
of his vernacular treatise ‘upon the Gamme’ in Lo763: ‘Quod Lyonel Power’. The two
mass movements on Thomas chants were already mentioned. Taken together with
the strong likelihood that OH was compiled for Thomas’s chapel, and the placing of
a Thomas motet in pride of place at the decorated head of the motet section, these
factors all point to Leonel’s possible authorship of Carbunculus. This would be his
only surviving periodic motet with isorhythm; he must surely have composed others.
Only the triplum of this motet survives. Its texting is entirely syllabic and, because it
strictly observes the discipline of not breaking a word with a rest, the words and music must
have been planned together, in order to make monosyllables fall in the right places for the
isorhythmic repeats (not in this case hockets), even though the number of syllables is not
reduced for the musical reduction between the first two sections, and just from four lines to

7 I now repent the standardised barring adopted in CMM 46.

8 The personnel of Thomas’s chapel when he became heir to his brother’s throne is unknown. Might it
still have included some of the members of John of Gaunt’s chapel? The young French singers recruited by
Gaunt, including Pycard and Mucherey/​Musseret (possibly =​Mayshuet? see Ch. 24), may have been the OH
composers of those names, though this is highly conjectural. If so, they may have continued under some kind
of royal patronage after Gaunt’s death, perhaps already recruited by Clarence soon after 1400, and thus ac-
counting for their presence in OH.
9 Bowers, ‘Lionel Power’, 106–​7.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 469

three in the third. See Figure 25.2. The text consists of thirty-​three decasyllabic lines. A mi-
nority of line-​breaks coincide with rests, but most rests occur at other points in the lines,
differently placed in the three sections (colores), but always, however, at a word break:

In C1 each of the three taleae has a four-​line stanza, all rhyming -​ie (12 lines). The
number of syllables between rests in each line is 10, 6, 9, 8, 7 =​40;

in C2 likewise, each rhyming -​ium (12 lines). The number of syllables between rests in
each line is 22, 4, 4, 10 =​40;

in C3 each of the three taleae has a three-​line stanza, all rhyming -​ia (9 lines). The
number of syllables between rests in each line is 15, 5, 3, 7 =​30.
The location of rests in the first stanza of each color of Carbunculus is shown by
vertical lines:

C1, T1
Carbunculus ignitus lilie |
Flammas vibrans lucis | eximie
Noctis latebris | fulgor Anglie
Lucerna | decoris ecclesie.| (× 3: different texts, same word divisions)

C2, T1
En propter Cristi testimonium
Ecclesie quoque zelum pium
Durum| fastigium| obprobrium|
Archi presul mentis absinthium.| (× 3: different texts, same word divisions)

C3, T1
Sed hec reproborum nequicia
Comitans sancti | desideria |
Mensura | propter temporalia.| (× 3: different texts, same word divisions)

ø ç c
Musically, the three sections are in [ ], and . Each section contains 12 × 3 =​36
breves; the breves are of different lengths according to the mensuration, resulting in
the overall proportions 9:6:4 based on those breve lengths. Each upper-​voice color is
divided into three isorhythmic taleae of 12 breves each, 12 × 3 breves, a total of 108
ç
breves of different lengths (equivalent to 114 breves of ). This suggests that the missing
tenor may also have been mensurally redefined for each section, but I have not yet been
able to reconstruct a tenor color that fits all three upper-​part sections, let alone to iden-
tify it with a Thomas chant. I have to conclude that there is no tidy coincidence with
the structure of this upper part, but rather that there must either have been a single
tenor color or some clever overlapping mensural scheme, perhaps more extreme than
the non-​alignment in Sub Arturo (see Ch. 20). It awaits an ingenious solution. I know of
only three motets which have the overall proportions 9:6:4: Carbunculus, Cooke’s Alma
proles/​Christi miles (OH, no. 112), and Sub Arturo plebs.10 All three are English, and all

10 Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20) redefined the tenor mensurally for each section in ø, ç and c, resulting in the
ç
same 9:6:4 proportions, but there the upper parts remained in throughout.
Fig. 25.2 Text of Carbunculus ignitus lilie, with aligned isorhythm, showing that rests never divide words
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 471

date from around 1400 or within the two following decades. The accelerating propor-
tion in each case is achieved not by diminution, but by mensural reinterpretation of the
same notation, as if they are acknowledging each other, though doing so in different
ways. I have linked Cooke’s St George motet Alma proles/​Christi miles to the peace pro-
cess preceding Agincourt in 1415, and its possible use in the aftermath of that victory
(see below). But neither it, nor anything else attributed to the royal clerks or chaplains
Burell, Cooke, Damett and Sturgeon, made its way across the Channel. Conversely, the
assertively patriotic Sub Arturo was until recently known only from Continental sources
(now also in an English source, Yox; see Chs. 20, 22). Its absence from OH is surprising,
when that manuscript offers a range of other motets including, as later additions to be
discussed below, patriotic and Agincourt-​related pieces and, anonymously, Dunstaple’s
Veni sancte spiritus/​Veni creator, which I date to 1416 or before. Alma proles regia, like
øç c
Sub Arturo, states the tenor three times, in , and . The upper parts for the first
ç ø c
section are ambiguously in or ; the two following sections are in and , respec- ç
ç c
tively against and in the tenor, with ingenious tricky alignment and split coloration
not unlike the final section of Sub Arturo. The mensural affinity between Sub Arturo
and Alma proles regia also suggests a possible alliterative relationship of the latter motet
with the musician motet Alma polis religio (Ch. 19) and in turn with Apollinis (Ch. 16),
although it stands outside the musician motets group. Such play on similarity of verbal
incipits between motets is a feature of that repertory.
A further pointer to possible authorship of Carbunculus by Leonel is that the overall
proportions of Cooke’s motet may be a homage to Leonel, if the motet is indeed by him;
they are two of the only three known motets with this proportion. They are the only
two composers represented in both layers of OH; Cooke’s Gloria no. 36 in the main
layer is closely modelled on Leonel’s Gloria–​Credo pair nos. 21 and 77, likewise with
alternating sections in two and four parts, a final five-​part section, with even a third
in the final chord (like Leonel’s no. 21). Cooke and Leonel share the apparently per-
sonal habit of using little letter names to cancel notated sharps; although not exclusive
to them, it is far from universal, even in their circle. Cooke’s Stella celi (no. 55) is so
heavily provided with cadential sharps that it may have been a pedagogic exercise or
demonstration. It is a simple piece, essentially a succession of cadential formulae with
notoriously explicit accidentals including ds and gs. All this could indicate that Cooke
was a disciple or pupil of Leonel; and as a bridge between the layers could have been
instrumental in removing the manuscript in the mid-​1410s from Clarence’s chapel, in
which Leonel served, to that of Henry V, in which Cooke served. If Cooke’s motet was
in any sense modelled on Sub Arturo, we might see it as a homage to another highly
talented composer.
Motets nos. 143–​45 all change mensuration in the upper parts at each structural
section (with horizontal minim equivalence), coinciding with a tenor color repeat in
nos. 144 and 145, but possibly not in no. 143 (Carbunculus). The upper parts of the two
motets by Mayshuet (nos. 146 and 147, discussed in Ch. 24) do not change mensuration
with the tenor diminutions, with the one exception that the Post missarum triplum in
c ç
OH and the motetus in Ox32 change from to for the final color to align with the
major prolation of the final tenor diminution.
Apart from no. 144, Mater sancta Dei/​Mater munda, with only two color statements,
all five motets thus have three statements in successive reduction, whether achieved
472 English Motets c. 1400–1420

mensurally or by diminution, and in that respect they have no English precedents

apart from the Yoxford motet O amicus (Ch. 22) and Sub Arturo (Ch. 20). Alongside
and very soon after the OH compositions, the three-​section pattern with two levels of
reduction became standard in England, with either two or three taleae per color. Some
of these (including Sub Arturo and some by Dunstaple) involve mensural transfor-
mation and not diminution strictly defined. Whether composed before or after 1400,
English motets, or motets preserved in England, seem to be the first to have three suc-
cessively reducing sections. They include the Mayshuet motets in OH, at least one of
which could, as stated in Chapter 24, be a contrafact from the French, and nos. 143
and 145. Nor does any fourteenth-​century Continental motet have as many as three
sections in successive reduction. Only the special case of Inter densas in Chantilly
has more sections. It apparently dates from before 1400; its apparent dedicatee died
in 1391. It does not apply diminution, but is entirely a mensuration motet, of the most
extreme kind, perhaps a demonstration piece (see Ch. 1); the sections are not arranged
in descending order of length.

The Later Additions to Old Hall: The Agincourt Motets

At some point in the 1410s, the compilation of OH was interrupted, and the book
came into the hands of Henry V’s clerks and chaplains Damett, Cooke, Sturgeon
and Burell.11 Compositions by these men were entered piecemeal at various times,
probably soon after composition. Various scribes are involved in compositions
ascribed to them, some apparently the composers themselves, others possibly also
members of Henry’s chapel.12 If some of Cooke’s contributions are indeed auto-
graph, they must have been entered by c. 1419, when he is last documented and
may have died. At any rate, he is no longer listed in 1421 as a member of Henry’s
chapel.13 His autograph contributions would have required his presence together
with the other chaplains; even if he was alive and present after 1419, but not by 1421,
this would still require a dating of the second layer within the reign of Henry V. The
reason for the interruption remains unknown.14 It does not require a specific occa-
sion, such as Clarence’s death or removal. The book which originated in his chapel
could have been loaned or given to the king’s chaplains, or simply appropriated. The

11 Much of this section has been updated and extended from Bent, ‘Sources’. The same sources were used

and commented on in Nosow, Ritual Meanings, with some differing interpretations, some of which are taken
into account here.
12 The autograph claim for some pieces rests on the alignment of scribal identifications with composer

ascriptions, and the evidence of compositional revisions by the same scribes in some of those pieces. These
were reported in Bent, ‘The Old Hall Manuscript’.
13 Roger Bowers, email of 25.6.2019: ‘The next list of Chapel Royal employees following 1419 is that made

for the supply of livery in anticipation of the coronation of Katherine of France as Queen of England on 24
Feb. 1421 (TNA, E 101/​407/​4, f. 36r). It contains no John Cook.’ Andrew Wathey (email of 9.4.2022) provided
me with a copy of the document London, The National Archives, C 81/​1365/​11, dated 25 July 1419, granting
to Thomas Gyles ‘the prebende whiche John Cooke late clerc of our saide Chapelle, hadde within oure free
chapelle of Hastynges’.
14 I now strongly reject the suggestions I made (‘The Progeny’, 27) that the Zacara Gloria could have been

transmitted at Constance and that (following Bukofzer) Byttering’s St Catherine motet could be for the
wedding of Henry and Catherine in 1420; both are too late if, as I now believe, those compositions were in
place by 1415.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 473

royal brothers and the chaplains of Henry’s chapel royal were regularly travelling to
and from France at this period.
The port town of Harfleur was besieged by the English from 18 August 1415 and
captured on 22 September, followed by the victory at Agincourt on Friday, 25 October
1415 (St Crispin’s day, as immortalised by Shakespeare). On 23 November 1415,
Henry returned to London in triumph, received by elaborate pageants, as reported by
chroniclers.15 Three motets by his chaplains Damett, Cooke and Sturgeon seem par-
ticularly well suited to the English situation before and following Agincourt. Thus c.
1415–​19 is the likely period within which the interruption took place, the manuscript
changed hands, and the later (partly autograph) additions were made.
The motets by these Chapel Royal composers have attracted attention on account of
the topical references in their texts. Albeit less explicit than the anonymous Agincourt
carol, they offer our only internal clue for dating any of the music of the second layer.
They are:

Damett, Salvatoris mater pia/​O Georgi Deo care/​Benedictus Marie Filius qui ve-​
(no. 111, ff. 89v–​90);
Cooke, Alma proles regia/​Christi miles inclite/​Ab inimicis nostris defende nos Christe
(no. 112, ff. 90v–​91);
Sturgeon, Salve mater Domini/​Salve templum gratie/​-​it in nomine Domini (no. 113,
ff. 91v–​92).

Their texts supplicate for peace and for delivery from affliction with prayers for the
safeguarding of Henry and England, and may relate to the continuing peace negotiations
before and after Agincourt and to the post-​Agincourt celebrations themselves. The
saints addressed in all the texts are Mary and George, the two most commonly invoked
and thanked by the English at the time of Agincourt, as attested in the Gesta Henrici
Quinti.16 St George literally figured large at Henry’s arrival. A verse account of the
pageant formerly attributed to Lydgate reports thus:

To londonn Brigge thanne rood oure Kyng

The processions there they mette hym ryght
‘Ave Rex anglorum’ thei gan syng
‘Flos mundi’ thei seide, ‘goddys knyght’ [i.e. miles Christi]

15 Gesta Henrici Quinti; the introduction gives an account of the various chronicles covering these events

and their status. A Chronicle of London, ed. Tyrell et al., 100–​4, reports ceremonies of thanksgiving in London
when news of the Agincourt victory arrived on 29 Oct.: Te deum was sung, and a procession from St Paul’s to
Westminster made offerings at the shrine of St Edward; thanksgiving was made to Christ, Mary and George,
with Hec est dies quam fecit dominus. For Henry’s return to London in November, and Sigismund’s visit the
following year, a short report adds no new information. Given-​Wilson, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 256–​65,
describes the Agincourt victory and gives a detailed description of Henry’s triumphant reception in London,
including the figure of St George, but without naming the titles that could denote musical items. Sigismund’s
visit (and return to Constance) is briefly mentioned in conjunction with Bedford’s naval victory, but there is
no musically relevant information.
16 The Gesta, also known as the chaplain’s account, was compiled between Nov. 1416 and July 1417 (pp.

xviii and xxiv) and is the earliest and most authoritative account of the events of 1415–​16. The author was an
eyewitness and an unnamed royal chaplain, which may account for the precision and detail of his account of
Henry’s liturgical mandates, for which see below.
474 English Motets c. 1400–1420

To londonn Brigge whan he com right

Upon the gate ther stode on hy
A gyaunt that was full grym of syght
To teche the frensshemen curtesy.

And at the drawe brigge that is faste by

To toures there were upright
An Antelope and a Lyon stondyng hym by
Above hem seynt George oure lady knyght
Besyde hym many an angell bright,
‘Benedictus’ thei gan synge
‘Qui venit in nomine domini’, ‘goddes knyght’
‘Gracia dei’ with yow doth sprynge.17

Compare the version of a related prose chronicle:

Where as he was riolly receyvet with precession and song ave anglorum, flos mundi, miles
Christi, and when he come to Londonn brigge whereas were ij turrettes on the drawbrige,
& a gret Geaunt and on the turrettes stonding a lyon and a antlope with many angeles
syngyng Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini. And so rode he forth in to london.18

As the king turned into Cornhill, he was greeted with the arms of St George, Edward
the Confessor, Edmund and England. Cooke’s motetus text petitions George, then Mary,
then both together, for victory and for peace, and to protect the king from his enemies.
The opening words address St George as Christi miles, soldier of Christ. Both the above
accounts of the London pageant hail Henry with these very words, as miles Christi, thus
endowing him with the attributes of St George, whose feast-​day (23 April) was formally
proclaimed a greater double feast after the Agincourt victory.19 Ave [rex gentis] anglorum,
Flos mundi and Miles Christi may either denote separate items, or the three texts of a non-​
extant polytextual motet.20 Motets of this type are hardly suited to outdoor performance
in a popular ceremonial context, but they could nevertheless have played a part in the

17 This follows Lo565, f. 112v, corrected from Gesta Henrici Quinti, Appendix IV, 191–​92. There are four

and a half more stanzas. The whole poem is printed in Nicolas, History of the Battle of Agincourt, 327; see also
A Chronicle of London, ed. Tyrell et al., 231, 327–​28, and Appendix IV of Gesta Henrici Quinti. A different ver-
sion of the same poem in Lo12 perished in the Cottonian fire; for this we are dependent on Thomæ de Elmham
Vita & Gesta, 359–​75; this account is now known as pseudo-​Elmham, as Elmham is no longer thought to be
its author.
18 Lo53, f. 157v. This 15th-​c. manuscript preserves one of the continuations in English of the Brut chronicle

(up to 1436); see Brie, The Brut, ii. 558 and Brie, Geschichte und Quellen. An older account of the chronicles
relevant to Henry V is in Kingsford, English Historical Literature.
19 The Register of Henry Chichele, III. 6, on 20 Nov. 1416. Benedictus and Miles Christi might refer to two

different but related extant motets, as suggested here, or they could be two texts of a single motet that has not
survived. Miles Christi is a responsory for Edward the Confessor, but no known chant for St George begins
with these words.
20 Nosow so interprets them (Ritual Meanings, 40), but does not make it entirely clear that this motet does

not survive, nor why he designates Flos mundi the triplum text (ibid. 41). He could have brought into play sev-
eral fragmentary English motets with potentially royal connotations that have not yet received much atten-
tion, notably the incomplete motet Ave miles triumphalis which is on the verso of Cant128/​6, the Canterbury
source of Preco.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 475

celebrations, perhaps in a more reflective and less public continuation which allowed
the chronicler (albeit imperfectly) to note the Latin titles. The tenor of Cooke’s motet
uses the words and music of the rogation litany for peace: Ab inimicis nostris defende nos
Christe.21 The rogation days in 1415, 6–​8 May, occurred at the most anxious time in the
peace negotiations between the French and the English. Talks had broken down, and the
truce, due to expire on 1 May, had been extended to 8 June in a last effort to avert war.
This would have been one of several appropriate times to write a motet of supplication
for peace, glossed in the upper parts by appeals to Mary and George to secure victory
for England. Particularly suited to the previous truce negotiations, Cooke’s motet would
have become topical again at and after the celebrations.
The two motets by Damett and Sturgeon display a rare and deliberate kind of
collaboration, since they share a plainsong, dividing it between them at the mid-
point. The plainsong is Benedictus qui ve-​| (n)it in nomine Domini (‘Blessed is he
that cometh in the name of the Lord’), with the Sarum Sanctus trope Marie Filius.22
Could this refer to the angelic song welcoming Henry to London, as reported above?
The tenors of all three motets, Cooke’s Ab inimicis, as well as the Benedictus chant
for Damett’s and Sturgeon’s motets, might allude to the chronicle reports. Damett’s
portion is Benedictus Marie Filius qui ve-​, Sturgeon’s [n]it in nomine Domini. While
the texts of the upper parts do not correspond directly to anything in the accounts
of the pageant, Damett’s motetus text, again addressed to St George, has the right
ingredients for the occasion:

O Georgi Deo care O George, dear to God,

salvatorem deprecare pray to the Saviour
ut gubernet Angliam. that He may guide England,
Ipsam teque commendare and that we may be worthy
valeamus et laudare to entrust it to thee,
deitatis graciam. and to praise the grace of God.
Tu qui noster advocatus May you, who are our advocate,
es ius tui patronatus defend from enemies the rights
defendas ab hostibus. of your status as [our] patron,
Et Anglorum gentem serva and preserve the race of the English
pace firma sine guerra with constant peace, without war,
tuis sanctis precibus. by your holy prayers.
Miles fortis custos plebis Strong soldier, guardian of the people,
sis Henrici nostri regis be present at the deliberations
presens ad consilium. of Henry our king;

21 The tenor of this motet is a processional antiphon specified in Liber regie capelle, ed. Ullman, of 1448, for

the daily procession and litany of the chapel royal ‘to be sung through solemnly as in the Processional’. This
wording implies chant rather than a polyphonic setting in which the chant is long drawn out and not readily
heard as such. This source is a generation later, and it is a bit of a stretch to take it, with Nosow, Ritual Meanings,
8, as licence for assuming that the motet, rather than the chant, was sung in this processional context.
22 Damett uses the Sarum plainsong 3 transposed down a tone; Sturgeon uses it untransposed. This is

hardly an obstacle to linked performance, since there is no evidence that written pitches were tied even to ap-
proximate standards of sounding pitch. Use of high clefs does not necessarily imply performance by trebles at
this date.
476 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Contra hostes apprehende warn against enemies, offer

arma scutum archum tende arms—​the shield, the bow;
sibi fer auxilium. bring help to him.
Gloriosa spes Anglorum Glorious hope of the English,
audi vota famulorum hear the praise-​offerings of thy servants
tibi nunc canencium. now singing to thee,
Per te nostrum ut patronum so that, through thee as our patron,
consequamur pacis donum we may attain the gift of peace
in terra vivencium. in the land of the living.

This text expresses confidence in the strength and superiority of England and of
Henry, combined with supplication to preserve the peace, to preside over the treaty
negotiations, and to warn Henry if his enemy started to re-​arm; presumably composed
during the prior negotiations whose continuation still required humble prayers for
peace, in the spirit of pious humility which Henry himself displayed.23 The text refers to
the bow, literally the instrument of victory at Agincourt, and the deliberations of Henry,
which may well refer to the long-​drawn-​out treaty negotiations which followed. The ex-
plicit references place this text during the reign of Henry V.
Damett’s triplum text is a known Marian sequence (Salvatoris mater pia), the last part
of which has been replaced by lines requesting eternal life for Henry.24 The first three
stanzas show only minor variations from the standard text, but the last two (below)
differ significantly to include topical reference to Henry:

Standard text: OH:

Regi nato adhaesisti Tutrix pia tui gregis
Quem lactasti et pavisti Memor sis Henrici regis
More matris debito: Pro quo pete filium:
Quae coniuncta nunc eidem, Ut exutus carne gravi
Es regina facta pridem Vite scriptus sit suavi
Operum pro merito. Post presens exilium.

Reis ergo fac, regina Regis nostrique regina

Apud regem, ut ruina Ora natum ut ruina
Relaxentur (or relaxetur) debita Relaxetur debita
Et regnare fac renatos, Et regnare fac renatos,
A reatu expurgatos A reatu expurgatos
Pietate solita. Pietate solita.

23 Gesta Henrici Quinti, 150–​55 and Jacob, The Fifteenth Century, 123–​24. Harrison, Music in Medieval

Britain, 246–​47, associates Alma proles and Salvatoris generally with Henry’s campaigns. Bukofzer, Studies,
70, suggested that the motets by Damett and Sturgeon (with upper-​voice texts beginning Sa-​and using a
Sanctus plainsong) ‘can be regarded as elaborately troped settings of the Sanctus’. After the Sanctus was one of
the places prescribed for polyphony; these motets were interpolated in a group of first-​layer Sanctus settings.
24 AH 54: 280. For sources see https://​can​tus.uwater​loo.ca/​sea​rch?t=​sal​vato​ris+​mater+​pia (consulted

10.4.2023). The standard text is also in Cu710, the Dublin troper.

 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 477

Translation of Old Hall text:

Holy guardian of Thy flock, be mindful of King Henry, for whom beseech Thy Son that,
stripped of heavy flesh, he may be enrolled for everlasting life after his present exile on
earth. And, O Queen of our king, pray Thy Son with Thy usual faithfulness, that the down-
fall due to us may be alleviated and that, reborn and cleansed from sin, we may reign [with
Thee in heaven].

The third motet, by Sturgeon, is simply votive to the Virgin and contains no topical
references, but it is linked by the continuation of its tenor plainsong to the motet by
his chapel royal colleague Damett. The points of contact with the chronicle accounts
would have made all three highly suitable both before and after Agincourt, with the
prominence they give to Mary and George. The Damett/​Sturgeon pair could possibly
relate to the Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini which the angels sang to greet him,
and Cooke’s rogationtide motet, with one part beginning Christi miles, might reflect
the miles Christi reported by the chronicler. Both Damett’s motet and Cooke’s address
the patron of Agincourt: ‘O George, dear to God, pray to the Saviour that He may
guide England, . . . and preserve the race of the English with constant peace, without
war’ (Damett), and ‘holy George, most brilliant of soldiers’, who ‘guards the realm of
England’ (Cooke). Even if these motets by Henry’s own chaplains were not sung in
the streets, they catch much of the vocabulary of the chroniclers’ accounts. Bowers
has proposed that they could be associated with any period during the wars with the
French.25 Because of the probable timing of the interruption to Old Hall, and the date
constraints for the copying of the autograph compositions (i.e. by 1419), the political
situation around 1415, including the victories at Agincourt and Harfleur, seems to offer
the most likely context for the composition of the three motets.

Mensural and Structural Features of the Agincourt Motets

No. 111: Damett, Salvatoris mater pia/​O Georgi Deo care/​Benedictus

Marie Filius qui ve-​
Each of the four tenor colores has two taleae, each of six perfect longs in perfect modus,
including a split coloration group of three imperfect red longs. The tenor as notated uses
longs and breves only. The overall notated proportions are 12:8:6:2 =​6:4:3:1, but they
appear to disagree with the specifications of a later informally written Canon tenoris,
which replaces a series of erased mensuration signs for the tenor: : ø ooo
Po sicut iacet de modo perfecto temporis imperfecti
2o per dimidietatem

25 Bowers, email of 5.5.2005, does not accept the Agincourt connection: ‘There are indeed some pieces

whose texts and tenors appear to imply that they were composed in time of war; but between 1409 and 1461
there were not many years when the English were not engaged in warfare.’ I agree that the motets are not
purely celebratory, but also piously reflective and supplicatory. But they must date from the reign of Henry V,
and therefore refer to the political situation before and after Agincourt.
478 English Motets c. 1400–1420

3o per terciam partem

4o per sextam partem

These, however, yield the proportions 6:3:2:1, which are accomplished by mensura-
tion signs in the upper parts which override the notated values, as explained below.
The notated values of the tenor color correspond to the upper parts neither at the
values of the first nor the last statements, but at those of statement 3.
The first tenor statement (color 1) is prescribed for perfect modus, imperfect
tempus. Although specified as sicut jacet, an imperfect breve of the tenor corresponds
to two perfect breves of the upper parts, i.e. a tenor semibreve equals a perfect breve
of the top parts; sicut jacet therefore denotes, here and elsewhere, a non-​equivalent
relationship, contrary to the common understanding of this term. In color 2, in im-
perfect modus and tempus, a tenor breve equals two imperfect breves of the upper
parts, which would relate (by semibreves) 6:4 to color 1. But the upper parts are signed
v (=​4:3, sesquitertia), achieving the halving specified in the verbal canon, 6:3. Color
3 is specified per terciam partem, which defines its relationship neither to 1 nor 2. But
its note values are read in diminution, down a level from colores 1 and 2, in perfect
modus, perfect tempus, so that their notated values now correspond to those of the
upper parts. If they were signed with a black o, this would reverse the v of the preceding
section, yielding 3:4 of the 6:4:3 notated values. But the o is red, here taken to reduce
what follows by a third, i.e. by sesquialtera. (The reduction is by a third, not to a third.)
Thus the first three sections relate not 6:4:3 as notated, but 6:3:2 as prescribed verbally,
and modified by mensuration signs. The final section (color 4) is in diminution in rela-
tion to 3, down a level, in perfect time, minor prolation, again relating with semibreve
o
equivalence to the upper parts. A black sign undoes the sesquialtera of the preceding
section, resulting in a 2:1, not 3:1 relationship between colores 3 and 4, overall 6:3:2:1.
This is a very unusual instance of precise tempo instructions being built in to override
the (otherwise presumed) semibreve equivalence of the notated values, in the form of
proportional indications or modified mensuration signs in the upper parts. Although
the red mensuration sign causes an overall proportional reduction, the notational co-
loration is for imperfection throughout, with split groups causing syncopation.

No. 113: Sturgeon, Salve mater Domini/​Salve templum

gratie/​-​it in nomine Domini

As noted, Sturgeon’s motet continues Damett’s Benedictus tenor. There are three state­
ments of the eight-​note color, which contains two taleae, each of two red notes and
o
two black notes. (See Fig. 25.3.) The upper parts are in [ ]‌throughout and follow
the tenor structure isorhythmically. The tenor is marked ‘De modo perfecto’, and the
three color statements are specified mensurally as øoç . The numerical values are in
semibreves as they correspond to the upper parts. The first semibreve rest, followed by a
syncopating dot, offsets what follows.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 479

Fig. 25.3 Tenor of Sturgeon, Salve mater/​Salve templum in London, British Library, Add.
MS 57950 (OH), f. 92. Reproduced with permission of the British Library

The asterisks in Figure 25.3 indicate the following:

* The B would normally be worth 3S, but it is altered to 6 before the following L, and
then imperfected to 5 by the second S rest (the rest after the dot).
** The L would normally be worth 9S, but is imperfected to 6 by the first (offset) S rest
and the two S rests that follow the L.
*** The B has to be altered (from 2 to 4S) before the L; this must therefore be coloration
for sesquialtera, not for imperfection (as also in En Katerine solennia). The numerical
values given here are as for the upper parts, but the red B rest is therefore technically
3S in the time of 2, the altered red B that follows it 6S in the time of 4, the red L 9S in
the time of 6. Thus both the black and the red L are in the prescribed perfect modus.

The tenor is written with semibreve equivalence between upper and lower parts only
for color 3. The prolation signatures imply that the tenor is being construed in aug-
ø
mentation for color 1; for each perfect tenor semibreve under , the upper parts have
a perfect breve (tenor M =​upper S). For each imperfect tenor semibreve under in o
color 2, the upper parts have an imperfect breve, again, augmentation. But for each per-
ç
fect tenor semibreve under , in color 3, the upper parts have a perfect breve, so if the
tenor’s major prolation is here counted in minims, it is now in diminution in relation to
the upper parts (tenor M =​upper parts’ S). The mental gymnastics of the imperfec-
tion, alteration and syncopation of this tenor are virtuosically conceived and have to be
solved empirically.

No. 112: Cooke, Alma proles regia/​Christi miles inclite/​Ab inimicis

nostris defende nos Christe

This motet is altogether more straightforward. The tenor is again prescribed mensurally, as
øoç ç cç
; the upper parts change signature at each color [ ] , though they align major and
minor prolation between the tenor and upper parts. Its mensural affinity with Carbunculus
480 English Motets c. 1400–1420

and Sub Arturo has been discussed above, together with the suggestion of a possible mentor–​
pupil relationship between Leonel and Cooke. There are three color statements, each of
two taleae of 18 longs. The tenor is in imperfect modus; unlike the other two motets, it
corresponds straightforwardly with the upper parts according to the signatures in each sec-
tion. Successive tenor statements reduce mensurally; there is no diminution.26 Thus, despite
some superficial similarities, each of these three motets employs a very different strategy,
attesting a high degree of competence in manipulating mensural complexity.

The Events of 1416, and the Motets of Dunstaple

The English had held Harfleur since September 1415, when the town surrendered after the
above-​mentioned siege, which was followed by the victory at Agincourt in October. But in
1416, the small English garrison had difficulty defending the town, and a series of encounters
in the first half of the year finally resulted in the victory of John Duke of Bedford at the Battle
of the Seine on 15 August (the feast of the Assumption). This occurred during the visit to
England of the Emperor Sigismund; he and Henry had signed the treaty of Canterbury on
that day.27 News of his brother’s victory reached Henry on 21 August on his return from
Smallhythe to Canterbury, where the Emperor was preparing his departure. Both attended a
service in the cathedral, probably on that same day or the next when, according to the Gesta
Henrici Quinti, they gave thanks with the Te Deum ‘and other [unspecified] offerings of pro-
pitiation’ (‘et aliis placacionum libaminibus deo dederunt gloriam et honorem’).
Titus Livius reports, following Bedford’s victory, that

Rex autem ut fratrem cum tanta victoria vidit redeuntem, cognito prius quo fuerat
ordine pugnatum, & quid in omnibus gestum erat, gratias agens immortali Deo,
quoniam ea fuerat obtenta victoria feriis assumptionis beatae Mariae Virginis, mandavit
ut singulis diebus vitae suae in sacrario suo Antiphona cum versiculo & Collecta in
commemoratione prefatae Virginis semel a capellanis & sacerdotibus suis decantaretur.

The king, however, when he saw his brother returning so victorious, having first
learned of the course of the battle, and what in all was accomplished, gave thanks
to immortal God. Since the victory was gained on the day of the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, he ordained that on every day of his life in his chapel an antiphon
with versicle and collect should be sung by his chaplains and priests in commemora-
tion of the said Virgin.28

26 Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 31 computes the proportions of Cooke’s motet by counting section II twice,

adding the number of minims in sections I and II to those in Sections II and III, to make the numbers come
out the same as for Dunstaple’s Veni and Preco, where he counts each section separately. Those two motets
have overall proportions of 3:2:1, achieved by successive diminution. Alma’s sections relate 9:6:4, an overall
proportion which it shares with Sub Arturo plebs and Carbunculus. The tenor of Carbunculus is missing, but
Alma and Sub Arturo both interpret a homographic tenor under different mensuration signs: this is neither
diminution nor a proportional process.
27 Sigismund was at this time King of the Romans, in effect the Holy Roman Emperor, though not so

crowned until 1433. The Gesta already calls him emperor.

28 Titus Livius, Vita Henrici Quinti, 26. Similar wording occurs in a version of the Latin Brut. Nosow, Ritual

Meanings, 19, suggests that ‘decantaretur’ might imply polyphony. He later quotes (pp. 34–​35) a similar ac-
count from Thomæ de Elmham Vita & Gesta, 83, no longer accepted as being by Elmham, seeming to imply
that the two accounts refer to different points in the narrative.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 481

Following this news, Henry indeed promptly mandated daily memorials augmenting
the liturgy of his chapel, and presumably its music. His direct personal interest is re-
ported at this point in the Gesta Henrici Quinti, ­chapter 22, which sets out the provisions
in striking detail. New memorials are prescribed for each daily litany and proces-
sion: three memorials at High Mass for the Trinity, for the Assumption (the date of the
recent naval victory), and for St George, ‘our champion and protector’, and six daily
memorials after compline. The Gesta account is complemented by that in Elmham,
Liber metricus (partly derived from the Gesta) which sets out the psalms and responds
for the daily litany and procession in tabular form:29

day dominica feria ii feria iii feria iiii feria v feria vi sabato
psalm Cantemus Iubilate Confi- Laudate Bene- Laudate Exultavit in ordine
te​mini nomen di​cite dominum cor meum in psalle
domini de celis domino
respond Summe Bene Quis Gloria Honor Tibi laus Benedicamus dabis his
trinitati dictus deus patri virtus patrem

These agree with the prescriptions of the Gesta. The three Mass memorials are reported
in the next few lines, and are likewise compatible with the Gesta account. Up to this
point, there is no reason to assume that anything other than chant is intended. Then fi-
nally the post-​compline memorials are set out in tabular form. The upper line identifies
the feast, with the addition, in a remarkable graphic coupling, of text incipits that in at
least one and probably more cases imply polytextual motets:

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

Trinitas [not specified; Spiritus Rex Edwardus Johannes Sanctus Sancta
traditionally sanctus [the Confessor] baptista Georgius Maria
the Requiem] Preco Miles Regina beata
Libera nos Veni Rex gentis &c Inter natos Hic est vere Placet hec
sancte (Lo13: Rex martir ad placitum
spiritus sancte Edwarde) chori
Confer ave
iungis

These additional texts are not given in the Gesta, but Elmham’s account is so closely
aligned with it that there is no reason to doubt that the additional incipits are integral.
The lower line gives one or more further text incipits, this time for chants that in some
cases may be motet tenors. The divisions between upper and lower lines may not always
be consistent in what they depict, but where the uppermost line specifies the saint, the
remaining one or two incipits (on either line) can be taken to indicate either chant or

29 There are slight differences between the sources (Lo4, article 4, and Lo1776). The versions here are

transcribed from Lo4. Bold type distinguishes larger, heavier script in Lo4. Attempts to show the tabulations
in the edition, Elmham, Liber metricus, 140–​41, are somewhat garbled. Nosow, Ritual Meanings, 20–​21, sets
out the comparative statements clearly in Table 1.1; Table 1.2 (p. 24), transcribes from the varied alignments in
the other manuscripts, Lo13 and Lo861 (the latter possibly a less careful copy of Lo4).
482 English Motets c. 1400–1420

polytextual polyphony, most likely a polyphonic motet when two texts are given and
one is not chant.30
The most suggestive candidate for identification is Preco, the unique non-​liturgical
text of a known motet, coupled with the tenor of that motet, the John the Baptist chant
Inter natos, prescribed for Thursday; there can be little doubt that Dunstaple’s motet
on that tenor is indicated: Preco preheminencie/​Precursor premittitur/​Inter natos (MB 8,
no. 29).31 This motet’s more famous musical twin, Veni sancte spiritus et emitte/​Veni
sancte spiritus et infunde/​Veni creator spiritus (MB 8, no. 32), may be intended by Veni
sancte spiritus. This is slightly less secure, since the well-​known sequence of that name is
not a new text like Preco.32 But the context, in suggestive company with Preco, and their
very similar musical styles and structures, encourages the suggestion that Dunstaple’s
four-​part motet is indeed meant. At least, if a polyphonic interpretation is contested, the
specification of these mostly liturgical texts in a royal context could have encouraged
composition of the motets. The other saints with double incipits are Edward (the
Confessor) and George. Taken alone, Miles, on Friday for St George, could imply the
OH motets by Cooke or Damett addressed to him but, coupled with a different chant,
Hic est vere martir, probably refers to a non-​extant motet on that tenor.33 It could also
refer to the miles Christi incipit in the excerpt from the English extension of the Brut
chronicle and the pseudo-​Lydgate poem cited above. For St Edward, Rex gentis most
nearly corresponds in known liturgical manuscripts to Ave rex gentis Anglorum, a motet
in Ox7 (from Bury St Edmunds), which refers not to St Edward but to St Edmund.34 But
our text is specified not for Edmund but for Edward, for which the Rex sancte Edwarde
of the Lo13 version seems closer: Ave sancte rex Edwarde is a sequence known from
Worcester160, f. 99v; this text or a variant of it could have served as a motet voice. The
status of Ave jungis is not known.
Henry’s liturgical programme in both sources is sandwiched between the same
datable events in August 1416, Bedford’s victory and Sigismund’s departure, together
with the motets signalled only in the Liber metricus. Although that programme has
longer-​term implications, its inclusion at precisely this point in the chronicle narra-
tive suggested to its editor, and to me, that some of these titles might also be associated
with that service. Robert Nosow rightly states that ‘there is no solid justification for the

30 Both accounts have long been known; Nosow has tabulated them in combination. He ingeniously

proposes extant polyphonic settings for these items, but the kinds of composition identified as having known
musical settings are so heterogeneous that no clear picture emerges.
31 Colton, Angel Song, 90–​91, demonstrates that a line in Wheathamstead’s epitaph, ‘melior vir de muliere

nunquam natus erat’, referring to John the Baptist both biblically and liturgically, reflects Dunstaple’s motet
and its tenor, thus showing knowledge of the motet and applying Christ’s appraisal of the one John to another.
32 The motetus text Veni sancte spiritus et infunde, otherwise unknown, is a trope or calque on the known

triplum text. Spiritus sanctus designates the feast; if it were taken as a text incipit, Dunstaple’s other motet for
the Holy Spirit (MB 8, no. 33), the differently constructed three-​part Veni sancte spiritus/​Consolator optime/​
Sancti Spiritus assit, could be intended. Account could not be taken here of work in progress by Roger Bowers,
based on his new scrutiny of the Gesta, which redates its reports of Henry’s memorials to the beginning of his
reign, and seeks to loosen any connection of the incipits with the Dunstaple motets. Their dates however re-
main plausible because of the OH context.
33 Another possible Miles Christi is the setting of a different text in OxS26. This is not addressed to St George,

but is an antiphon of St Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322): Greene, ‘Two Medieval Musical Manuscripts’, 3.
34 Bukofzer, Studies. The Ave anglorum reported earlier, conflated with this rex gentis, would yield Ave rex

gentis Anglorum, the title of the St Edmund motet.

 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 483

supposition that any motets were sung at the Mass . . . for which the only music specified
[in the Gesta] is the Te Deum’. But mention of the Te Deum does not necessarily exclude
other music; indeed, in this case the Gesta adds ‘and other offerings of propitiation’, as
noted above. Whether or not either motet was performed then, their position at this
point in the Liber metricus at least provides a hypothetical terminus ante quem of August
1416 for the titles listed.35
Veni sancte spiritus in OH and Preco in a fragment probably of Canterbury prove-
nance (Cant128/​6) are the only two Dunstaple motets with isorhythm preserved in any
English source, Veni the only one to survive complete in England. They are also the only
two such Dunstaple motets to appear in Continental sources in addition to the much
later ModB (c. 1440). On the verso of the Canterbury leaf is a motet triplum, Ave miles
triumphalis, followed by what seems to be the start of a low-​range motetus part, Cristi
morte nato mundo vite reserato . . . interdicti hostis. This sounds very much like another
Agincourt-​related motet, and would tend to corroborate the dating to 1415–​16 here
proposed for Preco. Addressed to a miles, St George would seem an obvious choice, but
Edward is another possibility.36 John the Baptist and George are celebrated on adjacent
days in the provisions (Thursday, Friday), possibly reflected in the adjacence of these
motets in Cant128/​6.
Elmham’s testimony is the clearest we could have that Dunstaple’s Preco
preheminencie/​Precursor premittitur, and probably its structural and almost certainly
chronological twin, his Veni sancte/​Veni creator, were composed in or before 1416, if
indeed they are the titles cited in the chronicle at this point.37 The composition of Veni,
at any rate, cannot be much later in date because of its presence, copied anonymously by
a scribe otherwise unrepresented, among the later additions to OH in the second half of
the 1410s. The script does not correspond to known Dunstaple autographs. Although
not bound by the latest date that the four composer–​chaplains were together, it occupies
the central bifolio (ff. 55v–​56) of the interpolated gathering IX, making it likely that
it was in place before its neighbours were copied around it. This location in the man-
uscript suggests that it was more or less contemporary with the other second-​layer
additions, which would again corroborate an early dating, not later than 1419; earlier if
it was indeed associated with the documentation of 1416.

35 I proposed these datings for the two Dunstaple motets in Bent, Dunstaple, 8–​9. I would now withdraw

the direct association I made with the Canterbury service itself, but still find their position in the narrative
persuasive for dating them by 1416, specified in conjunction with Henry’s memorie. The case that had been
made for Elmham’s authorship not only of the Liber metricus but of the prose Gesta is set out clearly by the
editors in Gesta Henrici Quinti, pp. xviii–​xxviii. Nosow uses Elmham’s testimony to propose incorporating
these large-​scale motets, extant or lost, into the prescribed ritual setting. I would limit them to the post-​
compline observances, rather than the litanies, processions and Mass.
36 Cant128/​6. Sandon, ‘Fragments of Medieval Polyphony’, 41–​ 44, suggests this motet may be for St
Bartholomew because of its apparent mention of Armenia; but he is not known as a soldier saint. The reading
of Armenie is doubtful, and I wonder if it could be Armonie. Another text mentioning Edward is the motet
fragment Cu4435, bv: ‘a serva regnum Anglie virtute . . . ndorum lilii rosa sine spina. Edwardus . . . ne miles
vigorosus. Insignis in . . .’; but this also appears to be a triplum part, like the Canterbury verso. Maybe this text
addresses George, Mary and Edward? This fragment is part of RC: see Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’ in
EECM 62 for facsimile and commentary, and inventory as Table 25.1.
37 MB 8, nos. 29 and 32. Nosow, Ritual Meanings, has proposed a different interpretation of Preco, seeing

Bedford (as John the Baptist) as the precursor of his brother Henry V (as Christ): see the review by Bent in
PMM, 22 (2013), 107–​13.
484 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Dunstaple and the Duke of Bedford

There have long been several candidates for identification with the composer, but only
recently has it become clear that some of the existing references to a John Dunstaple
in service to various members of the royal family may not all be to the same man. Lisa
Colton proposed a new candidate who died in 1459, which turns out to be the death
date of a different but probably related John Dunstaple.38 The composer’s epitaph fa-
mously describes him as an astronomer and musician; its date is non-​negotiable, so
the one secure fact is that the composer died in 1453. It has long been known that an
astrological treatise in St John’s College, Cambridge, MS 162, f. 74r, is headed with an
inscription describing him as ‘musician with the Duke of Bedford’.39 Other astronom-
ical treatises associated with Dunstaple, some (notably in Ce70) in his autograph, are
also well documented, though they remain under-​investigated.40 Rodney M. Thomson
discovered the erased name of Dunstaple in a Boethius manuscript in Corpus Christi
College, Oxford (OxC118), from which it became clear that annotations to the De
institutione musica, and the entire De arithmetica, were in his hand, as well as prompting
further speculations about his possible studies in Oxford and connection to the Merton
calculators.41 Further biographical work by Lisa Colton, Andrew Wathey and Roger
Bowers is ongoing.42 It necessitates disentangling existing archival references that have
been thought to apply to the same man, though it does seem that much of the archival
documentation associating Dunstaple with Bedford, uncovered by Wathey and others,
indeed applies to the composer.
The presence in the 1433 inventories of the Duke of Bedford’s property of a ‘book of
motets in the French manner’ has been widely reported. It is assumed that these were
motets with isorhythm such as the impressive body of such works left by Dunstaple and
preserved mostly in ModB.43 The stronger his ties to Bedford, the more likely it is that
this book included Dunstaple’s motets, but it is nevertheless interesting that they would
be identified as ‘in the French manner’, since their distinctive characteristics were in
place at an earlier date than the motets of Du Fay, which by the mid-​1430s might stand
as typical ‘French’ motets.
The dating of at least Preco and Veni to the mid-​1410s raises the possibility that all
of Dunstaple’s similarly structured motets could be relatively early, perhaps between

38 Colton, Angel Song, 86–​115.

39 ‘Iste libellus pertinebat Johanni dunstaple, cum duci Bedfordie musico’ (This booklet used to belong
to John Dunstaple, musician with the Duke of Bedford). The treatise is a separate libellus containing the
Introductorium in principiis iudiciorum of the ninth-​century astrologer, astronomer and mathematician
known as ‘Zael’, and contains annotations in Dunstaple’s hand.
40 Summarised in Bent, Dunstaple.
41 Thomson, ‘John Dunstable’. The Merton association was already mentioned in Bent, Dunstaple,

4. Elżbieta Witkowska-​Zaremba is currently working on the annotations to the Boethius MS OxC118, owned
and partly written by Dunstaple, and on other instances of his hand, notably the partly autograph astrological
treatises in Ce70.
42 Colton, Angel Song; Wathey, ‘Dunstable in France’; Stell and Wathey, ‘New Light’; Wathey, Music in

the Royal and Noble Households; Bowers, ‘Choral Institutions’, and Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’.
Ongoing work by Bowers and Wathey is as yet unpublished, but was presented in seminars at All Souls
College respectively on 21 Feb. (‘Composer biographies –​the cases of John Dunstable and “Roy Henry” ’) and
14 Nov. 2019 (‘John Dunstaple, Lionel Power and the mid Fifteenth Century’).
43 ‘Item ung Iivre de motez a la maniere de France couvert de cuir blanc’: See Stratford, Bedford Inventories,

20, 66–​67.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 485

the mid-​1410s and the 1420s (c. 1415–​30). David Howlett proposed that Albanus roseo
rutilat might be dated 1426, on the occasion of a splendid visit to St Albans by the Duke
of Bedford.44 This hypothesis is strengthened by the increasing likelihood that the com-
poser was in Bedford’s employ at least by the 1420s if not before. Bowers has cleared
away possibly conflicting royal patronage by showing that he was not the same John
Dunstaple who was richly rewarded by the dowager Queen Joan in 1427–​28 and 1436.45
He proposes that the composer was probably in Bedford’s service until the duke’s death
in 1435, implying frequent travels to France; and that he was with Bedford not only from
1422, but perhaps from as early as 1414, when Bedford was elevated to his dukedom
with a consequent presumed upgrading of his household and chapel personnel, thus
opening up the possibility of a twenty-​year association for the composer.46
Bowers has contributed a further important discovery relating to Dunstaple’s motet
Dies dignus decorari/​Demon dolens, on St German. Neither text specified which of two
northern French bishop–​saints was honoured. It was assumed to be St Germanus of
Auxerre (c. 378–​c. 448) because of Dunstaple’s association with St Albans, where this
saint was specially venerated. But Bowers was able to show by relating the motet texts
to the saint’s hagiography that the motet honours St Germanus of Paris (c. 496–​576),
who miraculously cured a supplicant in the manner described in the motetus text,
prompting his translation to a finer tomb. The saint’s relics and shrine were preserved
in the abbey church of St-​Germain near (and now in) Paris. That John Duke of Bedford
was one of this saint’s fervent devotees is documented around the time of the illness and
death of his wife Anne in 1432, when he caused the saint’s relics to be carried in solemn
procession through the city. She did not recover, but Bedford appointed the monks of
St-​Germain to escort her coffin to its tomb at the Célestins; the ducal chapel was in at-
tendance at the funeral. The motet further cements Dunstaple’s connection with both
Bedford and Paris. But the identification of a different St German in no way detracts
from his association with St Albans, not only because of the St Alban motet, but also
on grounds of the attribution to Abbot Wheathampstead of one or both of Dunstaple’s
funerary verses.47 Humfrey Duke of Gloucester also had strong associations with
Wheathampstead and St Albans, and apparently employed the composer after the death
of Bedford in 1435: a John Dunstaple, probably the composer, was recorded in 1438 as
his ‘serviteur et familier domestique’.48
Bowers also finds ‘oblique hints that Bedford’s chapel may have been joined by
Lionel Power following Clarence’s death in 1421’.49 Bedford was next in line to the
throne after the infant King Henry VI, following the deaths of both his elder brothers.

44 Howlett, ‘A Possible Date’. Dunstaple is assumed to have had dealings with St Albans at some date, partly

through his later connection with Duke Humfrey, but more particularly because his two surviving epitaphs
are attributed to Abbot John Whethamstede of that abbey.
45 Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’, 228. See also Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’. A similar early

dating of the upgrading of Clarence’s chapel was proposed above.

46 Seminar paper, ‘Composer biographies –​the cases of John Dunstable and “Roy Henry” ’, All Souls

College, 21 Feb. 2019.

47 Bowers, at the same seminar. For the epitaphs, see Bent, Dunstaple, 1–​3. Wathey, ‘Dunstaple, Power’,

suggests that it could have been performed at the Paris coronation of Henry VI in 1431.
48 Wathey, ‘Dunstable in France’, 21–​23, 28–​29.
49 Bowers, ‘ “Goode and Delitable Songe” ’, 227 and Bowers, English Church Polyphony, pp. ix, 111,

‘Commentary and Corrigenda’, 10–​11. See also Wathey, ‘Dunstaple, Power’, for new biographical information
there on Power in the late 1430s, and his potential link with John Duke of Bedford through the duke’s former
household officers.
486 English Motets c. 1400–1420

If indeed there was contact between Power and Dunstaple through Bedford in the
1420s, this could have led to a degree of mutual influence to account for so many con-
flicting attributions between them of music composed probably in the later 1420s, es-
pecially for the mass cycles Rex seculorum and Sine nomine, and perhaps even for their
joint role in initiating the cyclic mass, as well as the composition of antiphon settings
in ‘song’ style.50

Dunstaple: Musical Discoveries since MB 8, and Dating

Dunstaple is central to our understanding of English music in the first half of the fif-
teenth century, and of why it was so highly regarded and influential on the Continent.51
Musical discoveries made since MB 8 and included in MB 8rev are the missing
Kyries (anonymously transmitted in an English source, Ce300) of three mass cycles:
Rex seculorum (with majority ascriptions to Leonel), Sine nomine (with conflicting
ascriptions to Leonel and Benet), and Dunstaple’s Da gaudiorum premia, parts of
the Gloria Da gaudiorum premia, and a reworking (not necessarily by Dunstaple)
of the Magnificat. There is also a four-​voice setting of Descendi in ortum meum, of
which two voices are ascribed to him in Lo54324; the other two are anonymous in
Maidstone and enable a full reconstruction (see Ex. 25.1). This is one of two works
which evidently belong to Dunstaple’s late period, in the 1440s; the other is a setting
of Gaude flore virginali, in five parts with a range of twenty-​one notes, ascribed to
Dunstaple in the index of the Eton Choirbook, but now missing from that source.
An anonymous and incomplete setting in Lo54324 meets these criteria; this may be
all we have of a late work by Dunstaple. Example 25.2 gives what survives of the
o
first section in time, including a small portion in which all five parts are present.
c
The more fragmentary second section in time is not reproduced, being on the next
opening of which only the verso survives. The lost Eton setting is less likely to be a
two-​opening setting of Gaude flore virginali in Cu4435, part of RC, which may have
been in five parts but of which too little survives to establish its range.52 All three
compositions survive in fragmentary form in English fragments containing other
works by Dunstaple.53
Another subsequent addition is a three-​voice Kyrie of which the isolated but ascribed
lowest voice was published as MB 8, no. 65. Parts of the other voices were recovered
and transcribed in Bent, Dunstaple, 72–​73. The late Peter Wright, whose close know-
ledge of this repertory was unparalleled, more recently attributed to Dunstaple a three-​
voice Credo transmitted anonymously (‘Anglicanum’) in two sources of the 1430s, Ao
and Tr92. His fine-​grained stylistic and source-​based study is based on links with the

50 The Alma redemptoris cycle (EECM 42) is ascribed to Leonel in Ao. The Credo and Sanctus have re-

cently turned up alongside the Gloria Rex seculorum, all anonymously, in the English fragment Norwich6
(see EECM 62).
51 Testimonies of Tinctoris and Martin le Franc are discussed in Wegman, ‘Martin Le Franc’ and Bent,

‘Martin le Franc’.
52 Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’, and facsimile in EECM 62.
53 In Lo54324. Partially transcribed in Bent and Bent, ‘Dufay, Dunstable, Plummer’, where mention of its

chant cantus firmus, Ad nutum [domini nostrum], was inadvertently omitted.

 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 487

Credos MB 8, nos. 8 and 5, and further illuminated by his identification of a differently

notated English concordance to the latter in Philadelphia658.54
RC is an assemblage of eighteen leaves, now widely scattered, that once formed
part of a royal choirbook. It must have been copied in the early to mid-​1420s, because
some direct copying into it from OH occurred while that manuscript was still in use
and before some corrections were made.55 Table 25.1 gives a simplified inventory
of RC. Its royal credentials are its very interesting decorative initials, with heraldi-
cally significant animals, and especially its direct access to and direct copying from
OH, then in the hands of the chaplains of Henry V who had stayed on to serve his
infant son; some of their works were included in the main body of RC. This royal con-
nection was established before a Dunstaple component was discovered in Tallinn.
Just as the quest for a likely royal patron of Old Hall led to Clarence, a similar quest
for RC leads to Bedford, in any case the likeliest royal patron in the early 1420s, a
proposal further encouraged by the prominence given to Dunstaple: two adjacent
works by him head the Gloria section. The first is a unique and remarkable Gloria,
an accompanied canon 4 in 1, reproduced as Example 25.3.56 Following it on the
verso is the Gloria of the four-​part Gloria–​Credo pair hitherto known only from Ao
(MB 8, no. 11, presumably contemporary with its paired Credo, no. 12). These works
can all now be dated no later than the early 1420s. I have thus taken the opportunity to
reproduce here for convenience (as Exx. 25.1, 25.2 and 25.3) three compositions by
or probably by Dunstaple (in addition to the three-​voice Kyrie just mentioned) which
I have been able to reconstruct (for Ex. 25.2 only partially), and which are not other-
wise conveniently available. We must assume more later works are lost, or hiding in
anonymity.
The first layer of the Veneto manuscript Q15, completed by 1425, included English
compositions probably acquired during the Council of Constance (1414–​18). A Credo
by Dunstaple (MB 8, no. 8) is in the first stage of Q15 (c. 1420–​25), so this too must
date from c. 1415–​20.57 Q15’s first stage contains none of his structured motets with
isorhythm, but it does include the English motet by Alanus, Sub Arturo plebs (Ch. 20), as
well as two works by Leonel, his Salve regina and the Credo OH, no. 83, as well as works
by Gervase (an OH composer) and Benet.
Dunstaple’s other works in Q15, all antiphon settings, were copied in the early 1430s,
and are not known from earlier sources. They are the Regina celi, MB 8, no. 38, and Sub
tuam protectionem (no. 51). Three more have conflicting ascriptions in their various
manuscripts: Alma redemptoris (no. 40) to Power and Binchois, the Beata dei genitrix
(no. 41) to Binchois, and Quam pulchra es (no. 44) to ‘Egidius’ (Binchois is probably
intended).58 The compilation dates of other Continental sources (Trent, Ao, ModB) in

54 P. Wright, ‘A New Attribution’. His edition of the Credo is in EECM 55, no. 10. The presentation of no. 5 in

Ao has been notationally changed from what was obviously the English original. His subsequent discoveries
will be reported in Bent, ‘New concordances’.
55 A full account is given in Bent, ‘Towards the Reconstruction’, together with facsimiles, in EECM 62.
56 This reconstruction /​transcription was first published in my article ‘A New Canonic Gloria and the

Changing Profile of Dunstaple’.

57 Bent, ‘Constance’; Bent, Q15; P. Wright, ‘A New Attribution’, 222.
58 Regina celi, MB 8, no. 38; Quam pulchra es, MB 8, no. 44; Sub tuam protectionem, MB 8, no. 51; Alma

redemptoris, MB 8, no. 40, with conflicting ascriptions to Leonel Power and Binchois; Beata dei genitrix, MB
8, no. 41, ascribed in Q15 to Binchois. Wright, ‘Binchois and England’, evaluates and mostly rejects the con-
flicting ascriptions to Binchois.
488 English Motets c. 1400–1420

the 1430s and 1440s are too late to offer useful termini ante quos, though it is in those
manuscripts that we find the first unified English tenor mass cycles. In the absence of
earlier datable manuscripts, we might tentatively place the mass cycles and antiphons in
the late 1420s and into the 1430s. If not only Dunstaple but also Power (as has been ten-
tatively suggested) was associated with the Duke of Bedford in the 1420s, the opportu-
nity for mutual influence could account for some of the conflicting attributions between
them for works that may date from this period, some of which have been mentioned
above: the Alma redemptoris setting in Q15 (the authorship of Leonel’s mass on this
chant is uncontested), the Rex seculorum mass (of which only the Gloria is ascribed to
Dunstaple, all other movements to Leonel), and the Sine nomine mass also ascribed to
Benet and Leonel.59
Dunstaple’s absence from OH except as an anonymous later addition may simply
be due to him being probably about ten years younger than Leonel Power, not yet ac-
tive in the first decade of the century, outside the circle that constituted Clarence’s
chapel, having enjoyed different patronage, and that his absence from the main round of
additions to OH may be explained by the fact that he was not one of Henry V’s chaplains.
Most of the OH music was probably composed in the first decade of the fifteenth cen-
tury. If Dunstaple was born no earlier than c. 1390, he would still have been in his teens
in that decade, perhaps too young for the main compilation c. 1413–​15. His motets
would then be works of his twenties and thirties. The later the main OH compilation is
placed, the harder it would be to account for his absence from it. As already noted, the
best-​represented composer, responsible for some of the most striking music, is Leonel
Power, a member of the chapel of Thomas Duke of Clarence for which the main layer
of OH was apparently compiled. I estimate that Leonel (d. 1445) was probably born c.
1380–​85, to allow for him to have written so many works of such compositional sophis-
tication in his late teens and twenties.
If the music of the second layer of OH was largely composed and compiled c. 1415–​
19, it could be that a considerable quantity of Dunstaple’s music, beyond the few pieces
just mentioned, could date from the later 1410s and into the 1420s, while he was in
Bedford’s service, when his works would presumably have been copied into a manu-
script of Bedford’s chapel, rather than added to OH, which by then was in the hands of
the chaplains of Henry V and the infant Henry VI.

Dunstaple’s Motets with Isorhythm

Bukofzer included in MB 8 as ‘Isorhythmic motets’ Dunstaple’s nine ‘regular’ peri-

odic motets. He also included three motets that fall outside the predominant pat-
tern: Specialis virgo (MB 8, no. 31) has an irregular tenor in which the rhythm of two
two-​note segments is repeated; MB 8, no. 34 is a textless piece on a short tetrachord
tenor stated four times, a step higher each time; and the three-​part motet Veni sancte
Spiritus (MB 8, no. 33), whose tenor is repeated in inversion and retrograde.

59 Several conflicting ascriptions between Dunstaple and Binchois, Leonel Power and John Benet, have yet

to be resolved. P. Wright, ‘A New Attribution’, 196–​97, also refers to issues affecting the attribution of songs
and a carol. On carols see now Fallows, Henry V and the Earliest English Carols.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 489

The motetus text of the better-​known four-​part no. 32 is an otherwise unknown

para­phrase of the sequence, Veni sancte spiritus, et infunde, with three double stanzas.
In no. 33 the stanzas of the complete Veni sancte Spiritus sequence are divided be-
tween the upper parts. Its tenor is another Pentecost sequence, Sancti spiritus assit,
stated first as written, then in inversion, and then in retrograde a fifth lower. The first
two sections have some isorhythm in the upper parts, stricter for the opening duets.
See Table 25.2.

Table 25.2 Distribution of the sequence texts in Dunstaple’s motets nos. 32 and 33

No. 33, by Sequence No. 32, tr No. 32, motetus text Sequence
section stanza and mo distribution (by stanza
by color complete lines only)
and talea
triplum, I 1a Veni, Sancte Spiritus, C1. T1 Veni, Sancte Spiritus, 1a
et emitte celitus et infunde primitus
lucis tue radium. rorem celi gratie.

1b Veni, pater pauperum, Precantibus humanibus 1b

veni, dator munerum,
veni, lumen cordium.

motetus, I 2a Consolator optime,

dulcis hospes anime,
dulce refrigerium. C1. T2 salva nos divinitus
a serpentis facie.
2b In labore requies,
motetus, II in estu temperies, In cuius presentia 2a
in fletu solatium. ex tua clementia

3a O lux beatissima,
reple cordis intima
tuorum fidelium.

motetus, III 3b Sine tuo numine, C2. T1 tecta sint peccata.

nihil est in homine,
nihil est innoxium. Nostraque servitia 2b
corda penitentia
triplum, II 4a Lava quod est sordidum, tibi fac placata.
riga quod est aridum,
sana quod est saucium. C2. T2 Languidorum consolator 3a
et lapsorum reformator,
4b Flecte quod est rigidum, mortis medicina.
fove quod est frigidum,
rege quod est devium.

triplum, III 5a Da tuis fidelibus, C3. T1 Peccatorum perdonator 3b

in te confidentibus, esto noster expurgator
sacrum septenarium.

5b Da virtutis meritum, C3. T2 et duc ad divina.

da salutis exitum,
da perenne gaudium.
490 English Motets c. 1400–1420

Table 25.3 The Dunstaple motets classed by Bukofzer as isorhythmic

No. Composition Tenor Subject/

​saint

motets a3
23 Albanus roseo /​ Quoque ferendo Albanus (antiphon, 6th Alban
couplet)

24 Ave regina /​ Ave mundi (sequence) BVM

Ave mater

25 Christe sanctorum /​ Tibi Criste (hymn) Michael

Tibi Christe
26 Dies dignus / Iste confessor (hymn) German of Paris
​Demon dolens

27 Gaude felix /​ Anna parens (verse of Anne

Gaude mater respond)
motets a4
28 Gaude virgo salutata /​ [Ave gemma] (sequence: BVM
Gaude virgo singularis /​ Virgo mater stanza 5 of Ave mundi)

29 Preco preheminencie /​ Inter natos (antiphon) John the Baptist

Precursor premittit /​textless
30 Salve scema /​ Cantant celi (respond, end Catherine
Salve salus /​textless of repetenda)
32 Veni sancte spiritus et emitte /​ Veni Mentes tuorum (hymn, Pentecost
sancte spiritus et infunde /​ Veni creator line 2)
irregular forms
33 Veni sancte spiritus /​ Sancti spiritus assit Pentecost
Consolator (sequence)

31 Specialis virgo Salve parens inclita BVM

(sequence, stanza 5)

34 textless solmisation exercise

Adapted from Bent, Dunstaple, 64–​65.

 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 491

Table 25.3 Continued

Overall Tenor Tenor Overall length, and Upper

reduction of notated taleae talea unit parts in
tenor values and notes ModB

6:4:3; notated L, B 3C 176 (16) o C. o

[ ]
as for color 3 T3×8 last statement
(16B) foreshortened because
of rests
6:4:3; notated B, S 3C 128 (16) o C. o
[ ]
as for color 3, T2×9
with altered S
3:2:1 L, B 3C 120 (12) o cO
[ ]
T 2 × 11
6:4:3; notated L, B, S 3C 143 (18) o Co
[ ]
as for color 3, T2×9
with altered S
3:2:1 L, B 3C 180 (18) o co
[ ]
T 2 × 18

6:4:3; notated L, B, S 3C 153 (8) o co

[ ]
as for color 3, T3×7 each color contains
with altered S two differently
rhythmicised melodic
statements each of
11 notes
3:2:1 Mx, L, B 3C 150 (15) o Co
[ ]
T 2 × 12
3:2:1 Mx, L, B 3C 180 (18) o co
[ ]
T 2 × 18
3:2:1 Mx, L, B 3C 150 (15) o co
[ ]
T 2 × 11

3:3:2 L, B 12 o oc
[ ]
I as written; II
inverted; III
retrograde,
5th lower
none ç L, B 13 upper
parts
O
none ç B, S 5 upper
parts
o
492 English Motets c. 1400–1420

For motets nos. 23–​32, the mensural pattern for the upper parts is standard: [ ]‌ , o co
with isorhythmic repeats between each of the two or three taleae within each color.
Whether there is or is not a stroke through a signature in the various manuscripts has
no mensural significance. These strokes occur only in Continental manuscripts and
are inconsistently applied.60 All those motets, except the three ‘irregular’ ones, have
three color statements, three reducing sections, most with two taleae per color, two
with three taleae (nos. 23, 28); both of those have overall 6:4:3 proportions. Table 25.3
lists their overall proportions as 3:2:1 (five) or 6:4:3 (four). The tenors of all Dunstaple’s
‘3:2:1’ motets are notated in values corresponding to the upper parts for the first state-
ment, the subsequent two statements to be read in diminution, at the next note-​level
down. 3:2:1 is an arithmetic proportion, though the result is achieved not proportion-
ally but by diminution. The rhythms of the tenor statements are successively the same
but faster.61
But the tenors of all the motets with the overall (harmonic) proportion 6:4:3 are
notated in the shorter values that correspond to the third color statement, in perfect
tempus. Where the tenor includes semibreve pairs preceding a breve (only in nos.
24, 26 and 28), the second one is altered, in that final statement only. In other words,
there is mensural transformation.62 It is more often the case that subsequent tenor
statements are diminutions of the first, but here the first and second colores are read in
augmented values from the third, both up a single level to fit with the upper parts. The
breve of the third color is read in the first color as a long in imperfect modus, perfect
tempus, in the second as a long in imperfect modus, imperfect tempus. The semibreves
are now read as breves in imperfect modus, which precludes the alteration required in
the third color.

Afterword to Part V

The texts of the English motets reviewed in Chapters 22–​25 are more resolutely sacred
than most of their French counterparts. They seem to afford less opportunity for the de-
tailed verbal play and word-​painting that permeates the motets of Vitry and Machaut.
There are, however, topical deviations from standard texts, as in Damett’s Salvatoris
mater pia; polemics about vainglorious singers in a self-​declared contrafact in Are
post libamina; cryptic statements of compositional technique in O amicus/​Precursoris.
Words and rhymes are exploited as sonic objects, as in O amicus, where a long-​standing
English predilection for alliteration is lightly present. Numerical symbolism seems to
be less in evidence than in French motets; but in motets other than those by Dunstaple
the notational sophistication is at a very high level, equal to anything in Chantilly.
Dunstaple’s own motets come closer than those of his lesser-​known contemporaries

60 See Bent, ‘The Early Use’, and related articles.

61 See Ch. 2 for the distinction between this statement, and equal rhythm, i.e. without diminution, which
is what the term isorhythm implies. Ch. 23 recounts the distinction between arithmetic, geometric and har-
monic proportions.
62 The Dunstaple motets here referred to are no. 23, Albanus roseo rutilat; no. 24, Ave regina celorum; no. 26,

Dies dignus decorari; and no. 28, Gaude virgo salutata (MB 8, 1953, and MB 8rev, 1970). No. 23 is also propor-
tioned 6:4:3, but no semibreves are used and alteration at the tempus level is not involved. No. 23 uses longs
and breves only; no. 24 uses breves and semibreves; nos. 26 and 28 use longs, breves and semibreves.
 Old Hall, the Agincourt Motets, and Dunstaple 493

to following a standard template, though with music of the highest quality. With little
more than Sub Arturo (Ch. 20) as an international ambassador (the only unmistakably
English motet that circulated on the Continent in the first quarter of the fifteenth cen-
tury), the conundrum remains as to how English and French composers at that time de-
veloped similarly ingenious constructions without leaving more signs of access to each
other’s repertories.
 PART VI
ITA L IA N MOT ET S
496 Italian Motets

These chapters, devoted to Italian motets and motets in Italy, originated with my 1984
paper (publication delayed until 1992), which sought to reinstate the Italian motet as
a distinctive genre alongside the madrigal, ballata and caccia. The neglect of motets
was largely due to their absence from the retrospective anthologies, most famously
the Squarcialupi codex (Sq), which assembled works in those other genres grouped by
composer, and to very fragmentary survival until their culmination in the intact motets
of Johannes Ciconia (mostly composed in Padua c. 1400–​1411), which I edited for
PMFC 24. As well as updating that earlier work in Chapter 26, Chapters 28 and 29 con-
sider various aspects of his motets, both repertorially and analytically, and Chapter 27
evaluates the presence of motets in the palimpsest MS SL2211.
 26
The Fourteenth-​Century Italian Motet

In both general histories of music and specialist studies, French criteria have tended to
govern accounts of the motet in trecento Italy. To consider the Italian motet an offshoot
of the French tradition may be more valid for its origins than for its continuing history.1
The motet is indisputably French by origin and definition, but that need not bind the
subsequent, divergent traditions of other countries, notably England and Italy, to nega-
tive definition by French standards.
The Italian motet is a poor hunting ground for the features accepted as those of the
French motet as defined, for example, by Ursula Günther and Frank Ll. Harrison. One
of the few surveys of native Italian motet composition, when this paper was first given,
presented the older received view:

Before the early fifteenth century, motet production in medieval Italy had been negli-
gible; the extant pieces number fewer than half a dozen and demonstrate a fundamental
distrust of the species. Even more than the 13th-​century English composers the Italians
shied away from the cantus firmus and evidently tended to mould their motets into non-​
isorhythmic secular forms, like madrigals. All of Ciconia’s dozen motets have tenors with
bass-​like support quality . . . All but two are tonally unified . . . Their clear sectional articu-
lation is produced by various means, such as isomelic endings of taleae, structurally placed
melismas and cadential arrest of motion preceded by climactic acceleration. Furthermore,
the composers active in northern Italy evidently were the first to transfer the technique of
imitation from monotextual duets, where it was at home, to the motet. Since monotextual
motets were now written more frequently and the poems of a polytextual composition
were usually of the same length and had similar versifications and related subject matter,
the two upper voices, which had already occupied the same range in many 14th-​century
French motets, were now assimilated by melodic cross-​references, by similar rhythmic
facture and by declamation.2

These are distinctive features which can be expanded in substance, further distanced
from French practices, and extended by subsequent discoveries. My 1984 paper sought

Original version published as Margaret Bent, ‘The Fourteenth-​Century Italian Motet’, L’Ars nova italiana
del Trecento, 6. Atti del Congresso internazionale ‘L’Europa e la musica del Trecento’, Certaldo, 19–​21 July
1984 (Certaldo, 1992). This revision is published with permission from the Centro Studi sull’Ars Nova
Italiana del Trecento, Certaldo. Following the Certaldo presentation, I had supplied Kurt von Fischer at
his request with a copy of my paper, of which Fischer, ‘Bemerkungen’, published in the same year, includes
a German digest. I have taken the opportunity to add to this chapter one of the more recent post-​Ciconian
discoveries, as Ex. 26.3, my reconstruction of O Antoni expulsor demonum.
1 The cultivation of the older motet in Italy was reviewed by Ziino, ‘Una ignota testimonianza’. Gallo,

‘Mottetti del primo trecento’, reports the early Florentine motets in Ox42. Cuthbert, ‘Trecento II’ gives an
excellent recent overview of the repertory.
2 Ernest Sanders, ‘Motet’, in NG1, xii. 627. Similar definitions were widespread, as for example in Günther,

‘The 14th-​Century Motet’, and Harrison in PMFC 5.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0027
498 Italian Motets

to reinstate the Italian trecento motet as a distinctive genre in its own right, alongside
the madrigal, caccia and ballata. Principal reasons for neglect or non-​recognition of the
genre were its largely fragmentary survival, and its exclusion from the main retrospec-
tive anthologies of Italian music, an omission which remains puzzling.
Because of the parlous source situation, studies of the fourteenth-​century motet
necessarily consider the cultivation of the French motet in Italy, and have overwhelm-
ingly done so. Manuscript fragments and references in treatises attest the circulation
of French motets south of the Alps. They were certainly available for emulation by na-
tive Italians, whose adoption of specifically French techniques was largely delayed until
the early fifteenth century, when the so-​called international style brought northern
repertories and their notation together with Italian compositions in the same anthology
manuscripts. Almost the same is true of England, where, despite exposure to French
music and French music theory from the mid-​fourteenth century onwards, English
composers assimilated current French techniques only towards the end of the century.
In both countries, strong indigenous traditions persisted.3
One of the very few contemporary theoretical accounts of the motet is the short trea-
tise De modo componendi tenores motettorum usually ascribed to Egidius de Morino,
whose identity and date remain obscure, though he presumably originated from
Thérouanne.4 In Chapter 1 I argued that this ascription is unsafe and proposed restoring
the treatise to anonymous status. In its manuscript sources, the treatise is usually linked
with, or even treated as a continuation of, the Tractatus figurarum ascribed variously to
Philipoctus and to Egidius.5 The author of the motet treatise provides for pre-​existent
chant, tenor priority and contratenors, all of which have more place in the French than
the Italian motet. This treatise can be counted a further witness to the cultivation of the
French motet in Italy, and not to the indigenous Italian motets assembled here, notwith-
standing the author’s instructions for text distribution. Although the ‘four sections’ are
not stated to be equal, the fact that the division is made first in the text rather than the
music evidently made no allowance for the smaller amount of text often required for
reduced-​value second sections common in French but almost never found in Italian
motets.
Those fourteenth-​century French motets with Latin texts that were known to Italian
scribes and theorists, however, do happen to include the ones that most clearly approach
Italian features in aspects of mensuration, equality or near-​equality of cantus parts, and

3 Concordances for French motets occur in the English manuscripts Durham20, Robertsbridge and Ox7;

titles are also mentioned in English theory manuscripts from the mid-​14th c. For the motets of SL2211 see
Ch. 27. Bent, ‘Continuity and Transformation’, reflects on the simultaneous cultivation of different musical
cultures in Italy in the early 15th c.
4 Egidius de Morino is thus named in the texts of both Apollinis and Musicalis. For possible identities of

that musician, for the motet treatise and a challenge to authorship by Egidius, see Chs. 1, 16 and 17.
5 Arlt, ‘Der Tractatus figurarum’ evaluated the sources for these treatises, which are overwhelmingly of

Italian provenance. He cautioned against making a premature identification of Philippus/​Philipoctus as ‘de

Caserta’, and concluded that the authorship at least of the Tractatus had best be left unresolved. Against au-
thorship by Philippus is that the note-​shapes set out in the treatise do not correspond to those used in his
compositions. The Tractatus was discussed in Leech-​Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, i. 160–​62, then
edited and translated in Tractatus figurarum, ed. Schreur, and further evaluated together with the other
treatise attributed to Philipoctus in Di Bacco, ‘Original and Borrowed’. See also Stone, ‘Lombard Patronage’.
Despite its promising title, the treatise entitled Compendium artis motectorum Marchecti editum a Fratre Petro
Capuano de Amalfia (in Mensurabilis musicae tractatuli, ed. Gallo, 41–​47) is entirely concerned with men-
suration. Petrus Picardus, Ars motettorum, is a short treatise on mensural notation which gives no motet-​
specific precepts. For sources and authorship of De modo componendi tenores motettorum see Ch. 1.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 499

presence of an introitus or introduction (for these, see Ch. 1).6 Some solo and two-​part
introductions exist in the French repertory; a high proportion of the motets that were
known in Italy have such introductory duets before the tenor entry, though none has ex-
tended imitation like the Italian ones of later date. Most of the French motets in Italian
sources other than Ivrea and Chantilly are exceptional or unusual in various respects.
Further, motets in Chantilly may have circulated in Italy not long before 1400; that
manuscript is now dated after 1400. The contents of the later manuscripts ModA and
Q15 cannot be shown to have circulated in Italy prior to the second and third decades of
the fifteenth century. Possible reasons for the choices of motets in SL2211 are explored
in Chapter 27.
There are two outliers in the presumably French motet repertory, both datable
to the late 1370s. One is the well-​known Rex Karole, the other a very interesting and
little-​known unique motet preserved in two Basel fragments and further discussed
in Chapter 30. Basel71 preserves Gaudeat et exultet . . . Papam querentes, celebrating
the French antipope Clement VII and damning the Roman pope Urban VI, therefore
probably datable to 1378 or soon after. The verso of Basel72 has what appears to be its
contrafact, Novum sidus orientis . . . De scintilla, in a different script. The motet is still
incomplete, but both sources make essential contributions to a reconstruction. On the
recto of that leaf, directly preceding Novum sidus, is the last page of a two-​opening pre-
sentation of Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis. It celebrates Charles V, a strong supporter of pope
Clement VII. If Novum sidus was indeed a contrafact of the pro-​Clement, anti-​Urban
Gaudeat et exultet . . . Papam querentes, why would the compiler of these motets have
needed to change its text?7
Both Rex Karole and Gaudeat et exultet have many features strongly associated with
Italian motets: perfect time with minor prolation, imitative solo introductions and
interlocked hockets. But since one celebrates a French king, dated c. 1375 by Günther,
1378 by Carolann Buff, and the other a French antipope, from 1378, there is no reason
o
to consider them Italian. Rex Karole is the only French motet in time from this entire
period, perhaps joined now by Gaudeat et exultet. The picture is further complicated by
discoveries of motets from northern and eastern Europe that share some features with
o
Italian motets (including time), in turn highlighting some common ground between
Italian and Germanic motets.8
Ursula Günther claimed on the basis of Chantilly and ModA that composition of the
[French] motet declined around 1400.9 Although she refers in that study to Matteo da
Perugia’s Ave sancta mundi as a motet, she excluded it from her motet edition in CMM
39, presumably because its tenor is an Agnus Dei chant (which therefore qualifies it by

6 Ch. 1 notes the imitative introduction to Petre clemens/​Lugentium reconstructed in Zayaruznaya, ‘New

Voices for Vitry’.

7 Reasons are given in Ch. 30 for believing the contrafact to be in this direction, though the converse re-

mains a possibility.
8 Cuthbert, ‘The Nuremberg and Melk Fragments’, gives commented transcriptions of Celice rex regum/​

Ingentem gentem from Mu3223, Deo gracias papales/​Deo gracias fidelis/​Deo gracias salvator from Nuremberg9
and Gdańsk2315, and Tu venerandus presul Amandus from Belfast, a fragment which also preserves Gratiosus
fervidus, bringing that motet’s Italian status into question (see also Cuthbert, ‘Trecento II’, 1103), and notes the
presence of Comes Flandrie also in an Italian source. Cuthbert, ‘A Postscript’, transcribes excerpts of the iso-
rhythmic motets Mater digna Dei and Presulum quo tantus from the very damaged Montefortino fragment.
9 ‘The motet with its long tradition as an art-​form of the first rank had to give way before the more modern

polyphonic song’: Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’, 47.

500 Italian Motets

some definition as a Mass setting) and because both upper parts have the same text.10
In different ways, two editions presenting complete compositions (Günther’s French
motet edition in CMM 39, with its exclusive generic boundaries, and PMFC 12 and 13
with Italian motet sections inclusive of simple homophonic pieces) had combined to
obscure recognition of the Italian motet proper.11 Ave sancta mundi, the first piece in
ModA, has little in common with what is here defined as the Italian motet style, beyond
having two equal-​range top parts with the same text. The tenor is notated in breves,
which, however, have no mensural meaning, but are instructed to be performed in
iambic pairs (breve–​long). Against this triple modus, the upper parts are in imperfect
time and prolation throughout. The tenor is notated once, but specified to be repeated
in two stages of diminution (i.e. three reducing statements), a feature not found any-
where before c. 1400. The first tenor color has two taleae in the upper parts, one of which
spans the entire second tenor color (although that tenor statement is half the length of
the first). The same upper-​voice talea is diminished to fit the final tenor color (half the
length of the second), consequently with very short note values. For motets with two or
more levels of reduction, see Chapters 24, 25 and 20.
The large retrospective Florentine collections of Italian-​texted repertory give no en-
couragement to believe that the motet, whether French or Italian, was highly valued at
the time of their compilation. A payment to ‘Francisco’ (Landini) in 1379 by Andreas
de Florentia ‘pro quinque motectis’ remains tantalising; it has even been suggested that
these were not really motets—​presumably because Italians were not thought to have cul-
tivated them.12 SL2211 of around 1420 appears to modify this picture somewhat, with
its gathering of French and Italian motets (Ch. 27). But even here, the motets seem to
form an appendix of miscellaneous provenance rather than a homogeneous collection
like the other genre and composer groupings. Given the often topical texts of the Italian
motet, it is strange that it did not commend itself more to the historical consciousness of
the compilers of those monumental retrospective trecento anthologies, and that in this
one instance when motets were included it was a small, motley and largely international
group. The general neglect has been perpetuated in modern scholarship, an example of
the way in which exceptional early patterns of collecting and therefore of survival (the
trecento collections, the Machaut manuscripts) can narrow or distort our view of the
period’s musical culture as a whole.
In setting out the case for treating the Italian trecento motet as a genre alongside the
madrigal, ballata and caccia, although not included in the retrospective manuscripts,
I did not yet know of an informative testimony probably of the 1360s, a fascinating list in
the composite manuscript Seville25 of some thirty-​five titles, some attached to named
composers.13 It appears to list the contents of a lost or prospective book of polyphony,
10 This piece, in ModA, is printed in Cesari and Fano, La cappella musicale, 191. See now PMFC 13, no. 46.
11 Issues of generic classification were raised in my review of PMFC 12 (JAMS 32 (1979), 561–​77). The sub-
sequent publication of PMFC 13 in 1987 filled some of the gaps and separated motets from simpler liturgical
settings; motets are distributed between the two volumes.
12 See Ch. 27 n.6 for the documentation of this payment. ‘ “Motecti” are probably not to be understood here

as motets, but rather, in the wider sense of the word, as songs’: thus Kurt von Fischer, Landini, in NG1, x. I do
not see why their status should be doubted. In Simone Prodenzani’s Il Saporetto, c. 1415, some of the Latin
titles might also refer to lost motets. The jongleur Solazzo performs many genres, but these do not include
motets. See Nádas, ‘A Cautious Reading’, and Ch. 27 n. 2.
13 Seville25, f. 23v, palimpsest and very hard to read, was the subject of Michael Scott Cuthbert, ‘Trecento

Theory in Italian and Italian Theorists as Composers’, paper presented at the Medieval and Renaissance Music
Conference, Prague, 5 July 2017, and in 2018 at a conference at Yale University. It was independently studied
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 501

interspersed with a few items that may be treatises. The parchment bifolio 23–​39 serves
as a wrapper for the paper folios 24–​38. The front of the wrapper is inscribed ‘Liber
cantus i[d est] rationum’, an odd way to refer to the music treatise that forms the main
present contents of the wrapper. It seems to refer neither to some palimpsest music
nor to the list; f. 23v is upside down in relation to f. 23r, the outside of the wrapper.
Nearly all the titles are in Latin, either of liturgical items or probably independently
texted motets, and three Sanctus settings, none identifiable with known compositions.
Most are ascribed to named composers known and unknown, including four works by
Marchetto, twelve unknown mostly Latin works by ‘Magister Ja’ and one by Magister
Petrus; Cuthbert is cautious about identifying these with Jacopo da Bologna and
Magister Piero. Just three of the Italian texts are known, two of which (a madrigal and
a caccia) can be matched to extant compositions.14 Thus only a couple of the Italian
works that form the bulk or the entirety of the later collected-​works manuscripts are
represented in the Seville list. Other hitherto unknown composers, some of which were
added later, include: frater Terencinus de Verona He[remitarum], [frater] Michael de
Pad[ua]. It is exceptional not only in attesting to a significant body of Latin-​texted tre-
cento works, hinting at a largely lost Latin repertory, but also in the fact that at this early
date almost all of them are ascribed to composers. Even such an early source of naming
does not solve the puzzle as to what kinds of sources furnished the later manuscripts
of trecento secular repertory with so many ascribed compositions; only a couple of
the Italian works that form the bulk or the entirety of those manuscripts are identifi-
able here.
Q15 is a unique document of fifteenth-​century Rezeptionsgeschichte, in this case, re-
ception by its creator. Since the scribe worked on it for a period of at least fifteen years,
the nature of his substantial changes enables us to discern how he adapted, edited and
criticised what he copied.15 It is possible to detect not only how he changed his models
by addition or renotation, but also how his own tastes changed. The eight complete
motets by Ciconia from the first decade of the fifteenth century have been viewed as
isolated and original utterances; as their background becomes clearer, these motets still
stand out for their superb quality, but are revealed as exceptional not so much in their
generic innovation as in their survival. Most of them were selected for copying into
Q15 from about 1420, together with distinctly later repertory, a circumstance which
also serves to highlight their unusual features. The scribe who copied them made no
changes in their texts, even though those texts were intended for long-​dead Veneto
bishops and dignitaries. He did, however, make substantial musical changes to their tex-
ture and notation, principally by the addition of contratenors and the transformation

in Zimei, ‘Un elenco veneto’. On the structure of Seville25, see Cuthbert, ‘Palimpsests, Sketches, and Extracts’.
The list includes many titles which may be motets, some ascribed to composers. This testimony to lost works
and otherwise unknown composers falls outside the remit of Cuthbert, ‘Tipping the Iceberg’, a statistically
based study of lost repertories similar to works that survive, and the incidence of concordances in approx-
imately the two decades either side of 1400, which concluded that ‘Scholars now need have little worry that
they are viewing only a small, possibly unrepresentative sliver of the original written repertory’. Cuthbert
excludes older works, Latin-​texted motets and sacred music, and composers not represented in the retrospec-
tive anthologies, thus conceding ‘a larger lost repertory of music from mid-​century and earlier’.

14 The caccia In forma quasi is here attributed to an unknown Frater Enselmus, in Sq to Vicenzo da Rimini,

and anonymous in Lo29987.

15 See now Bent, Q15.
502 Italian Motets

of Italian into French notation, changes which had the effect of making them look and
sound more French. If we strip off these changes, we are left with eight complete and
well-​made three-​part Italian motets by Ciconia that are very close to the norm that we
are about to propose on the basis of earlier pieces. Within the assembly of currently
known Italian motets from the fourteenth century, there are elements of a recognisable
tradition, functional and musical, to which most of the pieces from the later part of the
century conform.

Sources and Repertory

The number of motets of Italian origin preserved in manuscripts earlier than Q15 has
now risen to at least sixteen, a significant increase on the half dozen noted by Ernest
Sanders. Many of these pieces are incomplete because the sources are fragmentary. Of
the motets listed in Table 26.1, nos. 1–​16 are distributed in twelve sources, of which the
most significant is Pad1106 (see Ch. 28), the surviving leaves from a motet section in
PadD, surely originally more extensive, and the only clear example of what must have
been an Italian motet anthology. Five of the motets have concordances. The last three
listed items in Table 26.1 could qualify as motets by a liberal definition; they do, how-
ever, stand somewhat outside the norm defined by the others. No. 26, Laurea martiri,
probably by Matteo da Perugia and in ModA, has a chant tenor with diminution; the
prevailing cadences are the Italianate 10/​6–​12/​8.16 Likewise no. 27, the Ave sancta
mundi salus by Matteo already mentioned and the first piece in ModA, has a chant
tenor (Agnus Dei) with diminution, but with 6/​3–​8/​5 cadences in the prevalent French
manner. No. 28, Cantano gl’angiol lieti, in Lo29987, has a single Italian text in both
of the two equal top parts, 6/​3–​8/​5 cadences, and a tenor which is not chant despite
being labelled ‘Sanctus’. It has a ‘madrigalian’ change to triple time for the final section.
An Italian motet listed in Table 26.1 that stands somewhat outside the core features
is no. 29, Argi vices Polyphemus/​Tum Philemon rebus, for Pope John XXIII, possibly
for his election in May 1410, but no later than 1414; it is discussed in Chapter 30.17
o
It shares many features of other Italian motets: time, two top parts equal in range
and activity (but with different texts), with syllabic patter and some rhythmic canon,
and with a final 10/​6–​12/​8 cadence. Less characteristic are that the unidentified tenor
may be chant; there is a contrapuntally essential contratenor; the final cadence is on
the less common pitch g, and there are four sections, isorhythmic in all four parts and
without diminution. The motet is unique to Ao in a copy much later than its date of
composition.

16 The Matteo fascicles of ModA were dated by Günther 1410–​18; gatherings 2–​4 have been placed in

Bologna c. 1410, with repertory from Avignon, Genoa, Milan, and the Council of Pisa 1409–​10. Stone, The
Manuscript Modena, dated ModA to c. 1420. A later date is now accepted by Stone, ‘Lombard Patronage’, per-
haps as late as 1425–​30, and Andrés Locatelli in an unpublished paper at the Basel Medieval and Renaissance
Music conference (6 July 2019) even proposed a dating into the 1430s. The recognition that Matteo’s disap-
pearance from the archives after 1418 does not necessarily mean his death opens the way to later activity, and
potentially later datings for his compositions and for ModA.
17 Published in PMFC 13, no. 49. The division of the text into four corresponds to a precept of De modo

componendi tenores motettorum: after an introductory quatrain, each of the four musically equal sections gets
13 lines of triplum text, 11 lines of motetus. On the text, see Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 503

To these we add the motets of Ciconia composed in the first decade of the fifteenth
century but preserved mainly in Q15, in later copies dating from between c. 1420 and
c. 1435. The total of at least twenty-​five items yields a repertory of the same size as the
twenty-​six surviving caccias.18 Given the different survival patterns for French and
Italian music, this is a more significant body of motets than its neglect has led us to be-
lieve. The list, however, could be extended to over forty pieces belonging to a coherent
and continuing tradition of north Italian motet composition, were we to add about
twenty motets by Ciconia’s followers, notably Antonius de Civitate (Cividale), Antonius
Romanus and Christoforus de Monte, all of which date from the second and third
decades of the century and are found in Q15 and Ox213.19 The table excludes Latin-​
texted homophony of the so-​called ‘simple’ or Ars antiqua kind, as well as contrafacta.20
For the status of O Petre Christi discipule (no. 25) as a two-​part motet without tenor, see
Chapter 28.21
Table 26.1 is very approximately chronological by manuscripts or by datable pieces.
With little effort it can be divided into three main chronological layers. The first three
items date from the early part of the century, and combine several technical and con-
structional features of the French tradition, from which they branched off after Franco,
with new Italianate features of notation and surface style. The large middle group (nos.
4 to 16) represents the later fourteenth-​century Italian motet as Ciconia must have
encountered it. Of these, only nos. 8 and 9 are less strongly marked with features of the
standard Italian model, as are the anomalous (and possibly later) nos. 26–​29, discussed
above. These six pieces happen to survive complete, but otherwise only nos. 1, 2 and 7
of the listed motets are complete until we reach the Ciconia group. Such accidents of
preservation, which have rendered unperformable and for most purposes unpublish-
able the most relevant precursors of Ciconia, have conspired to delay generic recogni-
tion. Without the retrospective anthologies, we would be in no better state with the rich
vernacular trecento repertory.
Marchetto’s motet Ave regina/​Mater innocencie has several features that link it to early
fourteenth-​century developments, including its semibreves with some downstems, in
groups separated by dots. Marchetto subsequently displayed his familiarity with the
French rhythmic innovations attributed to Vitry in the Pomerium. A ‘Marchetus’ was
documented as a choirmaster in Padua in 1305–​6. F. Alberto Gallo suggested that the
motet was composed in association with the 1305 dedication of the Scrovegni chapel,
and Eleonora M. Beck associated it even more closely with the Giotto frescoes.22 The

18 These are listed in Fischer, Studien. The newest critical edition, of 19 caccias, is La caccia nell’Ars Nova

italiana, ed. Epifani. His introduction, ‘Caccia e mottetto’ (pp. lvii–​lxi) extends the parallels between caccia
and motet suggested below.
19 Nosow, ‘Equal-​Discantus’ and ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’.
20 It excludes eight of the fifteen ‘motets and other sacred pieces’ printed in PMFC 12; inclusion of these

pieces dilutes the flavour of the Italian motet as presented in that volume, as does its necessary exclusion of
fragmentary pieces. Also excluded from this discussion are ‘simple’ motets in square notation listed in PMFC
12, appendix II (2).
21 I did not include it in my 1984 paper, but recognised it as a motet in ‘Papal Motets’, revised as Ch. 30, in

Q15, and in Ch. 28. See also Buff, ‘Ciconia’s Equal-​Cantus Motets’. Ch. 28 also addresses how the recto or verso
status of the leaves of Pad1106 bears upon whether the voices they preserve are judged to be cantus I or cantus
II parts. It reports some challenges to judgements made in PMFC 24 on the basis of codicological examination
by Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 104–​5 and 189–​93.
22 Marchetto was a singer and teacher of the boys at Padua cathedral in 1305 and is still documented there

in 1307. Gallo, ‘Marchettus de Padua’, suggested that he wrote the motet for the opening ceremonies of the
504 Italian Motets

Table 26.1 Italian motets c. 1310–1410

No. MSS Texts Composer Dedicatee or Date

occasion

1 Ox112 Ave regina/​Mater ‘Marcum B.V.M.

innocencie Paduanum’ Probably not
(acrostic) Scrovegni 1305
2 SanGiorgio Ave corpus/Protomartiris/T.Gloriosi Francesco doge 1329–​39
Stefani Dandolo
St Stephen
3 SanGiorgio Cetus inseraphici/Cetus apostolici B.V.M., Apostles —​
4 Egidi Marce Marcum Marco Cornaro doge 1365–​68
GR224
5 Egidi Florentia mundi Marcus of Viterbo, 1365 (d. 1366)
SL2211 speculum/​Marce pater minister general
pietatis of Franciscans
from 1359, led
chapter general in
Florence 1365
6 Egidi Leonarde, pater inclite Leonardo Rossi da 1373–​79
Giffoni
7 Pad1475 Lux purpurata/​Diligite ‘M. Jacobi de ‘Luchinus 1346–​49
SL2211 Bononia’ Vicecomes’
(Pad1475) (acrostic,
L. Visconti)
8 Pad1475 Gratiosus/​ [Gratiosus de ‘Georgius miles’ 1390s?
ModA Magnanimus Padua?] (acrostic)

9 Q15 O Maria/​O Maria B.V.M. —​

MuEm
Pad1106
10 Pad1106 Padu . . . serenans/​ [Ciconia?] Andrea Carrara, 1402–​4
(Pastor bonus) abbot of
S. Giustina

11 Pad1106 Principum nobilissime (‘me Franciscum’ Andrea Contarini doge 1368–​82

in text; Landini?)
12 Pad1106 Hic est precursor John the Baptist —​

13 Pad1106 Laudibus dignis [Jacopo da ‘Luchinus dux’ 1346–​49

Bologna?] (acrostic: L.
Visconti)

14 Pad1106 O proles Yspanie [Ciconia?] S. Anthony of

Padua
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 505

Table 26.1 Continued

Parts surviving Voices Rhythmic plan Mensuration* Texts Final

cadence

complete T chant? T: 2 colores, 6 taleae [p]‌ 2 g 6/​3–​8/​5

I T II middle T

complete T chant? T: 2 taleae [p]‌ 2 g 6/​3–​8/​5

I T II Ct middle T

end, I II T T chant [Salve regina] [p]‌ 2 d 10/​6–​12/​8

nearly complete free T, equal top —​ [i]‌ p 1 d 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T voices
incomplete free T? equal top —​ [p]‌ 2 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II?T voices

I free T? equal top —​ [n]‌ ? c 10/​6–​12/​8

voices?
complete free T, nearly equal —​ [i]‌ 2 d 10/​6–​12/​8
I T II top voices

complete T chant? top voices 2 × 2 taleae [i]‌ 2 c 6/​3–​8/​5

I T II middle T (AABB) over 3 T
statements, second in
retrograde
complete on 1r T chant? equal top T: 2 colores, 4 taleae, [i]‌ 2 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II Ct T and voices. Pad T & Ct, top voices also
Solus T others Solus T only repeat × 4
on 1v; cadence free T, equal top 2 statements all voices [p]‌ 2? d 10/​6–​12/​8?
suggests II, but voices?
verso, therefore
I and T (lacks II)
II, on 2r, lacks equal top voices? —​ [s.i.] ? f 10/​6–​12/​8?
I and T
on 2v, I and T free T? equal top —​ [p]‌ ? f 10/​6–​12/​8?
(lacks II) voices?
on 3r; cadence equal top voices? —​ [i]‌ ? f 10/​6–​12/​8?
suggests I, but
recto, therefore II
(lacks I and T)
on 3v; cadence free T; equal top 2 statements, all voices [p]‌ ? f 10/​6–​12/​8?
suggests II, but voices?
verso, therefore I,
and T, lacks II

* Mensurations for earlier motets are given in Italian style; from Q15 onwards with ‘French’ mensuration signs.
(continued)
506 Italian Motets

Table 26.1 Continued

No. MSS Texts Composer Dedicatee or Date

occasion

15 Ox16 [Cristina] [Ciconia?] S. Cristina

16 Houghton122 Trinitatem threefold schism 1409

17 Q15 O felix templum Ciconia (in text Stefano Carrara, 1402

Ox213 and ascribed) bp. of Padua
18 Q15 Venecie mundi/​ Ciconia (in text Michele Steno 1406
Michael qui Stena I and ascribed) Venice and
doge 1400
19 Q15 Albane misse celitus/​ Ciconia (in text II Albano Michiel 1406
Albane doctor maxime but not ascribed) bp. of Padua,
1406–​9
20 Q15 Petrum Marcello/​O Ciconia (in text II Pietro Marcello bp. 1409
Petre antistes and ascribed) of Padua 1409
21 Q15 O Padua Ciconia (in text City of Padua
and ascribed)

22 Q15 Doctorum principem/​ Ciconia Zabarella

Melodia suavissima/​ (ascribed)
Vir mitis
23 Q15 Ut te per omnes/​lngens Ciconia Zabarella
Ox213 alumnus Padue (ascribed)
24 Q15 O virum omnimoda/​ Ciconia S. Nicholas of possibly 1394
O lux et decus/​ (ascribed) Trani (too early?)
25 Q15 O Petre Christi Ciconia For St Peter, Pietro 1409?
discipule (ascribed) Filargo, and
perhaps also Pietro
Emiliani; see Ch. 28
26 ModA Laurea martiri/​ [Matteo da St Laurence
Conlaudanda est/​ Perugia?]
Proba me domine

27 ModA Ave sancta mundi/​ Matteo Eucharist

Agnus Dei

28 Lo29987 Cantano gl’angiol lieti

29 Ao Argi vices Polyphemus/​ Pope John XXIII;

Tum Philemon rebus see Ch. 30
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 507

Table 26.1 Continued

Parts surviving Voices Rhythmic plan Mensuration* Texts Final

cadence

incomplete, I, II, T free T; II slightly ? [i]‌ 2 f tenor final on

lower verso, despite
d tonality of
first section
recto; II, T; second ? oc 2? f 6–​8
half?
complete free T; equal top —​ o
[ ]‌ 1 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T +​optional voices, Ct added later, (d tonality of
problematic Ct then withdrawn first section)
complete free T; equal top —​ o
[ ]‌ 2 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T voices (I has one
higher note)
complete c
free T; equal top voices 2 statements, all voices [ ]‌ 2 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T +​optional Ct (I has one higher note)
complete free T; equal top o
2 statements, all voices, [ ]‌ 2 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T +​optional but voices each with T–​Ct repeat
integrated Ct with dim; T ad longum
complete free T; equal top —​ c
[ ]‌ 1 c 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T voices

complete free T; equal top Three T/​Ct statements ç oc 2 f 10/​6–​12/​8

I II T +​optional Ct voices successively inç oc
complete free T; equal top o
2 statements all voices [ ]‌ 2 d 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T +​optional Ct voices
complete free T; equal top —​ o
[ ]‌ 3 f 10/​6–​12/​8
I II T +​optional Ct voices (I has one
higher note)

I II 2 equal voices, no T —​ ç
[ ] 1 d 6–​8
I II Ct T; inessential T Proba me 3 tenor colores [c]‌ 2 d 10/​6–​12/​8
Ct but Solus T unidentified; equal reduced by ½ then ⅓.
present top voices Each color =​2 taleae
I II T T: Agnus IV; equal 3 T statements, c
[ ]‌ 1 g 6/​3–​8/​5
top voices (I has one successive dim. by ½;
higher note) I and II 4 statements,
the last in halved
values for talea 3
I II T equal top voices: final —​ co
[ ]‌ 1 d 6/​3–​8/​5
section madrigal-​like
ino
I II Ct T long texted canonic o
[ ]‌ 2 g 10/​6–​12/​8
essential Ct introduction then four
sections isorhythmic
in all parts
508 Italian Motets

proposed date is more than a decade earlier than the traditional datings of the complex
of ars nova treatises associated with Philippe de Vitry, and than Marchetto’s own theo-
retical writings, which are dated c. 1317–​19.23 The music fits with Marchetto’s notational
teachings; a date closer to his treatises around 1320 would be more credible, further
encouraged by a 1325 date within Ox112, the only source of his one extant motet.
The main contents of Ox112 are the Speculum vitae and Legum moralium of
Belinus Bixolus (ff. 1–​59v), copied by one scribe who signs himself on f. 58v in red
as Prosdocimus de Citadella, custos of Padua cathedral, with the date of 1325.24 The
main text is interspersed with prayers, tables and jottings, and plainsong insertions on
ff. 35r–​36v.25 The highly important polyphonic composition at the end is catalogued
simply as a hymn to the Virgin with musical notes. In fact it is probably the oldest ex-
tant motet of the Italian ars nova. The middle-​voice foundational tenor of the musical
setting is an Ite missa est chant for the end of mass. Stated twice in slow notes, each
statement is divided into three rhythmically identical segments (thus 2 × 3 =​6 taleae)
which determine the overall structure and length of the motet. The two faster-​moving
outer voices have different texts simultaneously: Ave regina celorum and Mater
innocencie. The top part starts each line with a word from the Ave Maria gratia plena:

Triplum Motetus
AVE regina celorum, pia virgo tenella. [M]‌ater innocencie,
MARIA candens flos florum, Christi[que] clausa cella A ula venustatis.
GRACIA que peccatorum dira abstulit bella. R osa pudicicie,
PLENA odore unguentorum, stirpis David puella. C ella deitatis.
DOMINUS, rex angelorum te gignit, lucens stella. V era lux mundicie,
TECUM manens ut nostrorum tolleret seva tela. M anna probitatis.
BENEDICTA mater morum, nostre mortis medela. P orta obediencie,
TU signatus fons ortorum manna [das dulcicella, A rca pietatis.
IN te lucet] lux cunctorum quo promo de te mella. D atrix indulgencie,
MULIERIBUS tu chorum regis dulci viella, V irga puritatis.
ET vincula delictorum frangis nobis rebella. A rbor fructus gracie,
BENE[DICTUS futurorum ob nos] potatus fella. N ostre pravitatis.
FRUCTUS dulcis quo iustorum clare sonat cimella. V irtus tue clementie
VENTRIS sibi parat thorum nec in te corruptella. M E solvat a peccatis.
TUI zelo fabris horum languescat animella.

Scrovegni Chapel in 1305, but he does not repeat this suggestion in his introduction to PMFC 12, where the
motet is edited, and from which the reconstructions bracketed in the text below are taken. Beck, ‘Marchetto
da Padova’, defends the early date by reference to the frescoes, and partly on numerological grounds.

23 For a model account of this fragile transmission, see Fuller, ‘A Phantom Treatise’, now revisited in a series

of articles by Karen Desmond (including ‘Did Vitry Write an Ars vetus et nova?’, and ‘Omni desideranti’) with
important contributions to the Vitriacan theoretical corpus.
24 Folio iiiv also has a note dated 1325 in a different hand, referring to Florence and Tuscany. There are dif-

ferent (informal) hands on f. 60r–​v and the final verso of f. 64v, where later jottings include the date 1431, part
of the two nested bifolios ff. 61–​64 containing the motet.
25 Kyrie, Alleluya, Adiuva nos, Alleluya, Veni sancte spiritus, Sanctus, Agnus, what the catalogue calls

hymns to the Virgin. These appear to be by the same text hand as the main text; music and text may be in the
same hand, that of Prosdocimus, the custos at that date, albeit slightly less formal, and with a finer nib.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 509

The text of the motetus has the acrostic ‘Marcum Paduanum’, which signals the com-
poser as the music theorist Marchettus of Padua, the unique source of his only surviving
composition. Authorial acrostics within musical compositions at this period are less
common than acrostics honouring dedicatees.26 Here, the accusative form of the
acrostic is integrated with the final line, the first-​person request for absolution (me
solvat) confirming that it is in this case authorial: Virtus tue clementie | Me solvat a
peccatis. That he was a composer as well as a music theorist is also attested from the
list of compositions in Seville25 headed with his name, and in the text of Jacopo da
Bologna’s canonic madrigal Oseletto salvagio.27
But although the roots are shared with late-thirteenth-century France, the Italian
trecento motet soon departs from French models, just as the Italian notational system
diverges. In fact, the first three items on the list, dating from the first half of the century,
do not yet have the distinctive features of the later Italian motet, but they are certainly
Italian and in some ways they do anticipate it. Tenor repetition is present in the first two;
Marchetto’s Ave regina has two identical colores of three taleae each, and the anon-
ymous Ave corpus sanctum/​Protomartiris/​Gloriosi Stefani has two taleae but no color
repetition. Such repetition is unusual in the later trecento motet, and diminution in
particular is exceptional, occurring only in no. 20 and the anomalous nos. 27 and 28.
The motets that look most like precursors of Ciconia are nos. 4–​7 and 10–​16. Of these
eleven, only no. 7 is fully complete, 4 and 5 nearly so.
In reporting the Venice fragment (SanGiorgio) containing nos. 2 and 3, Gallo noted
that the series of motets in honour of doges attests the existence of a secular motet tra-
dition, thus inviting its further investigation.28 All the doge motets except the very early
no. 2 fit our model (nos. 4, 11, and 18); more, not listed here, date from after Ciconia’s
death in 1412.29 Seven motets survive in honour of six of the fourteen Venetian doges
inaugurated between 1329 and 1423,30 four of them earlier than 1412, and there is an
almost unbroken succession for the doges inaugurated from 1365 to 1423. The two si-
multaneous texts of Venecie mundi splendor/​Michael qui Stena domus (no. 18) honour
Venice and the doge Michele Steno. If it were not for Ciconia’s association with Padua,
the most obvious suggestion—​sometimes adopted—​is that this motet dated from im-
mediately after the doge’s election in 1400. Some such occasional pieces are overtly in-
augural, but this one is not. Padua was conquered by Venice in 1405; in view of Ciconia’s
association with the Carrara lords of Padua, his motet can more readily be explained

26 Jacopo’s motet Lux purpurata/​Diligite justitiam (complete) and the single voice Laudibus dignis merito

(probably also by Jacopo) bear acrostics of the Visconti dedicatee Luchinus, followed by vicecomes and dux re-
spectively, both published in PMFC 13. A few non-​acrostic authorial signatures appear directly within motet
texts. Elena Abramov-​van Rijk informs me (email of 8.4.2021) that Zoltán Rihmer reads the tenth line not as
verus amator efficax, but iuris amator efficax, which restores the word vicecomes in the acrostic, making much
more sense than the hitherto accepted vucecomes.
27 ‘tutti si fan maestri: | fan ballate madrial’e motetti | tutt’en Fioran, Filippotti e Marchetti’; and in Niccolò

de Rossi’s sonnet Io vidi ombre e vivi al paragone: ‘Marchetto e Confortino, Agnol cum ello, | Blasio, Floran,
Petro mastro garçone’. On Seville25 see n. 13 above, and on Il Saporetto, n. 12.
28 Gallo, ‘Da un codice italiano’, with facsimile and transcriptions; also reproduced in I più antichi

monumenti, ed. Gallo and Vecchi, plates CXXXII–​CXXXV. This fragment from San Giorgio can no longer
be found.
29 See Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’.
30 Q15, no. 243, Ducalis sedes, by Antonius Romanus, is in honour of doge Tommaso Mocenigo, elected

in 1414. Nos. 206, Carminibus festos, and 215, Plaude decus mundi, respectively by Antonius Romanus
and Christoforus de Monte, are both in honour of Francesco Foscari, elected doge in 1423. See Antonii
Romani Opera.
510 Italian Motets

as an expression of Paduan acceptance of the new regime. Suzanne Clercx suggested

1407 as a likely date, when privileges were granted to Padua cathedral in recompense
for confiscated Carrara goods. But a more likely occasion might be that when Francesco
Zabarella, the archpriest of Padua Cathedral, in the name of the comune of Padua,
made an oration and presented the doge with the emblems of the Signoria before the
doors of San Marco on 3 January 1406. (Ciconia’s patron Zabarella was the dedicatee of
two of his motets.)31 Venice responded officially on 30 January with the ‘Golden Bull’
acknowledging the surrender of Padua, and promised to respect the privileges, cus-
toms, statutes and wool trade of the city.32
Numbers 7 and 13 incorporate acrostics of the dedicatee’s name; in addition, no. 1
has the authorial acrostic Marcum Paduanum, discussed above. Numbers 11, 17 and
18 incorporate a personal signature or composer’s name in the text itself; the words me
Franciscum in the text of no. 11, Principum nobilissime, may or may not refer to Magister
Franciscus, better known to us as Landini. Ciconia’s name is embedded authorially in
the texts of nos. 17–​21.33
In all Italian motets there is either no musical repetition at all (apart from tenor color
and talea restatements, as in Marchetto’s motet), or else the second half of the motet is
a straightforward rhythmic duplicate of the first; any such repetition is in all voices, not
only the tenor. Two other motets (that stand apart from the later fourteenth-​century
Italian norm in several other respects) are Gratiosus fervidus and O Maria, which have
rhythmic repetitions both in the tenor and the upper parts, as does no. 29, Argi vices.
The same is true of three motets by Ciconia (nos. 19, 20 and 23) and two fragmentary
motets in Pad1106 (PadD; nos. 10 and 14), all of which may date from after 1400. It
is not the motet but rather two madrigals, Lorenzo’s Povero zappator and Landini’s Sì
dolce non sonò that document the adoption of ‘French’ isorhythm in Italy.34 The tenor
of Sì dolce non sonò has three color statements, each of three taleae (i.e. a total of nine
rhythmic statements), and in the ritornello two identical statements, in which color and
talea coincide. There is no diminution. Povero zappator has three talea statements in
the tenor. Each of these statements has the rhythmic form ABAA, where each letter
represents two perfect longs (two bars) followed immediately by their rhythmic dim-
c
inution (two breves, one bar). The ritornello in time has two color statements, the
second a diminution of the first. This internal diminution scheme, although on a very
local scale, provides a precedent for Ciconia’s procedure in Petrum Marcello. The rarity
of diminution perhaps qualifies it as a special experimental device, like the use of ret-
rograde tenor statements in the earlier Gratiosus fervidus, and like the mensural rein-
terpretation of successive tenor statements in Doctorum principem, previously used in
French and English motets, but here originally devised in Italian notation and adapted
in its unique source (Q15).35

31 See Ch. 28 and n. 64 for Jason Stoessel’s proposal to link Ciconia’s O Petre Christi discipule to another ora-

tion by Zabarella.
32 As suggested in PMFC 24. See Simioni, Storia di Padova, especially 566, 611–​12.
33 On Ciconia’s texts, see now Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’.
34 CMM 8/​III, no. 9, and PMFC 4, no. 15. Fischer, ‘Philippe de Vitry’, discusses these two pieces and argues

that the latter honours Vitry. See now Abramov-​van Rijk, ‘Povero zappator’.
35 Cuthbert, ‘The Nuremberg and Melk Fragments’, 18–​19 suggests that Gratiosus might have been a

foreign import into Italy. Hallmark, ‘Some Evidence’, draws a possible connection between its use of ret-
rograde motion and Machaut’s Ma fin preserved in PadA, which of course uses retrograde. I was wrong to
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 511

Tenors

In the Italian repertory, unlike the French, chant tenors are the exception; no. 3, the
incomplete Cetus inseraphici/​Cetus apostolici, has a Salve regina tenor. Marchetto’s
Ave regina/​Mater innocencie is on the same tenor as the Ite missa est of the Tournai
mass (Cum venerint), but even it has not been otherwise identified. Several other
tenors that look like chant have not been convincingly identified. These include the
anonymous no. 2, Ave corpus; no. 9, O Maria; no. 8, Gratiosus fervidus; and even
Ciconia’s Petrum Marcello.36
Kurt von Fischer judged Vitry’s Tribum/​Quoniam an important herald of the Italian
motet, since it has an introduction, a middle-​voice (chant) tenor (like Marchetto’s
motet), and repeating taleae with no diminution. These features are by no means con-
fined to Italian motets. But beyond this, Tribum has no close link to the more distinctive
features of the later Italian motet, where few of the tenors look or behave like chant, and
almost none have been identified. At least some of them, written as accompaniments to
the primary upper parts, may have been fashioned as pseudo-​chant but are not in fact
pre-​existent. Marchetto’s tenor has been mentioned above. We can at least say that from
the start the Italian motet was less bound to tenor priority than was the French, and that
any such dependency receded further during the century. Three items have the tenor
as the middle part, in each case unidentified chant-​like melodies. This may be true of
Marchetto’s motet (no. 1), Ave corpus (no. 2), and the later Gratiosus fervidus (no. 8). In
addition to these, three further motets have unidentified tenors which are chant-​like
but are not middle parts. Of these, the tenors of O Maria and Laurea martiri are com-
pletely unidentified, and Ave sancta mundi is based on an Agnus Dei chant which, in
being drawn from the Mass Ordinary, may place it as much outside the tradition of the
Veneto as of the French motet.37 The practice of placing the tenor as the middle voice is
common in the English motet, and found in some French motets.38 It is not, however, a
normal feature of Italian motets in the later fourteenth century.

Top Parts

The top two parts were normally of equal or nearly equal range and activity.
Unfortunately for purposes of generalisation, nos. 5 and 7, Florentia mundi and Lux
purpurata, are almost the only two instances before Ciconia for which both upper parts
survive complete, and in both pieces the second cantus is a little lower than the first.
But in nos. 4 and 15, Marce Marcum and Cristina, enough survives to show that they

classify Doctorum principem as isorhythmic; its tenor is subject to mensural rereading. See Bent, Q15, and
Ch. 28. For other motets where a talea is followed immediately by its diminution before the next statement,
see Chs. 12 and 19.

36 See CMM 39, p. xlviii, and Anderson, ‘Responsory Chants’. S. E. Brown, ‘A Possible Cantus Firmus’, 8,

proposed a possible chant for Petrum Marcello.

37 No. 27, Cantano gl’angiol, as stated already, has an unidentified tenor marked ‘Sanctus’.
38 Of motets discussed here, notably in Tribum/​Quoniam (Ch. 4) and Apollinis (Chs. 15, 16 and n. 43); and

see Ch. 1. Another unidentified middle-​voice tenor is the recently reconstructed Flos vernalis/​Fiat intencio of
c. 1320. See Alís Raurich, ‘The Flores of Flos vernalis’.
512 Italian Motets

indeed were truly equal. They may also be somewhat later in date than Florentia mundi
and Lux purpurata, whose upper parts are in other respects equal—​in length, function,
rhythmic activity, and amount of text. The eventual equality of upper voices might well
have been the natural outgrowth of an earlier type having two active parts forming a
partly self-​contained duet around or above a tenor.

Contratenors

I maintain a distinction between a second cantus such as described above and a true
contratenor in the French manner, as also between contrapuntally essential and non-​
essential contratenors, while acknowledging that some intermediate cases defy defini-
tion.39 The true contratenor evidently had no part in the typical Italian motet. Contratenors
(always fourth voices in motets) that survive from the fourteenth century up to Ciconia
are all in some way problematic, even if not all are demonstrably later additions. The
contratenor of no. 2, Ave corpus, is clearly redundant in its copious doubling of the top
voice. The tenor and contratenor of no. 9, O Maria, are present only in the earlier source,
Pad1106, whereas two later sources, Q15 and MuEm, replace them with a solus tenor. In
this motet, the contratenor is at some points the lowest but nevertheless inessential voice;
at other points it is essential, underpinning simultaneous fourths between the tenor and
an upper part. No. 26, Laurea martiri, has a true contratenor, but it is a motet in French
style with no detectable Italian features. Ciconia’s Ut te per omnes survives in both a three-​
part and a four-​part version; Besseler declared the latter to be inauthentic, but he never
went on to apply the same scepticism to motets that happen to survive in only one ver-
sion with a contratenor.40 None of the surviving Italian motets with contratenors before
Ciconia fits the Italian model; the ones that have them are to varying degrees influenced by
French practice in other respects, as were editorial initiatives taken by the scribe of Q15,
who converted Italian notation to French, and both added and removed contratenors. The
evidence is particularly compelling in the case of the added contratenor, published for
the first time in PMFC 24, of Ciconia’s O felix templum (see Ch. 29 and Fig. 28.1 below).
Consequently, the authenticity of many unique contratenors appearing in Q15 for motets
by Ciconia and his Veneto followers comes into question. Some of these parts are asso-
ciated with only a single version of each piece, or are in later manuscripts that may be
to some extent dependent on Q15; without them, these pieces are much more easily
recognised as typical late fourteenth-​century Italian motets.

Characteristics of the Italian Motet

I shall now attempt to characterise the typical Italian motet as it crystallised around
the middle of the fourteenth century. From then on it became as distinct from the
French tradition as from the English; the same is true of the nationally distinct nota-
tional traditions that conditioned the musical thinking of composers both on a large

39 Some parts added to Italian madrigals are labelled ‘Contratenor’ in the manuscripts, but do not behave

as contratenors. See Bent, ‘Notes on the Contratenor’, and Counterpoint, Introduction, 38–​46 on contratenors
and the solus tenor.
40 Besseler, Bourdon und Fauxbourdon, 81, table and n. 6.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 513

scale and at local levels. The Italian motet is represented almost exclusively in sources
from the Veneto; its main features lasted at least until the death of Ciconia, and con-
tinued beyond, including in early motets by Du Fay. Except for pieces like Florentia
mundi speculum (whose text might nevertheless find more than an accidental echo in
Venecie mundi splendor), it might indeed be more appropriate to refer to this type as
the Veneto motet, and to see in this civic distinction a principal reason for its neglect
by Florentine anthologies. The two Italian motets in SL2211 are among the few that do
not refer to Veneto subjects, which may be why they are there, although a celebration of
the Lombard Luchino Visconti in Jacopo’s Lux purpurata might have been even less ac-
ceptable to the Florentines than the Venetians.41 However, the musical characteristics,
though more assiduously cultivated in the Veneto, are also abundantly present in these
few non-​Veneto examples, so I shall not further localise the term here. The possibly
earlier dating of O virum is addressed in Chapter 28.
The most characteristic examples of the Italian motet have some if not all of the fol-
lowing features:

1. A primary duet for upper parts that are either equal or nearly equal in range, nor-
mally pitched high, with C1 or C2 clefs. The parts are usually equal in length, func-
tion, rhythmic activity and amount of text.
2. These upper parts may have either the same or different texts.
3. The composer’s name or that of the dedicatee may appear in one of the texts, occa-
sionally as an acrostic.
4. The accompanying tenor is freely composed, often with semibreve motion, leaps
of fourths and fifths, rests of two breves while the upper parts continue, interludes
of two breves while the upper parts rest, and held longs in all parts.
5. The clearest examples of this style have no contratenor. If a contratenor is present it
can usually be diagnosed as a later addition and may be musically anomalous.
6. Use of hocket, imitation, syncopation, rhythmic canon and sequence, often
requiring participation by the tenor, is common.
7. There is little use of French techniques of rhythmic diminution or mensural
reduction.42
8. The prevailing mensuration is often .p. (=​tempus perfectum), sometimes adapted
o
to its French equivalent (transcribed as 3/​4) but with the characteristic Italian
rhythms associated with its renunciation of breve imperfection.43
9. Changes of mensuration within a piece are found in nos. 16 and 22, Trinitatem
and Doctorum principem, both dating (on grounds of their texts) from after
1400. Such changes earlier than 1400 seem to follow the model of the madrigal

41 See Ch. 27 and n. 4.

42 True isorhythm, rhythmic replication for the second half of the piece, where present, is usually in all
voices. This did not require the precompositional planning that diminution demands. Petrum Marcello is ex-
ceptional in having diminution within the color; but see Alma polis/​Axe poli (Ch. 19), and similarly complex
motets listed there in n. 10. See n. 34 above on Povero zappator.
43 All of Ciconia’s motets seem to have been conceived in Italian notation, and some of them display direct

evidence of notational translation; details are given in the Critical Commentary to PMFC 24. O felix templum
is the only one that actually survives in both notations in its two sources, but its typically Italian rhythms are
shared by others, and the process of transformation can be detected in erasures and adjustments within Q15.
Imperfect time, together with Italian triplet rhythms at the semibreve level, are found in nos. 19 and 21, O
o
Padua sidus and Albane misse celitus. The only French motet in time from this period is Rex Karole, one of
the motets that was known in Italy.
514 Italian Motets

ritornello, as in no. 4, Marce Marcum, which changes from octonaria [.o.] to .p,
c o
and the undated Cantano gl’angiol lieti, which changes from [ ]‌ to for a true
madrigalian ritornello.
10. Tenor coloration occurs in Pad1106, in the anonymous no. 10, Padu . . . serenans/​
Pastor bonus, and in some motets ascribed to Ciconia, all after 1400. No imper-
fection coloration occurs in any upper parts. Sesqualtera minim triplets are
sometimes flagged, sometimes void.
11. Typical cadences are 10/​6–​12/​8, on f, d or g, and extreme ‘tonal stability’ is often
cultivated. After Ciconia, the hitherto predictable roles of voices I and II at the
final cadence are occasionally reversed.
12. The subject matter is often civic or honorific: dedicatees include doges, bishops,
and other public figures. Where cities or saints are addressed, they may be coupled
with topical worthies. Although some motet texts are sacred or at least reverent
(none is frivolous or amorous, and all except the hybrid no. 28, Cantano gl’angiol
lieti, are in Latin), it would be a mistake to regard the motet, the Italian no more
than the French, as primarily sacred, let alone liturgical. Even the pieces that might
appear to be liturgical (because honouring a saint) could have been intended for
secular ceremonial use. Madrigals that carried civic or honorific function are better
preserved and known, owing to their inclusion in the large vernacular anthologies.

Stylistic Roots

Where are the stylistic roots of this characteristic texture of two equal top parts with a free
accompanying tenor? In the three-​voice madrigals of Jacopo da Bologna the upper voices
do have equal ranges, but they are different from the upper voices of a motet. In particular,
the two-​part madrigals (and the primary duet of the few three-​voice madrigals) charac-
teristically cadence with a third converging on a unison (3–​1), while the ballatas (mostly
a3), in common with a very few motets, have closer spacing between the voices, reflected
in their characteristic 6/​3–​8/​5 cadence. The motets, on the other hand, most often ca-
dence 10/​6–​12/​8, with parallel fifths between the top parts (see the last column of Table
26.1 above). This feature they share with some caccias and with Jacopo’s canonic madrigal
Oseletto salvagio; among Jacopo’s three-​voice works this formula occurs otherwise only in
his motet Lux purpurata. We might thus look to the caccia for parallels and precedents for
this disposition of voices. Other features of the caccia most easily recognisable in the motet
are the accompanimental character of the tenor, which is almost never based on chant, and
the effect of canonic techniques (extended canon in the caccia, canonic unison imitations
in the motet), which tend to foster precisely the kind of tonal stability just mentioned. Other
surface features, such as imitation, declamation, clichés and melodic interplay, are clearly
related to madrigal idioms. Just as caccia techniques were used in madrigal and ballata
settings, so they left their mark on the motet. The text of the canonic madrigal Oseletto
salvagio names the musical genres as ballate, matricale e muteti and, as mentioned above,
Trém lists French chaces together with motets (but see Ch. 31 for a possible explanation). In
Egidi, three motets appeared in company with Zacara’s caccia.
One manuscript of the Paduan judge Antonio da Tempo’s well-​known treatise
of 1332, the Summa artis rithmici vulgaris dictaminis, has an anonymous addition
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 515

entitled ‘Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis’, now dated after 1332.44 It discusses
ballade, rotundelli, motteti, cacie, mandrigalia and sonetti; the motet thus takes its place
alongside these other genres, whose descriptions have more often been related in re-
cent literature to the surviving music. Little account, however, had been taken of the
section on motets:

Motteti sunt cantus applicati verbis (sive Motets are melodies (cantus) applied to
dictionibus vel parabolis). Fiunt etiam ad words or narratives or allegories. They are
unum et ad plures cantus. Non habent ita furthermore made for one and for more
ordinem in verbis sicut ballade et rotundelli; voices (cantus); they thus do not have a
possunt esse de tempore perfecto et etiam verbal form like ballatas and rondeaux. They
mixti, et de italica et gallica, ita quod can be in perfect tempus, and even mixed
tempora unius correspondeant ad tempora tempus, and in [senaria] italica or gallica,
alterius et sit simile alteri. Et si primum, so that the breves of one correspond to the
secundum et tertium de uno cantu sit other and are similar to it. And if the first,
de uno tempore, scilicet perfecto, ita de second and third breves of one melody
alio cantu primum, secundum et tertium (cantu) are perfect, so in the other melody
esse volunt simili perfecto, ut in mensura the first, second and third [breves] should
similiter concordent, et de aere debent also be perfect, so that in measure they may
esse ad invicem et assimilari. Vult etiam concord in similarity, and that in melody
in compositione mottetorum haberi hec they should be adjacent and assimilated.
regula generalis, videlicet quando unus This general rule applies in motet
cantus ascendit, alter descendat et non se composition, namely, that when one cantus
inveniant in dissonantia in pluri quam in ascends the other descends, and they should
uno tempore, quia nimis foret asperum in not be dissonant with each other for more
auditu. than a breve, because it sounds harsh.
Caveat etiam, ne tritonum componat, Beware also lest you compose a tritone,
quia, sicut dictum est, fit auribus nimis because it sounds hard to the ear, as we
durum; et quando unus rumpit, alius have said. And when one voice has small
utatur brevibus vel longis et e converso. notes (rumpit), the other uses breves or
Et sic diversificando completi fiunt de illis longs and vice versa. And thus diversifying
circa fines: Unus pausat, alter cantat, et they are filled with these towards the
postea pausat, qui cantavit, et alter cantat. conclusions: one rests, the other sings, then
Utimur in eisdem mottetis pausis unius the one who sang rests while the other sings.
temporis et pauciores. Quare sic utendo In these motets we use rests of a breve and
uchettis et pausis videntur mottizando shorter, because using hockets and rests they
cantare. thus seem to sing ‘motetting’.
Cacie (sive incalci), a simili per omnia Caccias, or incalci, are in all respects
formantur ut motteti, salvo quod verba composed similarly to motets, saving that
caciarum volunt esse aut omnes de septem, the verses (poetic lines) of the caccias should
aut omnes de quinque syllabis. be either all of 7 or all of 5 syllables.

44 Venice97; see Debenedetti, Un trattatello, 79, newly edited in Burkard and Huck, ‘Voces applicatae

verbis’. Their edition, helpfully punctuated, is used here, but without classical diphthongs. Abramov-​van Rijk,
‘Evidence for a Revised Dating’, convincingly dates the Capitulum after 1332, when da Tempo completed his
Summa, rather than, as previously dated, between 1313 and 1332.
516 Italian Motets

This is at least as remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does. We are not told
about constraints on motet composition, such as versification (prominent in the other
genres discussed), pre-​existent tenors, or contratenors, let alone isorhythm. More im-
portant is that the cantus parts (with one or two texts?) should complement each other,
and that dissonance should be avoided. The use of hocket, of breve rests, contrary mo-
tion, and a preference for tempus perfectum are all mentioned. All of these are normal
features of the trecento motet as described here. Motets are likened to caccias except
for textual constraints which, however, are not spelt out for the caccia. The description
of the caccia goes on to describe alternation of voice roles, apparently referring both
to caccia and motet, and prescribes that the voices end some on the fifth, some on the
octave. This of course would be true not only of motets and caccias, but, in conjunction
with role alternation between the equal-​range parts, it surely implies the widely spaced
cadences typical of both forms.

New Additions in Bent, ‘The Fourteenth-​Century Italian Motet’

Trinitatem
Trinitatem (no. 16), is named as the tenor of what seems to be the second half of a motet
preserved on a pasted-​down flyleaf bifolio (Houghton122) that could not be lifted to
display the other side.45 Its text possibly refers to the period of threefold Schism between
1408 and 1415; the music could conceivably be by Ciconia, whose patron Zabarella was
active in efforts to resolve the Schism and in fact died at Constance, but it lacks strong
stylistic markers for Ciconia.
A revised description of the bifolio follows:

f. 1r (pasted down), first half of a Credo; f. 1v (exposed), verso with the second half of
the same Credo from Et in spiritum (left-​hand side cut off), two texted voices, a cantus
I part and Tenor, to be continued on the facing page together with cantus II. Identified
by Michael Scott Cuthbert as Q15, no. 64 (Salinis), where it is also texted in all three
parts and occupies two openings (there dividing at Et resurrexit): see Chapter 27,
Table 27.2.46

f. 2r (exposed); probably the second opening of a motet, Tenor Trinitatem, not chant,
therefore perhaps the incipit of either or both voices on a preceding lost opening;
cantus II starts [de] qua cordis (reading uncertain; qua looks more like pia or pra,
but the ‘2’ form of letter ‘r’ is used nowhere else on this fragment, only one syllable
is required, and ink is lost from the left side of the descender). Neither musically
nor textually does this appear to be a beginning. For an Italian motet it is unusual

45 Houghton122. A first account was given in Bent, ‘New Sacred Polyphonic Fragments’, including my

transcription, which was also used in PMFC 13, no. A17. Some revision to the description is in Bent, ‘Motets
Recovered’. I now deplore the Houghton library’s initiative (not mine) to use a chemical in an attempt to make
the reverse side more legible. Minimally greater visibility was achieved, with allegedly no lasting damage.
Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 283, questions whether this is fact an Italian manuscript. The script and or-
thography seem to me Italian (‘babtisma’, and ‘3’ form of final ‘m’).
46 Cuthbert, ‘Hidden in Our Publications’.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 517

in changing mensuration from o to c. The hockets in c time are unusual, but the
short passages in rhythmic canon, presumably tossed between the two cantus parts,
are typically Italian.

On f. 2v (pasted down), is apparently a Marian motet.

A Motet on Santa Cristina

Another fragmentary motet (no. 15) is preserved on a flyleaf (Ox16) that was cut
from a bifolio of music, most of which has been erased.47 (See Ex. 26.1 for a tentative
transcription.) A significant legible portion survives complete in three parts on the
bifolio which is now f. 97v (=​Av–​Br of the original), and the motet is completed over-
leaf on f. Bv, where one or two of the three parts remain in currently illegible form;
it can be hoped that new non-​invasive techniques will one day make them legible.
Only isolated words and syllables of the two texted cantus parts can be made out,
enough to confirm elements of the saint’s legend, but insufficient to determine the
form of the text. The legible text of the topmost part includes the words ‘baptizari
virgo Cristina post tua sancta dissipavit et fornacem sprevisti . . . -​cem ubera tua et
lingua Julianus . . . sit’, and of cantus II: ‘prole tue gens se . . . -​samus . . . sunt equales
tuorum ne iaspes es de . . . redolens . . .’, leaving no doubt that it refers to the legend
of Santa Cristina (feast day 25 July). The legend amalgamates elements from two dif-
ferent stories for saints of this name from Tyre and Bolsena. The story of the Roman
virgin martyred for maintaining her Christian belief in disobedience to her father
relates how, when thrown into Lake Bolsena, she was baptised by Christ himself; how
when her tongue was cut out she threw it at the Judge Julianus, thus causing him to
lose the sight of one eye; how she ‘spurned the furnace’ and was then further (presum-
ably in the missing portion of the text) tormented by serpents and finally killed by
arrows. The manuscript, like many in the Canonici collection, appears to be of Veneto
provenance. There were naturally various claimants to the remains of the saint, but of
relevance to this case is the fact that the Benedictine nuns of San Marco di Ammiano,
an island in the Venetian lagoon, believed that they had acquired her in 1252, from
which time they were known as the nuns of SS. Marco and Cristina of Ammiano.
During the fourteenth century, physical conditions on the island deteriorated. Fetid
air and rising water are reported, and eventually the nuns moved to Murano with their
relic. Reprimanded for an unauthorised translation of the saint, they were instructed
to return the relic to San Marco, which they did in 1340, with much ceremony. This
date is probably too early for the motet. The nuns remained on the sinking island
until only one nun was left, when the relic was officially translated in the 1430s to St
Anthony of Torcello. This date is too late, stylistically and notationally, for the com-
position of the motet. Meanwhile, the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice
erected a chapel in honour of the Virgin and Santa Cristina, which was moved and
renovated some time after 1386. It is reported that the Scuola tried to acquire the relic

47 Ox16, flyleaf. Andrew Wathey kindly alerted me to this fragment, which he subsequently described in

Wathey, Manuscripts . . . Supplement 1 to RISM.

518 Italian Motets

Ex. 26.1 Excerpt from fragmentary motet on S. Cristina in Ox16

 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 519

Ex. 26.1 Continued

520 Italian Motets

from St Anthony of Torcello in 1442. Since the likeliest time for the composition of
the motet, on grounds of style and script, is around 1400, it is tempting to speculate
that it may have formed part of a bid on behalf of the Scuola for the relic during that
same period of growing veneration for Santa Cristina.48
Even superficial comparison of the music of this fragment with Ciconia’s O felix
templum shows strong points of similarity.49 It is in pure Italian notation with pontelli
(dots separating brevial groups, down-​stemmed major semibreves, oblique-​stemmed
‘dotted’ notes and successive paired semibreve ligatures requiring ‘alteration’ (by via na-
turae) of the second note, even when not preceding a breve. Tonally, in rhythm, range,
imitations and so on, it clearly draws upon the same stock vocabulary as the motets of
Ciconia, and so it is possible that we have here the remains of an otherwise unknown
motet by him. While the most legible section with all three parts suggests a ‘d minor’ to-
nality, the final 10/​6–​12/​8 cadence on the verso is on f. These features it shares with the
securely attributed O felix templum.
The total length can be estimated at around one hundred breves, but the complete
three-​part texture is preserved only for a very short section. There is no rhythmic re-
peat. Like all Ciconia’s motets, it has two equal top parts, was conceived without a
contratenor and contains imitation sequences, hocket with participation by the freely
composed tenor, held longs, and two-​bar tenor interludes. But are we in any position to
make a claim of authorship? I have tried to review the profile of Ciconia in relation to
the Italian tradition from which his motets seem to have grown. The premise of a typ-
ical Italian motet, of which Ciconia’s are the main surviving complete but late examples,
lessens certainty about his personal individuality and discourages the attribution of
anonymous works. However, the features of surface style in Cristina do fall more fully
within Ciconia’s known style than do the two incomplete motets in Pad1106 that ap-
pear in PMFC 24 (nos. 10 and 14) as opera dubia; these are discussed in Chapter 28.
The comparison group of named composers is too small to permit certainty, given the
hazards of comparison between different genres.

Florentia mundi speculum/​Marce pater pietatis

This motet is perhaps the most significant yield: the full extent of the two upper parts
can be recovered, leaving the tenor to be editorially reconstructed. Having said that, the
transcription in Example 26.2 remains tentative. Many aspects—​pitches, rhythms and
simultaneity—​are open to revision. Two different sources are here conflated. One is a
barely legible image of a lost manuscript, the other a heavily overwritten palimpsest.
Staff lines and note stems are partly invisible. Some measures that appear simultane-
ously may be successive and vice versa; pitches may be a step up or down from those
given, and rests are often uncertain.

48 The amalgamated legend of Santa Cristina is given in Acta Sanctorum, v. 495–​534. Sources for her office

in AH XXV, 193–​96, include a 15th-​c. breviary from San Niccolò of Padua. She is represented in the pro-
cession of virgins in S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Most of the other details reported here are drawn from
Corner, Notizie storiche.
49 PMFC 24, no. 12, discounting the contratenor which is a later addition by the scribe of Q15.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 521

Ex. 26.2 Florentia mundi/​Marce pater, transcribed from Egidi and SL2211
522 Italian Motets

Ex. 26.2 Continued

 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 523

Ex. 26.2 Continued

524 Italian Motets

Ex. 26.2 Continued

 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 525

Ex. 26.2 Continued

526 Italian Motets

Egidi has been lost since the death of its owner,50 and survives only in a very poor
microfilm copy provided by Kurt von Fischer, slightly enhanced on DIAMM.51 As
well as the cantus Florentia mundi speculum, Egidi also contains Marce Marcum
in honour of Marco Corner, doge of Venice 1365–​68 (ff. 1v–​2; no. 4 in Table
26.1, completable from GR224), and cantus I of the motet Leonarde, pater inclite
(no. 6 in Table 26.1) in honour of Leonardo Rossi da Giffoni, d. 1405, master of
theology, head of the Friars Minor in Campania in 1372, and the general head of
the Franciscan Order in 1373. It celebrates his appointment as cardinal by Clement
VII in December 1378, an honour he had recently declined from Urban VI, who
also removed him as head of the Franciscans. Clement reinstated him as General
and rewarded him for having opposed the Roman pope.52 He was from Salerno, a
subject of Queen Joanna of Naples, who is thanked for her support of the Avignon
pope. Egidi also contains on f. 1r the tenor of Zacar’s caccia [Cacciando per gustar]/​
Ay cinci ay toppi.
On the basis of the opening imitation, I was able to identify that the then re-
cently discovered SL2211 contributes a complementary cantus II, previously
transcribed as Parce pater pietatis, to the single cantus I voice Florentia mundi spec-
ulum in Egidi, yielding two voices of an Italian-​style motet and lacking only the
tenor. Folio 69r (R188) in the palimpsest SL2211 preserves this cantus II, very dif-
ficult to read when I made the provisional transcription published with the orig-
inal version of this article. But enough imitation could be detected between the two
differently texted voices that the transcription of each can benefit from knowledge
of the other. In 1984 I informed the editors of PMFC 13 (published in 1987) of the
discovery that the two motet voices belong together, and provided them with my
transcription.53
My readings remain provisional, especially for Egidi, where much remains
doubtful, but my transcription was largely vindicated by the now more legible images
in Nádas and Janke, The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, which fortunately is on one of the
pages that has responded well to multispectral imaging. Some revisions are incorpo-
rated here in Example 26.2. From bars 121–​26 the two parts seem to have different
versions of the hocket, cantus II being one breve longer than cantus I (SL2211 is clear
here); hence the curious alignment in Example 26.2. The important new finding is
that the colour separation of the multispectral images of SL2211 shows that what had
been taken as an initial P by all previous writers is in fact part of the overwriting, and
that a guide letter ‘m’ for the intended initial is in the margin, as spotted by the sharp

50 See Egidi, Un frammento.

51 John Nádas meanwhile achieved different improvements with the aid of the University of North Carolina
Computer Science Department.
52 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 67, where the text is transcribed from Egidi, f. 1v. This corrects and

extends my report in Bent, ‘Italian Motet’.

53 The editors published fragments (PMFC 13, no. A 14, pp. 246 and 288), disconnected and misfitted,

rejecting my transcription, evidently able to read less than I had, and presuming that I had invented the
readings of SL2211. The editors report: ‘Margaret Bent tried to transcribe also other fragmentary passages
based on the principle of imitation. These are not included in the transcription.’ It would be more correct to
say that my transcription was based on what I could read, the coordination of the parts being confirmed by
identifying points of imitation. Now that multispectral images of SL2211 are available (Nádas and Janke, The
San Lorenzo Palimpsest), readers may offer their own improvements.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 527

eyes of Bonnie Blackburn, so the motet can now be known as Florentia mundi spec-
ulum/​Marce pater pietatis.54 I have also been able to transcribe more of the verbal text
of Marce pater, of which even Leofranc Holford-​Strevens has been able to make only
limited sense.
The cantus I, Florentia mundi speculum, refers to Florence and the Franciscans.
I suggested in the earlier form of this article that this pointed to the Chapter General
of the Order held in Florence in 1365, presided over by Marcus of Viterbo, who was
elected minister general of the Franciscan Order in 1359, made a cardinal by Urban V
in 1366, and died of plague on 4 September 1369. A monument to him is in the Chiesa
di S. Francesco in Viterbo. It is now clear that he is the Marco addressed and honoured
in cantus II, and that the motet can therefore be dated 1365, the year of the Florence
Chapter. Thus Egidi contained three motets for named individuals, two of them
Franciscan leaders; all three of its motets can now be dated 1365–​78.

Further Recent Additions

O Antoni expulsor demonum
Vienna661, two bifolios from the same original Veneto manuscript as Mu3224,
contains a unique motet, O Antoni expulsor demonum.55 Although trimmed, it can
be editorially completed, as Example 26.3. It is a strange little piece, shorter than
most of the Italian motets in the generation after Ciconia referred to above, from which
it probably dates, therefore falling outside Table 26.1. But it has many features of the
Ciconian motet: both upper parts have the same ranges and the same text, a short prose
text with some internal rhyme (-​um). There are also some declamatory chordal passages
for all four parts simultaneously. The saint addressed is the widely venerated St Anthony
Abbot (‘the Great’, 3rd–​4th c.), known not only for resisting temptations, but also for
expelling demons from his cave and for protection against sickness, notably ‘Saint
Anthony’s fire’, which has been thought to describe various afflictions, notably those of
the skin. The ingenious interlocking hockets are Ciconia-​like, if not quite up to Ciconia’s
standard. The accompanying tenor is freely composed. The inessential contratenor has
octave doublings and rhythmic duplication of cantus II, also some dissonances, and
could be a later addition.
New since that publication is the discovery by Alberto Rizzuti of this text as an
Alleluia verse for the Commemoration of St Anthony in a beautifully illuminated
missal of local use for S. Antonio di Ranverso (Torino) dating from around 1420,
now Lausanne, Lausanne8076 f. 178r.56 Rizzuti reports later survivals of this text,
previously known in a missal printed in Lyon in 1527 for the church of Viviers, and
in a psalter/​book of hours from the late fifteenth century, now Brive, Bibliothèque

i
54 On SL2211 see Ch. 27. Cantus II variants: 85.3 f (here corrected to g); 105 for major S; 108 oblique-​

stemmed S; 131–​32 oblique ligature LL.

55 See Bent and Klugseder, A Veneto Liber cantus. Discovered by Klugseder, and identified by Bent as

belonging with Mu3224.

56 Rizzuti, ‘Margaritae ante porcos’. This substantial study provides artistic and documentary context for

the cult of St Anthony at Ranverso. It builds on the discovery of the motet in Bent and Klugseder, A Veneto
Liber cantus, and reproduces Bent’s reconstruction and transcription of O Antoni, here Ex. 26.3.
528 Italian Motets

municipale, MS 1, f. 173r, with the variant (from the Brive version) ‘languorum’
in line 2. These sources otherwise agree, and show the motet text to be corrupt in
lines 3 and 4:

Text of Vienna661 Text of Lausanne8076, f. 178r

O Antoni, expulsor demonum, O Anthoni, expulsor demonum,
liberator languidorum hominum, liberator langorum hominum,
qui es spes fidelium, qui es spes et dux fidelium,
deprecare dominum, deprecare tu Dei filium
ut det nobis celorum gaudium. ut det nobis celorum gaudium.

Other Fragmentary Motets

A damaged bifolio used as the cover of SienaRavi3 contains two incomplete motets.57
The text of Gaude felix parens Yspania nove prolis on f. 67r is a version of the first Vespers
antiphon for St Dominic.58 The second cantus and apparently free tenor are preserved,
but damaged and hard to read. Pitched on d and apparently in duple time, minor
prolation, with some hocketing, it shared a manuscript opening with the motet Sanctus
itaque patriarcha Leuntius by Antonio da Cividale, known from Q15 no. 247 (ff. R272v–​
273, A301v–​302). Another fragmentary motet on this bifolio is Katerina pia virgo
purissima (f. 70r). The second cantus and apparently free tenor are preserved, pitched
on f with a 6–​8 cadence, and in perfect tempus with passages in imperfection color-
ation. There are two rhythmically identical halves, and some hocketing. Both motets
are untranscribed in print and are possible candidates for attachment to this group al-
though, like O Antoni, they may be rather later than the focus of this chapter, and belong
with the post-​Ciconian motets preserved in Q15 and elsewhere.59
Quire guard strips in Perugia2 contain fragments of motets. In addition to the well-​
known Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis (strips I and IX), text fragments of hitherto unidenti-
fied motets include, on strip II, Ar [Ve]netia iustitia mannas mannas et; Br nutritorem
hoc debet nos docere . . .-​are proditorem . . . di . . . ; Av . . . ditis Bononia statuti tullis . . . fit
ducisbus amen; Bv . .quoque facto . . .; on strip X, Ar . . .-​is integer vir gratia pacis et mare
tutum numina posseas; Br marique signifer defende tibi supplices yllustra bonis moribus
adsis pris favoribus; Av et Cripsti passi retollens sepe comitis prelia, agarenis crudelia. Ortus
occasus; Bv . . . tuosa plena fraude vulpina. Et veneni sentina et scorpionis stracta fa . . . 60

Conclusions

Given our dependence on such fragments, it is striking that as many as five of the pre-​
Ciconia motets, Marce Marcum, Gratiosus, O Maria, and now Florentia mundi speculum

57 Mecacci and Ziino, ‘Un altro frammento’.

58 Cantus database (https://​can​tus.uwater​loo.ca/​), Cantus ID 201900: Gaude felix parens Hispania novae
prolis dans mundo gaudia sed tu magis plaude bononia tanti patris dotata gloria lauda tota mater ecclesia novae
laudis agens sollemnia.
59 Those motets are reviewed in Nosow, ‘The Equal-​Discantus Motet Style after Ciconia’.
60 Text fragments as given in Brumana and Ciliberti, Frammenti Musicali, 51–​54.
 The Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet 529

and Lux purpurata, recur in more than one manuscript, thus suggesting a finite rep-
ertory of limited circulation. Conversely, the absence of Ciconia motets from SL2211
may offer further evidence of the narrow circulation of his motets, which, apart from O
virum omnimoda in Siena36, was apparently confined to the Veneto; most are unica.61
There are apparently no contratenors in the two truly Italian motets in SL2211. In cases
where only one page of an opening survives, this can sometimes be assessed by practical
constraints of spacing and layout, an observation which offers further support for the
addition of contratenors as a particular peculiarity of Q15. A northern ingredient in
Ciconia’s musical education had been presumed because of his use of isorhythm. But
his simple replication in three motets (literal isorhythm) is very different from French
motets with diminution or otherwise varied restatements. To put it over-​simply, his
motets are, rather, composed from the top down, as in other Italian instances (Ch. 29
refines this statement). It is true that Ciconia was born in Liège, but he evidently spent
his entire adult career in Italy. An earlier view that he was born in the 1330s has long
been discounted on grounds of having confused a father and son of the same name. The
now-​accepted dating for Ciconia’s life, with a birthdate in the 1370s, is compatible with a
hypothesis that he travelled south at an early stage, and there encountered and adopted
an established Italian motet style.62 Despite his northern birthplace, there is none of
the Franco-​Italian fusion with which he has been credited by most scholars. Rather,
we should now see Du Fay as the composer responsible for fusing French structural
techniques with a number of features typical of the Italian ceremonial motet. This gives
a new slant to the view that such motets are essentially rooted in French isorhythm.
There is nothing French about Ciconia’s motets, and the Italian influences that have
been pointed out in Du Fay have not hitherto conspicuously included that of the Italian
motet. It seems possible that Du Fay came to know Ciconia’s music in versions with
added contratenors such as those in Q15. The pseudo-​chant also became ‘real’ chant
for him (Vasilissa, with its chant tenor and ‘Ciconian’ isorhythmic replication for the
second half of the motet), and the detail of the rhythmic surface sounds similar, even if
Ciconia and Du Fay were conditioned by different traditions. When the scribe of Q15
dressed up Ciconia’s Italian motets with French notation and contratenors in the French
manner, he may thereby have pointed the way to a marriage consummated in the works
of Du Fay.
As a tradition with its own definable features and constants, the Italian motet
provides us with:

1. A means of diagnosis and of understanding a piece like Hic est precursor, which
can now be claimed as a motet lacking its second upper part rather than as a com-
plete two-​voice piece.63
2. Some possibility of chronological sorting of the repertory around datable pieces.
3. A purely Italian background for the motet repertories of Ciconia and Q15 which
no longer compels us to subscribe to the older view that the isorhythmic motet
with a freely invented tenor represents an innovation of considerable magnitude.

61They occur only in Ox213, Q15, BU2216, Siena36, and perhaps PadD. Details are given in PMFC 24.
62Fallows, ‘Ciconia padre e figlio’. See also the preface to PMFC 24.
63 PMFC 12, no. 42. Not everything, of course, fits the prototype: of Ciconia’s two equal-​voiced pieces in

Q15, O Petre Christi discipule (Ch. 28) is now counted as a tenorless motet.
530 Italian Motets

Many of the features of Ciconia’s motet that do not fit the French model have
Italian and specifically Veneto antecedents that put his apparently striking per-
sonal originality into a fresh perspective. We no longer need to view the Italian
caccia as a mere derivative of the French chace, and may be able to make a similar
claim for the autonomy of the Italian motet.
4. Petrum Marcello/​O Petre is unusual in presenting each talea first as is, then in
diminution before proceeding to the next one. The isorhythmic replication
includes these diminutions which are not themselves isorhythmic. The advent of
the integral contratenor comes relatively late in Italian compositions and may be
influenced by French practices.
5. A new recognition of Du Fay as the merger of French and Italian traditions.
The older picture of Ciconia as an epoch-​maker and international innovator is
flawed, and is already much changed by the subsequent recognition that Ciconia
was a younger composer.64 The motets of Ciconia and his followers can now be
seen as the culmination of an Italian tradition. They both followed its normative
conventions and at the same time transcended them. How central Ciconia himself
was in this process cannot be known as long as the surviving competition is so
scanty and the surviving pieces remain unattributed. To look at them all, including
Ciconia’s, without their contratenors, and to compare them with the survivals in
Egidi, SL2211 and the Padua fragments, makes it very clear that Ciconia was, with
his seemingly original creations, crowning a tradition that already existed and had
many conventions of its own. Whatever the young (maybe very young) Ciconia
brought to Italy from the north, it certainly included a greater readiness to adopt
the Italian motet than to impose a northern model upon it. It is with Du Fay rather
than Ciconia that the traditions of the French and Italian motet are brought to-
gether. Ciconia remains—​if only by accidents of survival and the taste of the Q15
scribe—​an isolated, excellent, original and mature surviving witness to a well-​
established and purely Italian motet tradition.

64 The epochal claim is made by Besseler, ‘Hat Matheus de Perusio Epoche gemacht?’, the demonstration

that Ciconia was a younger composer in Fallows, ‘Ciconia padre e figlio’.

 27
The Motet Collection of San Lorenzo 2211
(SL2211) and the Composer Hubertus
de Salinis

The magnificent reconstruction of the gathering structure and contents of the San
Lorenzo palimpsest by John Nádas and Andreas Janke will long be the starting point
for new work on its repertory.1 Like some other manuscripts of trecento repertory,
SL2211 is mostly organised by composer. The five caccias, however, unlike in the
other anthologies, are separated from the composer sections and presented together
in Gathering XVI,2 apparently all anonymously, and together with other additions of
international French repertory from Gathering XIV onwards. SL2211 is also the only
manuscript of trecento repertory to include a group of motets. This might at first suggest
that these, like the caccias, are segregated not by composer but by genre, and that they
represent an Italian trecento genre otherwise absent from the repertory manuscripts.3
Surviving in similar numbers to caccias, albeit mostly in fragments, motets are absent
from the composer groupings in those sources. But, in fact, the choice of Italian and
international motets in SL2211 is idiosyncratic, largely non-​Italian, presented anony-
mously, and does not herald a change of policy from the failure of other retrospective
anthologies to include motets. The ten motets in SL2211 are all in the final gathering,
XIX (see Fig. 27.1), and together with other French repertory and additions from
Gathering XIV onwards they form additions to the main retrospective Italian corpus
of madrigals and ballatas, arranged by composer. The motets follow the French songs
added anonymously in Gatherings XIV and XV (along with compositions by Paolo)
and the even later Gathering XVII with works by Piero Mazzuoli; they are additions
which were never planned as part of the core repertory composer groupings. The
SL2211 scribe had access to songs by Machaut that circulated outside the Machaut
manuscripts, but not to his motets, which, with few exceptions, did not circulate. Except

The original version of this paper (Bent, ‘The Motet Collection of San Lorenzo 2211’ in Calvia et al., The End
of the Ars Nova in Italy, 43–​68) and its present revision are dedicated to John Nádas. Reuse of the material was
permitted by Sismel –​Edizioni del Galluzzo (Florence).
1 Nádas and Janke, The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, and Janke, ‘Die Kompositionen’. See my review in PMM

26 (2017), 186–​98. The title was garbled after proofs and corrected in the next issue, 27 (2018), 99 and online.
I thank colleagues at Certaldo and by email for helpful comments, especially Elena Abramov-​van Rijk and
Michael Scott Cuthbert.
2 The three-​part Oseletto salvagio in Gathering III is listed as a caccia but, despite similar musical

techniques, Elena Abramov-​van Rijk (email of 2.12.2017) reports that it is usually now defined as a canonic
madrigal, not as a caccia or a caccia-​madrigal. Its poetic text is not at all that of a typical caccia, and it was not
included with the other caccias in Gathering XVI.
3 Motets are linked to caccias in the Capitulum: ‘Cacie (sive incalci), a simili per omnia formantur ut

motteti, salvo quod verba caciarum volunt esse aut omnes de septem, aut omnes de quinque sillabis.’ Burkard
and Huck, ‘Voces applicatae verbis’, 16.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0028
532 Italian Motets

Fig. 27.1 The structure of Gathering XIX in Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San
Lorenzo, MS 2211. Reproduced with permission from John Nádas and Andreas Janke
(eds.), The San Lorenzo Palimpsest: Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, Ms. 2211,
i. 47 (Libreria Musicale Italiana, Lucca, 2016) and Schwabe Verlag, Basel

for two of the three by Salinis, all the SL2211 motets are presented anonymously, even
the two Italian ones.
Five of the ten motets are widely circulated international pieces. Although Italian
motets (predominantly from the Veneto) are now recognised as a distinct genre, they
are not included in the main collections of trecento repertory (Ch. 26). Indeed, it was
the absence of motets from the anthologies and their often fragmentary survival that led
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 533

to this genre being overlooked for so long. But only two of the SL2211 motets are Italian
(nos. 210, Lux purpurata/​Diligite iustitiam and 213, Florentia mundi/​Marce pater), and
even they lack obvious Veneto connections—​one is by Jacopo da Bologna and the other
is about Florence.4 All earlier accounts of the contents of SL2211 (including Fig. 27.1)
read the title of cantus II as Parce; the colour separation of the new multispectral images
enabled Bonnie Blackburn to read the intended initial as M, as noted in Chapter 26.
The motet thus honours Marcus of Viterbo, who presided over a Chapter General of
the Franciscans in Florence in 1365, which can now be taken as the date of the motet.5
But even this Florentine compilation does not include the incomplete motet Principum
nobilissime known only from Pad1106 and attributed to Landini on the basis of the
text (me Franciscum), nor any others of the five non-​extant motets for which he was
paid nine shillings (pro quinque motectis) by Andrea da Firenze in 1379.6 As this text
is in praise of Andrea Contarini (Venetian doge 1367–​1382), it is unlikely to be one
of those unnamed Florentine motets; and there is no obvious reason for Landini to
have celebrated a Venetian doge. The two missing bifolios in Gathering XIX are mostly
accounted for by projected completions of works on their facing pages. At most, three
more short motets could have been accommodated on the missing pages, and only if
each occupied a single side.
The ten motets in SL2211 include five of the most widely circulated international
motets of the mid-​fourteenth century or later, each of which is preserved in from five
to fourteen further sources (see Table 27.1): 209, Flos ortus/​Celsa cedrus/​Quam magnus
pontifex; 211, Apta caro/​Flos virginum; 212, Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis; 215, Pantheon
abluitur/​Apollinis eclipsatur; 216, Impudenter circumivi/​Virtutibus laudabilis.7 Three
of these, nos. 209, Flos ortus; 211, Apta caro; 216, Impudenter circumivi, have been
attributed to Vitry with varying degrees of confidence. Three (nos. 209, Flos ortus; 211,
Apta caro; 215, Apollinis eclipsatur) are listed by their motetus parts in the Trém index of
1376 (Ch. 31). Four are in Ivrea or Trém; Rex Karole (212) is in neither, and may there-
fore be later, though probably from before 1380.8 The added triplum Pantheon voice
of Apollinis eclipsatur, hitherto known only from Coussemaker’s copy made from the
destroyed Stras manuscript, may also be later; it raises questions to be discussed below.
It is now the only one of the additional parts to Apollinis to survive in more than one
source. I shall tentatively suggest reasons for these particular choices, though they may
simply represent what was available to the compiler.

4 Elena Abramov-​van Rijk points out (email of 8.4.2021) that the celebration of the Lombard Luchino

Visconti (d. 1349) in Jacopo’s Lux purpurata would have been even less acceptable for the Florentines. But, a
generation later, both of Jacopo’s madrigals for Luchino, O in Italia and Lo lume vostro, appear in all the im-
portant Florentine trecento anthologies, including SL2211.
5 See Ch. 26 and Ex. 26.2.
6 The source of this payment is Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Conv. ss. Annunziata, vol. 841, f. 23, cited in

Taucci, ‘Fra Andrea dei Servi’, 102. Landini is never so called in the sources; Magister Franciscus is a more
appropriate appellation. In his 1980 NG1 article on Landini, Kurt von Fischer attributed three anonymous
motets to him as doubtful works: Florentia mundi speculum (SL2211 and Egidi; the motetus or second cantus
in SL2211 presented here was not yet known), Leonarde, pater inclite (Egidi), and Marce Marcum (Egidi and
GR224). Von Fischer’s attributions were retained in the NG2 revision by Gianluca D’Agostino. I see no reason
to support them, nor to assume that these were among the five motets specified.
7 Other widely circulated motets not present here include Colla iugo/​Bona condit and Degentis vita/​Cum

vix artidici.
8 Rex Karole, dated c. 1375 by Günther (CMM 39, pp. xxix–​xxxi), 1378 by Carolann Buff (‘Ciconia’s Equal-​

Cantus Motets’, 142–​51), is dedicated to the French King Charles V (1364–​80): CMM 39, pp. xxix–​xxxi.
Table 27.1 Motets in SL2211

SL Title SL2211 contents Other sources

206 Si nichil actuleris/​ tr, T, mo on recto Q15, no. 278, ff. R275v–​276,
R182r In precio precium A304v–​305; recopied stage III on II

207 Psallat chorus in tr, T, mo on verso Q15, no. 247, ff. R250v–​251,
R182v novo carmine/​ A279v–​280. Ct in Q15 only (a4);
Eximie pater Utrecht37, f. Vr identified by Michael
et regie Scott Cuthberta

208 Ihesu salvator tr, T, mo on recto Q15, no. 213, ff. R220v–​221,
R183r seculi/​Quo A249v–​250; verso recopied at stage
vulneratus scelere II; Ox213, f. 81r, black notation;
Stras, ff. 97v–​98 mo, T; no tr

209 Flos ortus/​Celsa tr on verso; recto missing Ivrea, ff. 9v–​10; Ca1328, f. 14v (tr, mo,
R183v cedrus/​Quam T; frag); Paris2444, f. 49r; Trém;
magnus pontifex Würz, f. 2r, end of mo; Paris22069,
f. 158v b; Darmstadt521, f. 235r–​v
text only

210 Lux purpurata/​ C2 and T on recto; C1 lost with Pad1475, f. 50v

R185r Diligite iustitiam f. 184v

211 Apta caro/​Flos mo and T on verso; tr on recto Ivrea, ff. 5v–​6 with Ct; ModA, ff.
R185v–​186r virginumc [sic], incomplete. Either a 10th 17v–​18; same Ct as Ivrea; Chantilly,
system was intended on f. 70r, or ff. 60v–​61; different Ct; Ca1328,
the scribe intended to complete ff. 10v–​11 (T and beginning of tr);
on the facing verso but did not Durham, ff. 338v–​339; no Ct; Trém
do so. A clef of uncertain pitch is
indeed visible on the verso.

212 Rex Karole/​Leticie tr on verso; recto missing Chantilly, ff. 65v–​66; tr, mo, T, Ct,
R186v pacis solus T; Basel72 recto, mo, solus T;
LoTNA, f. 1r; mo, Ct, and new Ct;
Stras, ff. 7v–​8; tr, T and solus T, but
labelled Ct and T; Washington1400,
f. 2r; mo only, frag.; Perugia2, f. Cv–​Dr
(strips 1 and 9), Ct and solus T, frag.

213 Florentia mundi/​ mo only Egidi, f. 2r –​original verso? (tr only)

R188r Marce pater

215 Pantheon abluitur/​ lacks contrapuntally essential Stras, ff. 64v–​65; 5 voices including
R188v–​189 Apollinis eclipsatur motetus (Zodiacum signis); additional triplum Pantheon abluitur.
Pantheon is otherwise only in Stras For thirteen other sources of all or
Apollinis (original tr) and T on part of Apollinis, without this added
verso, Pantheon abluitur on recto part, see Ch. 15
216 Impudenter tr on verso, not overwritten; Ivrea, ff. 4v–​5 with Ct and solus T;
R189v circumivi/​ recto missing Apt, ff. 13v–​14, tr, mo, Ct, T; Bern,
Virtutibus f. 18’ Ct only, unique, against solus Td;
laudabilis Brussels5170, Tr frag., mo, solus T;
Br19606, no. 6 with Ct and unique
solus T; Leiden342A, f. 1v tr frag.; Stras,
ff. 20v–​21 tr, mo, solus T; Troyes1397,
f. [230r] frag.; Würz, f. 1v; Tarragona1e
Plus two text-​only sources: see
Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de
Vitry’, 123.

a Further discussed in Fankhauser, ‘Recycling Reversed’, 57–​58.

b Identified in Cuthbert, ‘Monks, Manuscripts’, 122–​23, with a contratenor in Paris22069, on which see Everist,

‘A New Source’.
c This motet was once contained in a lost codex in the former ducal library, Pavia (item 84 of the inventory

drawn up in 1426; Milan, Biblioteca Braidense, MS AD XV.18.4). See Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, pp. xvi, 212.
d Discussed in Steiger, ‘Das Berner Chansonnier-​Fragment’, 57–​60.
e After the pastedown was lifted, this motet was identified by David Catalunya on Facebook, 29.10.2013.
Table 27.1 Continued

Attributions Comments

Q15: hubertus de salinis 2 × C2, with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on d, ç void col.
SL2211: Imbert’ d’ Salinis

Q15: Hubertus de salinis 2 × C1, with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on g. ç void col.
SL2211: no attribution On St Lambert, patron saint of Liège

Q15: hubertus de salinis 2 × C1, with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on f

Ox213: Ubertus depsalinis c time, no col.
SL2211: Hu’bert’ d’ Salinis On the passion of Christ, or Holy Week. II paraphrases stanza 2 of
the hymn Vexilla regis; T quotes the beginning of the hymn melody.

SL2211: no attribution Equal-​cantus motet 2 × C1 with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on f

attrib. Vitry by Leech-​Wilkinson On St Louis of Toulouse.
and Kügle on grounds of structure Vitry generally avoids breaking words with rests, either by
and stylef matching hockets and text or by leaving hockets untexted; this
motet does not do so, which might argue against his authorship.g

SL2211: no attribution Nearly equal cantus parts C1, C2, with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on d
Jacopo da Bologna (Pad1475)

SL2211: no attribution Final cadence on f

SL2211: no attribution The only tempus perfectum minor prolation motet in the ‘French’
Stras: Philippus Royllart repertory: final cadence on f

Egidi: anon. Transcribed in Bent, ‘Italian Motet’, and here Ch. 26. Lacks tenor.
SL2211: no attribution Equal cantus parts 2 × C1 with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on f

SL2211: no attribution Perhaps copied thus because compiler was looking for equal-​cantus
‘B. de Cluni’ in text; no other motets and mistook the 2 × C2 parts with opening imitation as
attributions in any source ‘essential’.
Original motet (Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis) has 10/​6–​12/​8
final cadence on f, but SL2211 version lacks proper cadence.

SL2211: no attribution Equal-​cantus motet 2 × C1 with 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence on f

attrib. Vitry in Coussemaker’s
transcription of Strash

f Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Related Motets’, 11; Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 124–​25.

g See Zayaruznaya, ‘Hockets’, 493.
h For his index and partial copy of Stras see Coussemaker, Strasbourg.
536 Italian Motets

Of the other five motets, only two are Italian—​nos. 210, Lux purpurata/​Diligite
iustitiam, and 213, Florentia mundi/​Marce pater—​ interspersed with the ‘interna-
tional’ ones. Each is known from just one other source. Jacopo’s Lux purpurata/​Diligite
iustitiam survives complete in the Padua fragments (Pad1475), and SL2211’s Marce
pater complements the cantus Florentia mundi from Egidi.9
The group is headed by the three known motets by Hubertus de Salinis (nos. 206–​8),
copied consecutively in what is now their earliest source.10 All three are also in Q15 a
few years later.11 In Q15 Psallat chorus in novo carmine/​Eximie pater et regie (207) has
an inessential and presumably added contratenor that is not in SL2211. Unlike some
Q15 contratenors, it was not added at stage II but copied integrally at stage I before
1425.12 Ihesu salvator seculi/​Quo vulneratus scelere also appeared anonymously in Stras
and is Salinis’s only motet in Ox213, ascribed, and in pride of place at the beginning of
Gathering V, the original starting point of that manuscript. I shall return to Salinis.
Six of the ten motets—​Psallat chorus/​Eximie pater (207); Flos ortus/​Celsa (209, in
Paris22069), Apta caro/​Flos virginum (211, with a contratenor in ModA and Ivrea,
and a different contratenor in Chantilly); Rex Karole (212); Apollinis eclipsatur (215);
Impudenter circumivi (216)—​survive elsewhere with one or more contratenors, and (in
the case of Apollinis) optional added triplum parts. None of those contratenors is in
SL2211, which (as far as can be judged, taking missing folios into account) confines
itself to three-​part versions. None of the motets is given with more than three voices, al-
though one combination, for Apollinis, is anomalous. Apollinis has no fewer than three
different added tripla in three different sources, all hitherto unique: a textless triplum in
Barc853,13 Psallentes zinzugia in LoTNA, and Pantheon abluitur in Stras. It is that Stras
voice which appears here together with the original triplum Apollinis, but the piece is
unperformable as presented in SL2211: it gives the central tenor voice, but lacks the
grammatically essential motetus Zodiacum signis that (unusually, in this and very few
other motets) provides the contrapuntal foundation below the tenor.14
No fewer than four of the motets (Apollinis, Rex Karole, Impudenter, and Salinis’s
Ihesu salvator) were in Stras, a collection thought to have conciliar links to the 1410s
(the date 1411 appeared within the main compilation). A possible connection here,
direct or indirect, gains significance from the fact that Stras was hitherto the unique
source of Apollinis’s added triplum part Pantheon abluitur.15

9 I identified the connection from the opening imitation. See Ch. 26 n. 51 and Ex. 26.2.
10 Nosow (NG2) calls them ‘an uneasy appropriation of Italian 14th-​century motet style’.
11 One (Psallat chorus/​Eximie pater) was identified in Utrecht37 by Michael Scott Cuthbert. He also

identified Salinis’s Credo no. 4 (Q15, ff. R79v–​81) in Houghton122; both in Cuthbert, ‘Hidden in Our
Publications’.
12 At least two of these motets date from Q15 stage I (Psallat chorus entirely, and Ihesu salvator partly

recopied at stage II; the hitherto unique Si nichil, now in what is probably a stage-​III recopy on stage-​II
paper and parchment, was probably also present in stage I), but they do not appear consecutively. For these
placements see Bent, Q15, i. Q15 compositions were sometimes recopied in order to add a contratenor, but
the only one of Salinis’s motets with a contratenor is wholly in stage I, and the recopies in this case were not for
that purpose. Both rectos of the Gloria Jubilacio have the text incipit following cantus II for a contratenor that
was not entered (Q15, no. 54, R62v–​64, stage I).
13 Although claimed in Gómez, ‘Apollinis’, as a five-​voice version, it seems to be in only four parts. Even

with drastic adjustments, a contratenor on the same opening marked Per sanctam civitatem does not fit: see
Ch. 16.
14 See Ch. 1 for middle-​voice tenors.
15 The triplum only of Apollinis also survives in Pad658; whether this source had an added part for Apollinis

is unknown, but unlikely. Jacopo’s motet is in Pad1475.

 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 537

A picture begins to emerge of the possible reasons for the choice of motets in SL2211:

• The number of voices, three, appears to have been one of the bases for selection. No
optional contratenors are included, even where they exist in other sources.
• All have different texts for triplum and motetus, as in all international motets and
most Italian motets, though some Veneto motets—​the doge motet Marce Marcum
and some by Ciconia and later composers—​have a single text in both voices.
• Some French motets have texted voices that are differentiated in range, though
most are equal or nearly so; all the SL2211 motets have two equal-​or very nearly
equal-​range texted upper parts plus tenor.16
• The SL2211 compiler has chosen motets where the two upper parts have fairly
equal activity as well as range. This is particularly striking in the case of Apollinis,
where the true motetus Zodiacum, which is slower-​moving and contrapuntally es-
sential, has been sacrificed in favour of an inessential additional triplum part. The
compiler’s preference for motets with equal cantus parts seems to have resulted in
his misunderstanding of that composition.
• Nearly all motets in the Italian repertory have 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadences on f
(‘major’) or d (‘minor’), rising parallel fifths in the upper part over a stepwise de-
scending tenor. About half the French fourteenth-​century repertory has 6/​3–​8/​5,
half 10/​6–​12/​8 cadences, with a few irregular endings. None of the ten motets in
SL2211 has a 6/​3–​8/​5 cadence; all have some form of 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence, one
on g, two on d, seven on f.
• The choice of motets in SL2211 seems to favour echo openings. Rex Karole has
opening echo imitation and, like many Italian motets (including Florentia mundi),
is in perfect time; it sounds superficially a bit like an Italian motet.17 Salinis’s
Ihesu salvator and Psallat chorus have opening echo imitation; the added triplum
Pantheon abluitur briefly echoes in imitation the opening of its true triplum
Apollinis eclipsatur; Impudenter circumivi and Apta caro have spaced but not echo
openings, as does Jacopo’s Lux purpurata/​Diligite iustitiam.
• The absence of Ciconia from this manuscript during the decade after his death
again suggests that the circulation of his motets may have been mainly limited to
the Veneto.

All these choices favour characteristics of the Italian motet, albeit in the case of
Apollinis misunderstood by the compiler. It may be that these motets were selected not
only because they were widely available, but because they were more like Italian tre-
cento motets or could be made to appear more like them. That raises the unanswer-
able question why Italian motets that better meet these criteria were not included. Do
the motets in SL2211 represent choices by the compiler, or did he simply copy what
happened to be available to him?

16 I have called these second voices mo[tetus], but it would usually be equally or more appropriate, as with

Ciconia’s and other Italian motets, to call the equal upper voices cantus I and II (C1 and C2 in the tables).
17 This is the only French motet in PMFC 5 in perfect tempus with minor prolation. In CMM 39 Günther

labels as contratenor a voice found only in Chantilly; the parts she labels solus tenor and [tenor] are correctly
labelled in Stras as tenor and contratenor.
538 Italian Motets

Various dates have been given for the compilation of SL2211 and additions to it in
relation to Sq. The additions cannot be very much later than the corpus if indeed the
scribe is recognisably the same throughout, as Nádas and Janke assert, though this is
very hard to ascertain, given the state of damage. The difficulty of making judgements
about script and ink colour is also an impediment to determining whether the song-​
fillers within the main corpus were entered at the same time as the main items on those
openings, or over how long a time spread. John Nádas’s identification of the scribe of
SL2211 with that of the Gloria and Credo added later on ff. 82v–​85r of Lo29987 invites
further exploration of a possible Medici connection.18 Some of the contents of Lo29987
have Visconti associations, but the first folio of the surviving portion of the divided
manuscript bears a Medici coat of arms.19 This, but especially the scribal connection,
could bring the chronology of those two manuscripts together in Florence in the Medici
orbit at an earlier date than hitherto suggested for Lo29987. Since San Lorenzo was the
parish church of the Medici, it cannot be ruled out that the music manuscript reused
for the Campione had indeed been associated with them, though Nádas and Janke
prudently do not commit to a Medici provenance.20 These relationships deserve fur-
ther exploration; there seems no reason to challenge the judgement that this scribe was
working in Florence.
Another possible point of reference for the compilation could be the employment
of Ugolino of Orvieto as a singer at Florence Cathedral in 1417–​18.21 An earlier as-
sumption that a whole gathering might have been devoted to him was tempered by the
discovery of other ascriptions within that gathering, notably to Salinis, as noted above.
But he was accorded at least a grouping if not a whole gathering of his own, perhaps
reflecting his late arrival and short tenure in Florence. Ugolino and Piero must be the
youngest composers represented, reflected in their position after the French section.
The main corpus was not terminated by the provision of capitals, which were
anticipated by guide letters, so there was no hard break between the core repertory and
the added gatherings; the manuscript was never completed as intended. Indeed, as can
be demonstrated for other manuscripts, it may have remained unbound for a while, pre-
sumably as a growing collection, at least as far as the additions are concerned, but within
a shorter time-​span than, for example, Q15 or Ox213.22 The relationship between Sq
and SL2211, and indeed between Lo29987 and SL2211, and their order of compilation,
is one of the most pressing and interesting questions for future work.

18 Nádas, ‘Some Further Observations’, 147. He there refers to the ‘main’ scribe of SL2211, perhaps implying

others, but in the latest publication a single scribe is favoured (Nádas and Janke, The San Lorenzo Palimpsest,
i. 18 and 22: ‘a single hand’). That, and most other studies by Nádas referred to here, are reprinted in Nádas,
Arte Psallentes. The scribal characteristics of Lo29987 are described in Di Bacco, ‘Alcune nuove osservazioni’,
191 and 195, and Gozzi, ‘Alcune postille’. Lo29987 was part of a larger manuscript of at least 185 folios, as the
surviving leaves were originally numbered 98–​185. The question of scribal identity in SL2211 is crucial for
assessing the later additions, though certainty may never be possible.
19 Opinion has been divided as to whether this coat of arms is of the 15th or the 19th century, perhaps

added to enhance its sale to the British Museum in 1876. Michael Scott Cuthbert judges it to be 19th-​c.
Stefano Campagnolo has suggested that the dating could be resolved with a simple scientific examination of
the blue pigment, and prefers to see the stemma as a mark of ownership rather than of patronage (email of
2.1.2018). See Campagnolo, ‘Il Frammento Brescia 5’, 82 n. 62. He reveals further highly significant scribal
interconnections between Florentine manuscripts.
20 For San Lorenzo in this period, see Gaston and Waldman (eds.), San Lorenzo, especially Gardner von

Teuffel, ‘The Altarpieces of San Lorenzo’.

21 D’Accone, ‘Music and Musicians’, 106.
22 As suggested in Nádas and Janke, The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, i. 18.
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 539

Hubertus de Salinis

Hubertus de Salinis occupies a special position in SL2211 as the only named composer
of any of the motets (two of the three) and French-​texted songs (three), and the only
non-​Italian to be named anywhere in the manuscript.23 (See Table 27.2.) The little we
know about his biography is due to the fundamental researches of John Nádas and
Giuliano Di Bacco, who were able to reconstruct part of his ecclesiastical career from
two papal documents of 1403 and 1409.24 I am very grateful to John Nádas for sending
me the documents and his readings, on which the following summary is based.
In a papal response dated 29 May 1403 to a supplication from Ubertus de Salinis, the
Roman Pope Boniface IX greeted him as a canon of Braga, referring to an earlier sup-
plication in which he had been allowed to proceed to minor orders, despite being the
illegitimate son of a priest and a single woman, and to a single benefice sine cura, after
which time he would be given permission to attain full holy orders and receive all forms
of benefices. In fact, he was eventually promoted to the diaconate and was able to receive
the canonicate with prebend at Braga that he now held. He also exchanged a benefice at
the church of St Peter de Torrados for one (presumably more lucrative) at the parish
church of Sanctus Salvator in Taagilde in the diocese of Braga.25 With this letter the
pope allows Hubertus to increase his beneficial portfolio by receiving greater favours,
and assures him that no one can deny him this privilege.26 His naming as a deacon in
1403 has led to a presumption that he was then below the canonical age of twenty-​five
for the priesthood, though this cannot necessarily be assumed. The letter is crossed out,
but a marginal note explains that the corrected letter is entered again, in the first year
of Gregory XII’s reign; this revised letter has not been found. John Nádas believes that
the corrections were needed simply due to an error in the original reading; lines 6 and 7
did not correctly represent his clerical status and the beneficial career already attained.
Nothing in this document indicates that Salinis was in Italy in the period from 1403.
The second papal letter is from Alexander V, dated 10 July 1409, three days after his
inauguration at the Council of Pisa. It names Humbertus [sic] de Salinis, still a canon
at Braga cathedral, as a familiar of the newly elected pope and singer in the papal
chapel (‘familiari nostro . . . in capella nostra cantor existis’).27 The letter grants him an

23 The article by van den Borren in MGG1 records him as ‘Hubertus de Salinis’, without giving alternative

spellings at the head of the article, though he does note the Chantilly ascription to ‘Hymbertus’. He points
to various corresponding place names in France and Walloon Belgium, favouring Slins near Liège, as noted
above. MGG2 (Robert Nosow) follows its predecessor in prioritising ‘Hubertus de Salinis’, but gives alterna-
tive forms.
24 The first document is Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Registra Lateranensia (AAV, RL), vol. 111 (Boniface

IX, 1403, anno 14, lib. 158), f. 182v, dated from Rome, 4 Kl. Junii Anno XIV (29 May 1403). The letter was
briefly reported by Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 71–​72, and anticipated in more detail (but with some
ambiguities) by Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, to whom they had communicated it in advance of
their publication.
25 Or Tuagilde =​Tagilde, south of Braga (not the small community of Tangil north of Braga, as Nosow

suggests in MGG2).
26 A copy of the letter goes to the archbishops of Vienne and Braga.
27 A letter from Alexander V to Salinis, dated Pisa, 10 July 1409, AAV, RL, vol. 138 (Alexander V, anno 1,

lib. 5), ff. 105r–​106r: ‘dilecto filio Humberto de Salinis canonico Bracharensi, familiari nostro, . . . in capella
nostra cantor existis’. See Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels and Italian Sources’, 71–​72 n. 77. According
to Nosow the letter also appears to name the bishop-​elect of Silva, also in Portugal, as Salinis’s legal repre-
sentative. See Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, 89. Nosow (NG2) takes this document to imply
that he was a priest (aged twenty-​five or more) and that his birthdate can therefore be set between 1378 and
540 Italian Motets

Table 27.2 Mass music and motets by Hubertus de Salinis

Composition Q15 Ox213

Gloria Jubilacio, a3 54: R62v–​64 | A63v–​65

Gloria, a3 63: R78v–​79 | A79v–​80

Credo, a3 55: R64v–​66 | A65v–​67; pair,

unicum

Credo, a3 64: R79v–​81 | A80v–​82; irreg.

paired

Salve regina, ‘Virgo mater 232: R236v–​237 | A265v–​266,

ecclesie’, a3 unicum

Ihesu salvator seculi/​Quo 213: R220v–​221 | A249v–​250 Ox213, no. 179, f. 81,a
vulneratus scelere, a3 full black notation,
Ubertus de psalinis

Si nichil actuleris/​In precio 278: R275v–​276 | A304v–​305

precium, a3

Psallat chorus in novo carmine/​ 247: R250v–​251 | A279v–​280

Eximie pater et regie, a3,
on St Lambert

a This is his only piece in Ox213, and was the original beginning of the collection, gathering V, the earliest
gathering to be copied. In SL2211 the three Salinis motets (206, 207, 208) have voices below each other on a
single page, but in all cases the Motetus follows the tenor: Tr T Mo. Salinis is the only non-​Italian composer to
have pieces attributed to him in SL2211.
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 541

Table 27.2 Continued

SL2211 Venice145 Other

Venice145, Utrecht37, III (Strohm, The Rise, 100)

ff. 15v–​19

Q1 verso (I and first staff of T only), black

notation [anon.]

Houghton122, identified by M. Cuthbert

[anon.]

208, R183, black notation Stras, ff. 97v–​98 (not transcribed in

Hu’bert’ d’ Salinis Coussemaker, Strasbourg) [anon.]

206, R182, black notation

Imbert d’ Salinis

207, R182v, black notation Utrecht37, f. Vr; identified by M. Cuthbert

(anon. here) [anon.]
542 Italian Motets

additional lucrative canonicate and prebend at Lisbon Cathedral, implicitly in absentia,

worth 80 livres tournois annually, vacated on the promotion of its holder Fernando to
the archbishopric of Lisbon. That he succeeded an archbishop (albeit just to a benefice)
might imply that Salinis was in fact already quite senior, or at least specially favoured.
His benefices at Taagilde and Braga also amount to 80 livres tournois. In addition, he
holds an expectative benefice at Coimbra (worth 50 livres tournois) and one at Evora,
which he must relinquish in order to take the Lisbon benefice. These benefices confirm
his previous Portuguese career, and have led to a presumption that he had come to the
council with the king of Portugal’s large embassy. Salinis is not in the first full listing of
the chapel of John XXIII, dated 18 March 1413, where Antonio Zacara heads the list and
is called ‘magister’, here and in the April list.28 It is therefore assumed that Salinis was by
then no longer in the papal chapel; there is no further record of him.
The name Hubertus or Humbertus appears both with and without an ‘m’, but these
are not simple variants; there are distinct traditions for the two names.29 Hubert was a
venerated eighth-​century bishop of Liège; the name in various forms but without the
‘m’ is rare in southern Europe. Humbert is a name particularly associated with Savoy
and south of the Alps, so ‘Hubert’ might well have been assimilated to ‘Humbert’ or
Umberto in Italy and Iberia. The Veneto manuscripts Ox213 and Q15, accustomed to
migrants’ names from the Low Countries, unanimously call him Hubertus or Ubertus,
without ‘m’. The Italian scribe of Chantilly uses the—​perhaps for him—​more familiar
‘Hymbert’. The San Lorenzo ascriptions are hard to read, but both forms appear to be
present.30 Given that all archival or musical sources of the name are Italian, the presence
in some of those Italian sources of the almost uniquely northern form without ‘m’ may
count as a lectio difficilior favouring Hubert, and thence a Liège origin. Nádas and Janke
standardise his name to ‘Humbertus’ in their inventory of SL2211; the first papal docu-
ment calls him Ubertus, the other Humbertus.
Charles van den Borren named the composer only as Hubertus in his article in
MGG1, though noting the Chantilly variant. He had no biographical documents, but
he made the case for the composer’s origin in Slins (Salinis), a demesne that belonged in
the fourteenth century to the cathedral chapter of St Lambert of Liège, a few kilometres

1384, but as the document does not name him as a priest this cannot be taken for granted; many men older
than twenty-​five were still described as deacons or subdeacons, having never reached the priesthood (in-
cluding cardinals).

28 Nádas, ‘Further Notes’, 175–​76, reports the three surviving accounts volumes from the papacy of John

XXIII, preserved among the Strozzi papers in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence: Magl. XIX. 80 (1410),
Magl. XIX. 79 (1410–​12), Magl. XIX. 81 (1413–​14), citing Waldmüller, ‘Materialien’. Nosow (NG2, s.v.
Hymbert de Salinis) says that he was no longer in the chapel by Jan. 1413, but that list is not a full one. Zacara
then heads the list and may have been magister cappelle, though not so named. See Nádas, ‘Further Notes’, and
Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Zacara e i suoi colleghi’.
29 Leofranc Holford-​Strevens observes that Humbert (Germanic, ‘warrior-​bright’) is a name particularly

associated with Savoy (and thence, as Umberto, with the Italian royal family); the Dominican Humbert of
Romans was from Romans-​sur-​Isère in south-​eastern France. Hubert (‘mind-​bright’) was a bishop of Liège,
whose name in various forms (for example, Hupperts) became widespread in northern Germany and the Low
Countries.
30 Ascriptions in the musical sources are as follows: Q15, H de Salinis or Hubertus de salinis; Ox213,

Ubertus de psalinis; Ch, f. 46, En la saison carries an ascription to Hymbert de Salinis, but for a song that may
be spurious anyway. SL2211, Nádas and Janke, The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, i. 20, read two of the ascriptions
as ‘Imbertus’ (R177r and R182r), and another as ‘Hubertus’ (R183r); in the other cases it is not clear (to me)
whether there is an abbreviation sign over the ‘u’. They report for R175v M’ Hu, R177 Imbert, R179 Hu t’ d’ S,
R182 Imbert’ d’ Salinis, R183 Hu’bert’ d’ Salinis.
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 543

from that known musical centre. The Latinisation of Slins as ‘de salinis’ or ‘de psalinis’ is
documented in Liège archives.31 Van den Borren noted the dedication of Psallat chorus
to St Lambert, as well as the name Hubert being relatively restricted in the Middle
Ages to that area. Additional support for a liégeois origin comes from the texts of the
motets. Two of Salinis’s three motets are based on older works. Both texts of Psallat
chorus/​Eximie pater are adapted to celebrate St Lambert, the patron saint of Liège, from
a widely circulated St Nicholas motet on the tenor Aptatur.32 ‘Aptatur’ (=​‘fitting’, or
‘adapted’) ends triplum and motetus parts in both motets, though the Salinis motet is no
longer on that tenor. The words Domine Nicholae and Hac die, Nicholae in the two orig-
inal texts are here replaced by Sancte Lamberte; other variants are minor. In Q15, tenor
and contratenor join the upper voices between the fermatas with the emphatic words
sancte Lamberte, the only text in those parts.33
Like those of Psallat chorus/​Eximie pater, the texts of Si nichil/​In precio are taken from
a thirteenth-​century composition, in this case two stanzas of a three-​part conductus in
score, which starts with Salinis’s motetus underlaid to the music, followed by the triplum
stanza.34 In Salinis’s setting, the equal cantus parts set the two texts with nearly simulta-
neous syllabification over a free accompanying tenor in the Italian manner. These short
texts, taken from thirteenth-​century models, lead to motets that are exceptionally short
for the early fifteenth century, even where the music is extended with textless canonic
or sequential interludes, as here. Ihesu salvator/​Quo vulneratus is another strikingly
short motet. Since two of Salinis’s three motets use older texts, could these texts also be
pre-​existent, although not yet identified? Although many texts start with these words,
I could not find elsewhere the version that mentions Judas.
Nádas and Giuliano Di Bacco collected some twenty references in papal documents
to clerics called ‘de Salinis’, nearly all explicitly from the Besançon diocese.35 Nosow
places his birth categorically in Salins-​les-​Bains near Besançon.36 The Besançon affilia-
tion is lacking, however, in both documents affecting our Hubert, which could support

31 I am grateful to Catherine Saucier, email of 19.2.2017, for the following references:

• Four payments from the Cathedral of Liège, Compterie des Anniversaires, register numbers 80 (1418);
83 (1426); 84 (1432); and 87 (1442) for the celebration of the anniversary of Hermannus de Salinis
(also spelt ‘Psalinis’ in register 87) in the month of February.
• One payment from the collegiate church of Sainte-​Croix, accounts of the grain, register number 206
(1354?) to Jacobus de Salinis (possibly a canon of Sainte-​Croix?) for singing a responsory on the feast
of St Lambert.
32 The older motet, with both texts, is in Mo, fascicle 4, no. 51 (60), ff. 98v–​100; Bamberg, no. 30;

Darmstadt3471; Paris11411; and Lwa33327. On Aptatur see now Bradley, ‘Choosing a Motet Tenor’, and
Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus. The texts of the anonymous motet O Maria virgo/​O Maria maris
stella in Q15, MuEm and Pad1106 are likewise adapted from an older motet, also in Mo fascicle 4 and else-
where: see Bent, Bologna Q15, I, 217, and here Chs. 1, 26, 28.
33 Mo variants include the following: Tr: tuo tegmine (Q15 has the metrically less correct tuo regimine);

domine Nicholae (Q15 Sancte Lamberte); aptatur (Q15 wrongly optatur). Mo: hac die Nicholae (Q15 Sancte
Lamberte); nos doce (Q15 doce nos). Nosow (NG2) suggests that ‘Salinis seems to have travelled provided with
ready-​made texts, which explains the re-​use of 13th-​century French motet or conductus texts’.
34 The motetus imagines a contemporary reception of Homer and Croesus; Homer’s literary prowess would

now mean nothing, while Croesus’ wealth would bring him friendship, praise, and honour. See CMM 11/​VII.
Reaney reports text in other sources including Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel, 34. In precio precium is in Fauvel,
p.mus. 16; the first lines are from Ovid, Fasti I. 217. Florence29 no. 652, f. 227r–​v, two stanzas of a conductus,
has In precio precium underlaid in one voice, with Salinis’s triplum text Si nichil following as a second stanza.
35 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 71–​72.
36 See Nosow, Hubertus de Salinis, in MGG2. In his earlier dissertation (‘Florid and Equal-​ Discantus
Motet’, 98 and 87), however, because of prepublication access to the information about his beneficial career in
Portugal, he called him a ‘Portuguese composer’ and ‘from the diocese of Braga, in northern Portugal’.
544 Italian Motets

him not being from that diocese. Nothing else associates the composer with Besançon,
which seems not to have had a significant musical tradition at the time. Northern
musicians were in demand in Italy and the Iberian peninsula, as evidenced by the
careers of Ciconia, the Lantins and, only a little later, Du Fay. The name Hubert, and the
motet texts for St Lambert, make it in my view more likely that he was from Slins near
the known musical centre of Liège, given that Salinis is a documented Latinisation of
that place-​name.37
Doubt hangs over the attribution of what was hitherto his only song, En la saison,
unique to Chantilly (f. 46r; and see Ch. 30). There is also doubt about the dedicatee
and date, despite Ursula Günther’s careful heraldic work. In an ingenious and wide-​
ranging study, involving heraldry, genealogy and historical connections, Günther as-
sociated two ballades with members of the du Guesclin family.38 Bonté de corps (Reina,
f. 55) is unambiguously tied to Bertrand du Guesclin (d. 1364) by an acrostic as well as
by the heraldic content of the text. The ballade En la saison specifically refers to the du
Guesclin family heraldry and contains references to an ‘olivier’ and a ‘pierre’.39
Günther concluded that the ballade was in fact written in the early 1390s for the
son of Thomasse le Blanc, dame de la Roberie et de la Bouverie (‘la pierre’, she female,
‘pierre’ the name of her father, ‘blanche’ the family name), wife of Bertrand and mother
of Olivier du Guesclin, who from 1386 was seigneur of Brisarte. He died before 1397
but seems to have been alive in the early 1390s. Günther leaves open the possibility that
the ballade could instead refer to a younger grandson of Thomasse called Olivier, about
whom nothing is known, but would place En la saison at the latest before 1398. The
younger candidate might have to be considered if a later date for the song became neces-
sary to reconcile with authorship by Salinis.
The ballade carries an ascription to Salinis at the head of the page in Chantilly, but the
name of Jo. Cuvelier (or Cunelier; u and n are often indistinguishable) appears under the
tenor in the same hand. Gilbert Reaney assumed that just the tenor was by Cuvelier, but
Günther rightly thought this unlikely. Cuvelier may well be Jean le Cuvelier, chronicler
of Bertrand de Guesclin, the high-​ranking Constable of France, buried with royalty in
St-​Denis. The Règles de la seconde rhétorique refer to a poet Jacquemart le Cuvelier from
Tournai, possibly the author of that chronicle, completed c. 1387, and thus well placed
to be the author at least of the text of the ballade honouring a member of that family,
perhaps Bertrand’s son. ‘Jo. Cunelier’ is the composer of another Chantilly ballade, on
Gaston Febus, Se Galaas (f. 38), which, as Günther points out, has strong stylistic and
notational affinity with En la saison, both of which use full and void forms of both black
and red notation. Other works in Chantilly, anonymous or with cryptic ascriptions,
have been linked to this composer on stylistic and notational grounds.40 Without the

37 Strohm, The Rise, 100, calls Hubertus de Salinis ‘a contemporary of Ciconia from the diocese of Liège’.
38 Günther, ‘Zwei Balladen’. The heraldry is discussed in great detail, ‘a la barre vermeille’ at 23.
39 Günther offers a corrected version of the text and music, which was taken over by Reaney in CMM 11/​

VII. She calls it one of the latest works in Chantilly, by a very young Salinis (‘Zwei Balladen’, 38).
40 Lorsques Arthus (Ch, no. 61, f. 40v) and Se Geneine (Ch, no. 63, f. 41v) have cryptic superscriptions,

which Gilbert Reaney reads as ‘Jo Cun[elier]’ (‘The Manuscript Chantilly’), and Günther as Jo Cuvelier (‘Zwei
Balladen’), a reading adopted in Reaney’s edition. It is hard to share their confidence; Plumley and Stone
(Chantilly Codex) are more cautious and read it as ‘J.O.’. However, the stylistic and notational usage between all
four pieces and the anonymous Medée fu (Ch, no. 26, f. 24v) is so strikingly similar that the same composer is
quite possible.
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 545

subsequent documentary evidence for Salinis in 1403 and 1409, Günther thought En la
saison must be a very early work, under the influence of Cuvelier. In linking the marginal
drawings in Chantilly f. 37 to artist(s) associated with Boniface IX, Francesca Manzari
raises the possibility of a relationship of the manuscript to the court of Boniface, who
signed Salinis’s first surviving documentation in 1403.41 Other considerations point to a
later dating of Chantilly in the 1410s, with these artists working after the pope’s death in
1405, possibly for a different patron.
Günther’s sense of Salinis’s likely age was based on the span between a ballade written
before 1398 and his presence in the later manuscripts Ox213 and Q15, and the assump-
tion that his Gloria Jubilacio was written as a prayer for the end of the Schism in 1417.
Since Günther’s article, the above-​reported biographical documentation of Salinis in
the first decade of the century has come to light. It now seems more likely that this
Gloria was composed in 1409, referring as it does to a newly elected pope (Alexander
V) who will bring the Schism to an end.42 As Salinis’s career can now be documented
only in the first decade of the fifteenth century, if the assumptions that he was still young
are correct, and if the identity proposed for Cuvelier holds, Cuvelier seems the likelier
author for a piece dedicated to someone who died before 1398. Accepting that the date
is too early for Salinis to be the composer, Lucia Marchi suggests that he could be the
performer responsible for its transmission into Chantilly.43
Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone question the Salinis ascription of En la saison and
favour attributing the entire piece to Cuvelier on grounds of context, musical style
and notational links to his other ascribed composition (Se Galaas) and perhaps to
the two other Chantilly songs that may be by Cuvelier. They note that Salinis has no
known connections ‘to the Avignon papacy or to the French circles in which so many
Chantilly composers appear to have been active’.44 His status as a deacon in 1403 has
suggested that Salinis could still have been relatively young (even though succeeding an
archbishop-​elect to a benefice, as noted above), perhaps born in the early 1380s. If that
were so, he cannot be the composer of a notationally and heraldically complex composi-
tion dating from the early 1390s, probably composed closer in time to Cuvelier’s activity,
in the 1380s, and much more elaborate notationally and stylistically than anything else

41 Manzari, ‘The International Context’, 31.

42 Lacking biographical guidance, van den Borren associated the Gloria Jubilacio with the election of
Martin V in 1417, which ended the Schism (as reported in Reaney CMM 11/​VII, p. ix). Now that Salinis
is known to have been associated with Pietro Filargo around the time of his election as Pope Alexander V,
documented as a familiar of the new pope and singer in his chapel, a date in 1409 seems likelier, even if the
hope that this election would end the Schism proved premature. This earlier dating was first proposed in
print by Strohm, The Rise, 100). Without access to the new documents, Strohm proposed that he was active
in Florence around 1410. This redating was affirmed at a conference held at the Library of Congress on 1–​3
Apr. 1993, later published as Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 71 n. 77 and Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’,
29 (here Ch. 30). For the Gloria, see CMM 11/​VII, vii, ix, and xxv, and Il Codice T.III.2, ed. Ziino, 50. The
trope text is in AH 47, 279 and is set by Salinis as duets. The trope is as follows: ‘Gloria, jubilacio | uni Deo et
simplici, | vero Christi vicario, | nostro summo pontifici. || Laudet chorus ecclesie | unum Christi vicarium;
| benedicat, glorificet, | adoretque non dubium. || Gratias tibi ferimus | quia, excluso scismate, | sacro dedisti
pneumate | verum papam quem credimus. || Fili patris obediens, | agnus Dei purissime, | carisma sanctum
tribuens | unionis sanctissime. || Tu tulisti de medio | scisma donante flamine | ut esset pax et unio | sub veri
pape culmine. || Patris sedens ad dexteram, | solus sanctus et dominus, | regeque sponsam dexteram, | papam
nostrum quem colimus.’
43 Marchi, ‘Traces of Performance’, 14.
44 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 133–​34 and 150.
546 Italian Motets

attributed to Salinis.45 The SL2211 songs by him appear to be much simpler in style—​as
are his mass movements and motets, which casts further doubt on his authorship of
the complex ballade. Style alone would not necessarily discount his authorship; Sus un
fontaine, for example, is an essay in proportional and mensural subtlety found nowhere
else in Ciconia’s works. But I agree that En la saison is probably by Cuvelier; it seems
very unlikely that, as a young composer with an early beneficial career in Portugal,
Salinis had contacts with, or reasons to honour, the du Guesclins.
However, the fact that Salinis was known as a composer to the Chantilly compiler
favours a date of compilation of that manuscript around and after 1410, whether or not
he composed the ballade. It is indeed because of the ascription of the ballade En la saison
to ‘Hymbert de Salinis’, who was apparently already in the service of Pietro Filargo at the
time of his election as Alexander V in 1409, that Plumley and Stone associate the later
parts of the Chantilly repertory with the circles around this pope; they suggest that
the actual compilation may have started under his aegis and continued after his death,
and that Chantilly was compiled between c. 1409 and 1420, later than previous datings
and in the same decade as SL2211.46 All Salinis’s other works—​three motets, four mass
movements, and his Salve regina—​are in Q15, hitherto all unica except the motet Ihesu
salvator and a concordance in Houghton122 for the Credo Q15, no. 64, discovered by
Michael Scott Cuthbert. Most of them (probably all originally) are in the old layer be-
fore 1425.47
Four of the added French songs in Gathering XVIII of SL2211 (all unica) are the
only pieces in void notation, though they again appear to be by the same scribe.48 These
are nos. 198 (R175v); 200 (R176v); 201 (R177r); and 204 (R178v–​179). (See Table 27.3.)

Table 27.3 Songs by or possibly by Salinis

Song SL2211 Chantilly

En la saison que toute riens (ballade), f. 46 unicum:

a3; opus dubium? J. Cuvelier? Hymbert de Salinis
Tenor Jo. Cuvelier
Con plus (rondeau?), a2 198, R175v: ‘M Hu’, void notation
J’ai . . . (rondeau?), a2 201, R177r: Imbert, void notation
unidentified ballade, a3 204, R178v–​179r: Hu’t d’ S, void notation

Other possible candidates:

Las. . . (virelai), a3 199, R176r: anon. in same group
T . . . (rondeau?), a3 200, R176v: anon., void notation
unidentified virelai, a3 202, R177v: anon. in same group
Adieu plaisir (ballade), a3 205, R179v–​180

45 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, do not cite this chronological problem as a reason for discounting

the ascription to Salinis.

46 Plumley and Stone, Codex Chantilly, 181.
47 Nosow observes (NG2) that the troped Salve regina ‘Virgo mater ecclesie’ ‘is otherwise set only by English

composers; it reflects the international milieu at the Council of Pisa, and was probably composed in the divisi
notation current in papal circles’. See Bent, ‘Divisi and a versi’.
48 Reported by Janke, ‘Die Kompositionen’, 33.
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 547

This is particularly striking given that Salinis’s motet Ihesu salvator is one of only four
pieces in black notation in Ox213. It was the showpiece at the beginning of the orig-
inal compilation (the current Gatherings V–​VIII), the first recto of Gathering V,
with an enormous capital I and monogram ‘YHS’. A more formal script was used
at the comparable place at the beginning of Q15 (f. R1); and Bartolomeo da Carpi
prescribed bona nota for the black notation in which the Lamentations he requested
for his memorial volume were copied.49 Another black-notation piece in Ox213
is Ciconia’s O felix templum, in what I presume to be its original Italian notation.
Salinis’s motet in its presumably original full-black French notation contrasts inter-
estingly with his void-​notation songs in SL2211. All the contents of Q15 (except the
later-​added textless song no. 109) are in black notation. The (full) clefs and (void)
custodes of the SL2211 songs appear to be consistent with those of the black-​notation
pieces, so there is no prima facie reason to challenge the claim that all are by the same
scribe, even though the void note-​bodies are larger than and differently formed from
full-​black notes. Three of the four void-​notation songs in SL2211 are ascribed to
Salinis. These ascriptions are very striking, as all the other French songs (apart from
one by Ugolino) are the fifty-​four anonymous unica, or the anonymously presented
known songs of international circulation by Machaut, Senleches, and others. It is pos-
sible that the fourth void-​notation song, the three-​voice rondeau no. 200, could also
be by Salinis—​perhaps reflecting an authorial notational preference—​and the other
anonymous songs appearing consecutively with them are also candidates. So at least
three songs in SL2211, nos. 198, 201 and 204, are attributed to him, and possibly four
(the void-​notation songs) or more (nos. 199 and 202) may be by him. They remain
untranscribed and incompletely decipherable. In positing void notation as a possible
authorial preference, we should remember that his only motet in Ox213 is in full black
notation. But that could well have been because it was the first piece, and presented
conservatively, not uncommon for opening pages or pieces, as just mentioned for the
opening recto of Q15.
The two ascribed rondeaux (nos. 198 and 201) are both for two equal texted voices.50
No. 203, ascribed to Ugolino, is also a two-​voice piece (but a ballade with differentiated
ranges) and adjacent to a three-​voice ballade by Salinis with macaronic text (no. 204).
But the other items in this consecutive group, nos. 199, 202, 205, and the fourth void-​
notation piece, no. 200, all directly precede his three motets (nos. 206–​8) and may also
be candidates for authorship by Salinis. The recto for no. 205 is not overwritten and
contains the contratenor. These songs seem to be much simpler in style and notation
than En la saison, hitherto his only ascribed song, further bringing his authorship of
that ballade into question.
It is perhaps noteworthy that no works by Salinis are preserved in ModA together
with those of Matteo da Perugia, since both composers were in the service of the Pisan
Pope Alexander V (Pietro Filargo).51 Although Filargo must be suspected of strong mu-
sical persuasions and tastes, corroborated perhaps by the connection with his supporter,
the music-​loving Pietro Emiliani, whom he promptly promoted to the bishopric of

49 Bent, ‘Pietro Emiliani’s Chaplain’.

50 The then-​known repertory of equal-​voice songs was catalogued by Fallows, ‘Two Equal Voices’.
51 Stone, ‘Lombard Patronage’, addresses Filargo’s patronage of Matteo da Perugia.
548 Italian Motets

Vicenza,52 no motets survive for that new pope by Salinis or Matteo. However, Salinis’s
troped Gloria Jubilacio, referring to a newly elected pope who will bring the Schism to
an end, and formerly associated with the Council of Constance, has now more plausibly
been associated with Alexander V and the Council of Pisa.53 This new dating is also
consistent with his disappearance from archival records by 1413; he is then no longer
listed when Zacara is named. But Constance could account for the transmission of his
music to the Veneto manuscripts Ox213 and Q15.
Salinis’s three short motets are in SL2211 and all were copied in Q15 a few years
later than SL2211. Si nichil actuleris/​In precio precium is so far known from no other
source. Ihesu salvator seculi/​Quo vulneratus scelere is in Ox213 and Stras. Psallat
chorus/​Eximie pater was recently identified in Utrecht37 by Cuthbert.54 In Q15 it has
an inessential and presumably added contratenor, apparently unique to that source.
The layout of all three of his motets in SL2211 is highly unusual, each complete on a
single page: triplum, then tenor, followed by the motetus below the tenor. Ihesu salvator
also appears with the parts in this unusual order on its single side in Ox213 for his
only motet in that manuscript. Q15 uses the normal layout across an opening. No other
motet in Ox213 with two cantus parts occupies only one side, so there is no precedent
there for this layout.55 It may have been chosen as the original opening piece of Ox213
because it could be contained on a single page, the opening recto of the manuscript.56
As mentioned, it has a huge initial letter and the monogram ‘YHS’; the choice of an
opening motet addressed to Jesus can perhaps be read as a salutation of new beginnings
through Church councils; we know Salinis was at Pisa, which could also have been the
conduit for SL2211’s acquisition of international repertory.57
All three Salinis motets are short, respectively only 64, 64 and 56 breves in length,
with freely composed tenors and no rhythmic or structural repetition; all have si-
multaneous and equal or nearly equal text in the texted portions of both voices. Ihesu
c
salvator is in imperfect time, with 64 breves of . There is a short (five breves) opening
echo imitation at the unison, between equal top parts over a free tenor, and it ends
with a 10/​6–​12/​8 cadence on f. Two lines of text are set simultaneously in the upper
parts, followed by an untexted interlude, then two more lines, then another untexted
interlude, then two final lines of text. There are some parallel fifths with the tenor and
between voices I and II.58

52 Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’, 27–​28.

53 Strohm suggested that Ciconia’s Gloria Suscipe Trinitas might be associated with post-​Pisan conciliarism
around the election of John XXIII in May 1410 (The Rise, 17). Instead, Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 70–​
77, argue that the Trinity is invoked as a statement of faith, symbolic of unity of differences, and, above all, that
it would be blasphemous to equate it with the very division that was tearing the church apart. Starting from a
careful exegesis of the text, they reject the claim associating the Trinity invocation with threefold schism, i.e. after
1409, that was suggested by Michael Connolly and reported in PMFC 24. It has always felt uncomfortable to
have to place this Gloria in the final years of Ciconia’s life. Di Bacco and Nádas point to Ciconia’s patron Philippe
d’Alençon’s role in trying to mediate the Schism, and find the text suited to the intellectual climate surrounding
debates starting with the Jubilee year in 1390 and attempts in 1395 to force Benedict XIII’s abdication. They argue
for a date for this Gloria between 1390 and Philippe’s death in 1397, placing it in Ciconia’s Roman years that they
have so persuasively documented.
54 Cuthbert, ‘Hidden in Our Publications’.
55 There is another layout anomaly for no. 211: Apta caro/​Flos virginum in SL2211 has motetus and tenor

on the verso, triplum on recto. There is no obvious explanation for this except the weak one that the motetus
(Flos virginum) starts without rests, or that it was confused with the triplum Flos ortus.
56 Gatherings I–​IV with newer material were added in front of the original starting point, now Gathering V, the

present Gathering I being the last to be copied. See Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Canon. Misc. 213, ed. Fallows.
57 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 71–​72; Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’, 29, and here Ch. 30.
58 The complete motets from which these examples are adapted are published in CMM 11/​VII.
 Motets in SL2211 and Hubertus de Salinis 549

These untexted interludes are quite ingenious. The first (Ex. 27.1) presents
rhythmic canons gfgff in all three parts in bar 10 at a semibreve’s distance (crotchet
in this transcription), four and a half times. The next (Ex. 27.2) has rhythmic repe-
tition and melodic sequencing in the upper parts only: gfg (five times) then fgf
g (three times), strictly melodically sequential; in II: gfg (four times) then fgfg
(three times).

Ex. 27.1 Salinis, Jhesu salvator, first textless interlude with strict rhythmic canon (8-​minim
unit) in all three voices (CMM 11/​VII, pp. 60–​61, bb. 8–​15)

Ex. 27.2 Salinis, Jhesu salvator, second textless interlude, with two strict rhythmic canons
(of 4-​then 6-​minim units) between the upper voices, also strictly melodically sequential in
I (CMM 11/​VII, pp. 60–​61, bb. 20–​26)
550 Italian Motets

Psallat chorus is the only one of Salinis’s motets with a contratenor, which may
have been added by the Q15 compiler in accordance with his habit. Unlike some Q15
contratenors, it was not added at stage II but was copied integrally at stage I. Psallat
ç
chorus also has 64 breves, this time of , and 11 breves of echo opening.
Again, there are different simultaneous texts, alternating with interludes of textless
rhythmic sequencing in the upper voices. The first four text lines are followed by just
such an interlude of five breves (Ex. 27.3); two more lines take us to ‘Sancte Lamberte’
in all (four) parts with fermata chords at bars 38–​42, then three lines followed by five
breves of textless rhythmic sequencing reversing the roles of I and II. Q15’s added
contratenor makes parallels, and forms tenor cadences below the unison cadences of
triplum and tenor, before a final line. The even shorter motet Si nichil has 56 breves of
ç again with simultaneous texting throughout, but no echo opening, and no textless
interludes.

Ex. 27.3 Salinis, Psallat chorus, first textless rhythmic sequential passage. Each voice
has a different rhythm. The integrated contratenor is present only in Q15 (CMM 11/​VII,
pp. 62–​64, bb. 27–​31)

In conclusion: a closer examination of the choice of motets in SL2211 and the pos-
sible reasons for those choices leads to an extension of the comments I made in an ar-
ticle drawing attention to the contemporaneous copying of the retrospective trecento
anthologies and the new international style represented in Q15.59 The comments
should also be extended to include the simultaneous cultivation of Italian-​and French-​
texted pieces evident in the Padua fragments and to a striking extent in SL2211. What
I perhaps failed to stress sufficiently in that article was that the core repertory of SL2211
follows the normal pattern for trecento manuscripts, but that additions including
French songs and motets stand outside that core. (Fp26 of course also contains added
French songs but no motets.) The prominent inclusion of Salinis but not Ciconia in a
conciliar collection is noteworthy, as is the absence of motets by Landini in a Florentine
anthology. SL2211 is indeed an exception among the trecento anthologies in its inclu-
sion of a group of motets, albeit as an afterthought; but apart from not being typically
Italian, they hardly change the still-​unexplained exclusion of Italian motets from those
anthologies and of all but two in SL2211.

59 Bent, ‘Continuity and Transformation’.

 28
The Motets of Johannes Ciconia

The inclusion of Ciconia in the series Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century
(PMFC) was planned well before the appearance in 1976 of an article by David Fallows
establishing that Ciconia was not a canon of Liège born c. 1330, as had previously been
claimed, but was the illegitimate son of that canon, born c. 1370, and only by marginal
definition a fourteenth-​century composer.1 Since then, we learned that he left Liège as a
young man, accompanying the cardinal and papal legate Philippe d’Alençon from Liège
to Rome around 1390, where he probably spent a few years, but it is very likely that he
spent at least part of the later 1390s at the court of Giangaleazzo Visconti in Pavia; the
madrigal Una panthera has been dated to mid-​1399, for the visit of Lazzaro Guinigi of
Lucca to Pavia to secure an alliance with Giangaleazzo.2 Other works (Le ray au soleyl and
Sus une fontayne) display advanced French-​Italian musical features that show Ciconia’s
mastery of current styles associated with that court, before he was recruited to Padua.3
Thus his composing career unfolded in the 1390s in Rome, then probably in Pavia, and
finally, most importantly, in Padua from 1401 until his premature death there in 1412. He
thus stands right on the edge of classification as a composer even of the long fourteenth
century, and his inclusion in a fourteenth-​century series now looks anomalous. The older
view promulgated by Suzanne Clercx that an elderly Ciconia was responsible for mar-
rying Italian lyricism to French structural principles was based on faulty biographical
premises, on a misplaced assumption that motets were inherently ‘French’, and on too
narrow an understanding of the fragmentarily preserved motet genre in Italy.4 The time
was ripe for a new edition following her pioneering biographical study and edition, since
when much new biographical and musical material had come to light from which a new
attempt could benefit. Following the publication of PMFC 24 in 1985, yet more new ma-
terial has become known, important new biographical material, a few new sources and
some new ascriptions or attributions, and other updatings, not to mention the advent of
digital images, whose manipulation can sometimes produce better readings.5

This chapter was originally written in 1991 as part of an introduction intended for a reprint for Oiseau-​Lyre
of The Works of Johannes Ciconia, PMFC 24. The reprint, alas unrealised, was planned for three paperback
volumes (Mass music, Songs, Motets) with new introductions. The numbers in this chapter are those of
the motets in PMFC 24. This chapter was intended for the motets volume; an abbreviated version formed
part of my contribution on Ciconia’s works in NG2. Here it is in revised form, with updates (including some
revisions to the commentary notes in PMFC 24) in the light of more recent thinking by myself and others, in-
cluding Robert Nosow, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Leofranc Holford-​Strevens and Jason Stoessel. I am grateful
to Cuthbert for his comments (email of 6.3.2016) on an earlier draft of this chapter, prompting me to several
clarifications. I have not attempted to take account of everything that has been written about Ciconia’s motets
since first drafting this essay, and apologise to any authors whose work I have neglected.
1 Fallows, ‘Ciconia padre e figlio’.
2 The Lucca Codex, ed. Nádas and Ziino, and Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’.
3 See Hallmark, ‘Johannes Ciconia’.
4 Clercx, Johannes Ciconia.
5 Most strikingly, Deduto sey now has an authoritative attribution to Zacara from the Vercelli treatise: see

Cornagliotti and Caraci, Un inedito trattato; and Merçe o morte has an ascription to Ciconia in the further

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0029
552 Italian Motets

As stated in Chapter 26, earlier studies of the fourteenth-​century motet had concen-
trated on the French at the expense of the different Italian and English motet traditions.
Ciconia’s motets are as much influenced by Italian precedents as by whatever French
influences he absorbed in his youth, a view consistent with the establishment of his
birthdate at c. 1370, and with his early move to Italy.
The recognition of a distinctively north Italian tradition of motet composition in the
fourteenth century has provided a context and background for Ciconia’s motet style,
as well as placing the Italian motet alongside the previously recognised genres of mad-
rigal, ballata and caccia, despite the absence of motets from all the retrospective tre-
cento anthologies except SL2211. Even there, the motet section did not represent the
typical Italian motet but rather is dominated by international repertory that was in wide
circulation (Ch. 27).
Chapter 26 spelt out characteristics of the typical Italian motet, mainly associated
with the Veneto, as two upper voices of equal or very nearly equal range, with the same
or different texts, and with imitation and interplay between them. Some have initial
echo imitation. Table 26.1 listed those motets including those by Ciconia. Table 28.1
lists Ciconia’s motets, with more detail, and will be referred to in what follows. Only
two of them, PMFC 24, nos. 12 (O felix) and 15 (O virum), start with wide-​spaced non-​
overlapping echo imitation, each statement differently accompanied, in both cases
starting with cantus I and tenor and with rests in cantus II.6 In all motets but no. 16
(Albane) the upper parts are accompanied by a tenor from the beginning. The final ca-
dence is typically 10/​6–​12/​8, in a piece oriented on f (‘major’) or d (‘minor’).7 These
motets are typically conceived from the top parts down, anticipating the addition of a—​
usually essential—​supporting tenor. These tenors are freely composed accompanying
parts; despite some attempts, none has convincingly been shown to derive from pre-​
existent chant, even in the motet (Petrum Marcello, no. 18) that is least like the others in
having a slow-​moving tenor that looks like chant but has not been so identified.8
The style of a fragmentary motet on Santa Cristina in Ox16, f. 97v, strongly suggests
authorship by Ciconia, as discussed in Chapter 26 (Ex. 26.1).9 It has strong affinities

leaves of Mancini published in Nádas and Ziino, ‘Two Newly Discovered Leaves’. Fallows has also reviewed
(and augmented) Ciconia’s song attributions and their datings in Fallows, ‘Ciconia’s Earliest Songs’, and
‘Fallows, ‘Ciconia’s Last Songs’.

6 Nos. 12 and 13 are analysed in Ch. 29. For further on the repetition strategy of these motets see Buff,

‘Ciconia’s Equal-​cantus Motets’, 69–​78; despite generous references to my work elsewhere in the dissertation,
she takes no account of my analyses in her chapter discussing the same pieces.
7 Only one of Ciconia’s ascribed motets, Ut te per omnes, ends on d; O Padua unusually ends on c, but

with the same cadential progression. One of the few complete older motets, an antecedent forty years earlier,
is Marce Marcum, for the doge Marco Corner (1365–​68), ed. in PMFC 13, no. 44. See Ch. 26 and Caffagni,
‘Omaggio a Johannes Ciconia’. It has a single text, equal-​cantus parts over a free tenor, triplet figuration and
opening echo imitation. In that imitation, however, cantus I continues singing during cantus II’s echo, and
the final cadence is not 10/​6–​12/​8, but 6/​3–​8/​5 on g. Another motet in the Padua fragments with features
that place it outside the ‘Italian’ type (including a 6/​3–​8/​5 cadence, chant tenor and a cantus II below the cen-
tral tenor) is Gratiosus fervidus/​Magnanimus opere, PMFC 12, no. 43, p. 153. On candidates for the tenor of
Gratiosus, see Roger, ‘La composition du tenor’, 401. On the solus tenor and its criteria, see Bent, Counterpoint,
Introduction, 38–​46.
8 Despite Brown, ‘A Possible Cantus Firmus’.
9 A portion where all three parts are mostly legible was transcribed in Bent, ‘Italian Motet’, 120–​21, and

here, revised, as Ex. 26.1, up to the end of the first opening of what was a two-​opening presentation: Ox16,
f. 97v is part of a centre-​gathering bifolio, severely trimmed at top and left, and barely legible on the recto.
Ultraviolet photography since my transcription makes a few more notes available.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 553

with O felix templum and is in the pure Italian notation which I have proposed as orig-
inal for at least some of Ciconia’s motets.
Omitted from this list is Regina gloriosa (PMFC 24, no. 24) which must be a Latin
contrafact of a virelai or ballata, as the provision of open and closed endings and a strong
terminal cadence at the midpoint show. Without its contratenor, it invites comparison
with the virelai Aler m’en veus, contrafacted as O beatum incendium (no. 22), though no
vernacular version of Regina gloriosa is known. But having rejected Clercx’s proposed
connection between the Gloria–​Credo pair (PMFC 24, nos. 3–​4) and this anonymous
‘motet’, no good reason remains to attribute it to Ciconia, though his authorship cannot
be excluded.10 In its unique source, Warsaw8054 (olim Krasiński 52), it appears as a
page-​filler after Credo settings by Radom and Ciconia. Uncoupled from the mass pair,
it was nonetheless included in PMFC 24 to facilitate review of the relationship proposed
by Clercx, which rested too heavily on the use of a cliché common to many works of the
period. David Fallows has proposed the addition to the Ciconia canon of two Latin-​
texted works, but neither bears any resemblance to any contemporary motet.11
The motets listed as nos. 12–​19 present no problems of authenticity and share dis-
tinctive style traits. All eight except Albane misse celitus (no. 16) are ascribed to Ciconia
in Q15 (the unique source for O Padua, Venecie mundi splendor, Albane misse celitus,
Doctorum principem and Petrum Marcello, nos. 13, 14, 16, 17 and 18). Albane, together
with O felix templum, O Padua, Venecie mundi splendor and Petrum Marcello, have the
further authorial corroboration of incorporating Ciconia’s name within their texts as
supplicant and composer, presumably of both text and music; those are here described
as ‘signed’. Six motets (nos. 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23), are unique to Q15. O felix templum
and Ut te per omnes (nos. 12 and 19) are also in Ox213, O virum omnimoda (no. 15) in
BU2216 and Siena36. The five signed motets are all in Q15. O Padua, Venecie, O virum
omnimoda, Petrum Marcello, Ut te per omnes, O beatum incendium and O Petre are all
in stage I of that manuscript. O felix templum was in stage I, subsequently discarded and
recopied in an unprecedented three-​stage transmission within a single manuscript (see
Fig. 28.1; Fig. 28.1 appears additionally on the website to facilitate magnification).12
Albane misse celitus and Doctorum principem, although now only in later copies, were
probably also in stage I, though earlier presence is not supported by direct evidence.
Thus, all of Ciconia’s ascribed motets are preserved in Q15, several of them uniquely.
But that manuscript does not contain two anonymous and incompletely preserved
motets that have been attributed to Ciconia as opera dubia, O proles Yspanie and
Padu[a] . . . ex panis . . . serenans (nos. 21 and 20).13 These are in Pad1106, part of the

10 See PMFC 24, pp. xi–​xiii, and bibliography there cited.

11 One is the French rondeau Ave vergene (Lucca 184 and Perugia3065, the Mancini codex, f. 54) of which
only the lower parts survive; it is quite unlike any other song of the 14th or 15th cc. and Fallows suggests a
possible context among his motets, though those parts are also quite unlike any motet, Italian or other. But as
he points out, Pirrotta’s argument that it is too late in style falls away if we accept Nádas and Ziino’s dating of
Mancini in Ciconia’s lifetime in the first decade of the century (The Lucca Codex, ed. Nádas and Ziino). The
other piece is the macaronic Sancta Maria regina celorum (Venice, ff. 25v–​27), with a faster-​moving cantus
accompanied by tenor and contratenor. Both are of uncertain status (possibly contrafacta?) and are discussed
and transcribed in Fallows, ‘Ciconia’s Last Songs’. See also Fallows, ‘Ciconia’s Earliest Songs’.
12 These are set out in Bent, Bologna Q15, 145, also 98 and 138.
13 Published in PMFC 24 as Padu. . . serenans; a few more letters have since been deciphered by Cuthbert,

‘Trecento Fragments’ and Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’. The first line is problematic and hard to read.
PMFC 24 gave it as Padu . . . serenans. Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, reads Paduas ex panis serenas, but
554 Italian Motets

Table 28.1 Ciconia’s motets (numbered as in PMFC 24)

PMFC Title Sourcesa

24 no.

12 O felix templum jubila Q15-​[I]‌, no. 216, R223v–​(224), A252v–​253, ‘Jo ciconie’,
and no. 341, f. R224/​A341, anon; was in stage I; Ox213,
no. 33, ff. 22v–​23, ‘Magister Johannes Ciconia de leodio’
13 O Padua sidus preclarum Q15-​I, no. 256, R257v–​258, A286v–​287; stage I, no
contratenor, ‘Jo ciconie’
14 Venecie mundi splendor/​Michael Q15-​I, no. 257, R258v–​259, A287v–​288, stage I, no
qui Stena domus contratenor, ‘Jo ciconie’
Tenor Italie mundicie
15 O virum omnimoda veneracione/​ Q15-​I, no. 254, R255v–​256, A284v–​285, stage I, ‘Jo
O lux et decus tranensium/​O beate ciconie’; BU2216, no. 55, pp. 72–​73, ff. 36v–​37, ‘Jo
Nicholae Cichonia’; Siena36, ff. 25v–​26, anon.
16 Albane misse celitus/​Albane doctor Q15-​III, no. 273, R271v–​272, A300v–​301, stage III copy,
maxime was possibly in I; anon., but signed within the text

17 Doctorum principem/Melodia Q15-​III, no. 272, R270v–​271, A299v–​300 (stage III or II,
suavissima/Tenor Vir mitis was possibly in I), ‘io ciconia.
[plus canon]
18 Petrum Marcello venetum/​O Petre Q15-​I, no. 245, R248v–​249, A277v–​278 (stage I), ‘Jo.
antistes inclite ciconie’
T, Ct
19 Ut te per omnes/​Ingens alumnus Q15-​I, no. 259, R260v–​261, A289v–​290 (stage I), ‘Jo
Padue ciconie’: Ut per te omnis’, a3; Ox213, no. 277, ff. 119v–​120
(a4, with Ct in Ox only), ‘M. Johannes ciconia De leodio
conposuit’. Incipit reverses two words: ‘Ut te per omnes’
22 O beatum incendium Q15-​I, no. 255, R256v–​257, A285v–​286, stage I), ‘Jo
ciconie’. Latin contrafactum a2 of the virelai Aler m’en
veus, of which cantus I only survives in Pad1115 (PadB),
no. 3, f. Av, ‘Johes’ [Ciconia]
23 O Petre Christi discipule Q15-​I, no. 258, R259v–​260, A288v–​289, stage I, a2, ‘Jo ciconie’

Opera dubia:
Santa Cristina motet Ox16, f. 97v, anon., a3

20 Padu[a]. . . ex panis . . . serenans/​ (Pad1106, f. 1v), anon., cantus and tenor

Tenor Pastor bonus

21 O proles Yspanie/​Tenor O proles (Pad1106, f. 3v), anon., cantus and tenor

nobile depositum

a For Q15, see Bent Q15. Q15 piece numbers are as given in Bent, Q15 (and earlier in the inventory of De Van).

A[rabic] folio numbers are the modern foliation which runs through the entire manuscript, and corresponds
to the numeration on the DIAMM images. R[oman] numbers are those of the latest of the original series of
foliations, referring to the first stage, in part to the second, but it is absent in gatherings added at stage III. Both
systems are used in the scholarly literature, usually without specification. There is no original foliation in stage
III, though Gulielmus Musart added a few local numbers in portions he indexed. Here, (224) is a later sub-
stitution for that roman folio which is now one of the rear flyleaves. For Ox213, see Oxford, Bodleian Library
MS Canon. Misc. 213, ed. Fallows. For BU2216 see Gallo, Il codice musicale 2216. For all the Padua fragments,
including Pad1106, see Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, and Cuthbert, ‘Groups and Projects’.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 555

Table 28.1 Continued

Ciconia’s Equivalent Tonality Commentsb Date, dedication

name ‘signed’ French
authorially mensurations
within the text?

one text, signed o

[ ]‌ (d) final f echo imitation; later Ct 1402, Stefano Carrara,
in both added and then withdrawn bishop of Padua

one text, signed c c a3 before 1405; possibly 1401

in both
2 texts, signed o
[ ]‌ f a3 January 1406: submission
in I to Venice and Doge
Michele Steno
3 texts, not o
[ ]‌ f echo imitation; Ct all possibly 1394, 300th
signed sources, with variants anniversary of St Nicholas
of Trani, but this seems early
2 texts, signed c
[ ]‌ f +​Ct; isorhythmic; upper 1406, Albano Michiel,
in II parts have 12B introduction bishop of Padua 1406–​9
before T/​Ct entry
2 texts, not çoc f +​Ct; three tenor statements Zabarella
signed in different mensurations

2 texts, signed o
[ ]‌ f tenor and contratenor 1409, Pietro Marcello,
in II coloration; +​Ct. Dim. within bishop of Padua 1409–​28
each half; isorhythmic
2 texts, not o
[ ]‌ d +​Ct in Ox only. On Zabarella
signed St Francis, Francesco
Zabarella and Franciscans;
isorhythmic
not signed o
[ ]‌ d a2, equal voices, contrafact

not signed o
[ ]‌ d a2, equal voices 1409? (St Peter and Filargo
and/​or Emiliani; see
below); or 1406

2 texts [i]‌ d fragment, anon., but with

strong Ciconian features
not signed [p]‌ d I (or II) and T; tenor 1402? Andrea Carrara,
coloration; ‘tenores’; abbot of Santa Giustina
isorhythmic
not signed [p]‌ f I (or II) and T; isorhythmic

b+​Ct: contratenor probably added. ‘Isorhythmic’ means two rhythmically equal halves in all parts.
Hypermetric [O] added in PMFC 24 to both texted voices of Doctorum principem for the initial melisma.
556 Italian Motets

group of Padua fragments known as PadD copied by Frater Rolandus of Santa Giustina,
probably in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Dating from Ciconia’s lifetime and
the same city, these copies seem to be not only older but potentially more authoritative
than the more complete survivals in Q15 and even later sources, which often show signs
of reworking—​notational translation and added contratenors. But the Padua fragments
give us only approximate dating clues for the few fragmentary pieces they contain.
Despite their incomplete state, a wide range of composers is represented, and even if
Ciconia was foremost, he cannot be the only candidate for compositions celebrating
Padua in the early 1400s. All the sources of Ciconia’s ascribed and completely surviving
mass and motet compositions date from ten years or more after his death, and there-
fore have no value in establishing a chronology of composition. They also need to be
viewed with scepticism where there is reason to think they present changed versions,
as is most apparent in the motets. This may seem a strange claim for a source of such
central importance and proven reliability as Q15, which must have been used by
singers who had known and sung with Ciconia. However, the compiler of that manu-
script intervened in two major respects: he added (and in one demonstrable instance
withdrew) contratenors, and he changed the notation of at least some of his exemplars
from Italian to French.

Contratenors

I have shown that at least some of the contratenors to motets by Ciconia and other
composers in Q15 were or may have been later additions.14 By characterising them as
‘inessential’ I mean grammatically inessential, i.e. where a contratenor does not pro-
vide essential support to otherwise unsupported fourths between the tenor and the top
parts, and can be omitted without damage to the musical sense.15 In some cases it can be
argued that these contratenors make a musical contribution by enlivening the texture;
equally often, they flatten it by crossing the tenor so that the lower parts together form a
drone (as in the opening of Doctorum principem, no. 17), or obfuscate what was a clean,
clear texture, and introduce anomalies of superimposed fifths and other dissonances.
These contratenors often go well with the tenor but not with the upper parts, while the
upper parts go well with the tenor, as when, for example, the upper parts have a fifth
above the tenor, the contratenor a fifth below it; I call these conflicts ‘bifocal’.
Unstable transmission and later addition are most abundantly documented for O
felix templum (no. 12, Fig. 28.1 above); it has no contratenor in Ox213, whose Italian
notation I believe reflects its original state. The composite copy of this motet now in the
body of Q15 (no. 216, ff. A252v–​253) contains cantus I and tenor on the left (the stage-​II

Paduas is not a word and makes no sense. The letters are as read, except that there is a macron over the last
word, making serenans. Holford-​Strevens reads the opening hexameter as Padu<a> . . . ex vanis serenans. The
problem is in the two letters preceding ex, which may be as. Even the first two letters ‘Pa’ are now partly cov-
ered by a restorer’s patch and no longer easily legible. In view of the uncertainty, the title will be given here as
Padu[a] . . . ex panis serenans.

14 See Bent, Q15, i. 147, and Westerhaus, ‘A Lexicon of Contratenor Behaviour’.

15 See Bent, ‘Notes on the Contratenor’.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 557

Fig. 28.1 The three stages of O felix templum in Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca
della Musica, MS Q.15 (Q15). Reproduced with permission from the Museo internazionale
e biblioteca della musica di Bologna. Fig. 28.1 is also on the companion website in colour
558 Italian Motets

verso), facing cantus II on the right (the late stage-​III recto). The stage-​II recto that orig-
inally faced the stage-​II verso was relegated to serve as one of the rear flyleaves (f. A341,
no. 326), and includes an inessential and problematic contratenor added at that stage
and then rejected for the stage-​III recopy of that page now in situ. A few notes of music
from near the end of the first staff of the recto of O felix templum on the back of pasted
capital no. 92 attests that this piece existed in a stage-​I copy, whose more generous
spacing would have left no room for a contratenor on that opening. R223v (=​A252v),
the left-​hand page (verso) of the copy now in the body of the manuscript, uses pasted
capital no. 84, which was cut from the stage-​I verso of this piece; pasted capital no. 64,
also cut from the stage-​I copy, faced it on the recto.16
Thus O felix templum jubila went through no fewer than three copying stages in Q15.
The first of these was without contratenor, the second was evidently made in order to ac-
commodate a new contratenor originating from the compiler, who in a final third stage
thought better of it and recopied that recto page without contratenor, a positive rejection
rather than a passive omission. While such a tortuous and instructive process cannot be
documented for other motets, there are indications that this scribe took similar initiatives
elsewhere, thus placing all the Ciconian contratenors under suspicion. No contratenors
earlier than those in Q15 survive for any Italian motet, with the exception of O Maria
virgo davitica/​O Maria maris stella in Pad1106, which is also an outlier in the Italian rep-
ertory (if indeed it is Italian) in having an essential contratenor and a solus tenor.
By any standards we can now understand, there is no obvious reason to forfeit the sat-
isfactory (and, I believe, original) texture of two cantus parts plus tenor that is basic to
all Ciconia’s motets (except O Petre Christi discipule, for two equal parts without tenor;
see below), in order to enjoy whatever dubious musical gains the contratenors may
bring, however interesting they are for the near-​contemporary reception of this music.
This view challenges Heinrich Besseler’s claim that tenor and contratenor parts in the
fifteenth century support the harmony as a foundational duo; that claim can apply only
to those pieces with essential contratenors, but to none by Ciconia.17 The type of dis-
sonance introduced by these contratenors (a pedal or drone, or ‘bifocal’ superimposed
fifths) has an idiomatic quality of its own which, while very different from that of the pri-
mary parts, often looks worse on paper than it sounds in performance. The contratenors
were printed in PMFC 24 on small staves to draw attention to their optional character.
Performers are nevertheless encouraged to experiment by performing the four-​part
motets with and without contratenors, and perhaps to programme performances of
both versions in succession: the two sound very different.
O virum omnimoda (no. 15) stands apart from Ciconia’s other ascribed motets
in several ways. It is the only one with prose rather than verse texts, with three texts
(one of them a texted tenor), and with more than two sources, Q15, BU2216 and the
non-​Veneto source Siena36.18 The contratenor is present in all three sources, but with

16 For the pasted capitals, see Bent Q15, i, ch. VIII. For O felix, see 145–​46.
17 See Bent, ‘Grammar’. It is possible that the contratenor of Petrum Marcello, though still inessential, may
be original, because of the way it works together with the tenor. See below on Padu[a] . . . ex panis (no. 20).
18 It is one of the minority of his motet texts that are unsigned by Ciconia. The two monotextual motets nos.

12 and 13 are both signed; of those with more than one text, no. 14 is signed in cantus I, 16 and 18 in cantus II.
The two Zabarella motets nos. 17 and 19 are unsigned. This pattern may lightly challenge the authenticity of
nos. 20 and 21.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 559

interesting variants. It fits perfectly with the tenor, but creates some problems with
the upper parts, most notably at bars 65 and 80, where two fifths are superimposed.
The contratenor sounds a fifth below the tenor while an upper voice is a fifth above
it; the resulting bifocal sonority can only be rescued by omitting the contratenor.19
See Example 28.1.

Ex. 28.1 Final systems of O virum omnimoda (PMFC 24, p. 84). Reproduced from Éditions
de l’Oiseau-​Lyre, with permission from The University of Melbourne

PMFC 24 followed Q15 in giving five exact and one inexact limbs of the imitations
in bars 75–​80 (asterisked at b. 75 in the edited score), which involve the three primary
voices (excluding the contratenor, which does not participate in the imitations), and
start on an unusually wide range of pitches (g, d, f, c). Neither of the other two sources
is prior to Q15, and both may depend on it; both begin the imitation with g f e f in the
tenor, followed by d c b c in the two upper parts, before adopting the version as printed
for the last two entries. Did these other sources soften an imitation that was felt to be too

19 Not by turning the lower fifth into a fourth, as on several recordings. Pedro Memelsdorff has refined

and amplified interpretations and classifications of contratenors in a series of luminous articles, notably in
Memelsdorff, ‘Lizadra donna’.
560 Italian Motets

bold, or did the compiler of Q15 seize an opportunity to take Ciconia’s own imitation a
step further?
The contratenors of two Ciconia motets copied early in Q15 stage III are both
grammatically inessential. The contratenor of Doctorum principem (no. 17, Q15,
no. 272) neutralises the leaping tenor part, turning the lower-​voice pair into a sort of
drone, as mentioned above. The contratenor of Albane (no. 16, Q15, no. 273), albeit
integrated into the rhythmic and melodic repetition scheme, is problematic in that it
introduces actual and narrowly avoided dissonance and parallels uncharacteristic of the
three principal parts.20 Contratenors were probably added to both motets at that late
stage, which occasioned their recopying, probably from copies without contratenors
that were discarded from stage I, to judge by the uniquely documented case of O
felix templum. Those two motets are excellent instances of the copying of Ciconia’s
celebrations of long-​dead dignitaries, twenty years after their and his own death, with
some musical updating, but with no recycling of the dedicatees’ names—​a fascinating
indication of that compiler’s priorities.
The tenor of Petrum Marcello (no. 18) bears the rubric: ‘Canon tenores dicuntur
sic: primo usque ad secundam talliam ut iacent; 2o diminuuntur resumendo et sic suc-
cessive alie talie procedant.’ The contratenor is marked ad modum tenoris; although it is
grammatically inessential and causes several anomalies of superimposed fifths, for ex-
ample at bar 24, where it is integrated into the rhythmic structure and accompanies the
brief opening duet before the tenor entry. In this case, the contratenor may be original,
if not grammatically essential. The two lower parts are referred to as tenors (plural), as
also in no. 20, Padu[a] . . . ex panis, even if they do not have tenor function contrapun-
tally. (The plural usage tenores often applies in rubrics for complex pieces with twinned
lower parts, implicitly treating an essential contratenor as a second tenor.) The slower-​
moving undiminished tenor and contratenor here necessarily relate to the paired upper
voices somewhat differently from most other motets. In both tenor and contratenor, the
first statement is to be followed immediately by one in diminution; the second half of
the motet is then a rhythmic replication of the first, each half in full values followed by
a statement in diminution. Possibly the only Italian precedent for this highly un­usual
procedure, albeit in much shorter segments and a very different style, is the madrigal
Povero zappator by Lorenzo da Firenze.21 There is no indication within the motet’s
tenor and contratenor parts as to where the diminution is to be inserted; this has to be
inferred from the point at which the tenor’s rhythm repeats. For the diminution, notes
of the next value down are substituted, which means in this case (where perfect modus
becomes perfect tempus) that the breve becomes a semibreve, resulting in the relatively
unusual reduction 3:1.22 The contratenor has been artfully integrated with the diminu-
tion. Its harmonic anomalies, albeit fewer, are similar to those of the other contratenors
(as at b. 22) and it must also be considered suspect. Both tenor and contratenor are in
addition written out as ad longum parts of some notational interest, fully notated rather

20 Brown, ‘The Motets’, 104.

21 See Abramov-​van Rijk, ‘Povero zappator’. This also occurs in more complex form in the Chantilly motet
Alma polis/​Axe poli; see Ch. 19.
22 This diminution relationship is not common in the French motet (pace Machaut Motet 1) but is also

found in Fountains, Humane lingua/​Supplicum voces/​Deo gratias, and in Cyprus motets 8 and 14 (Ch. 32).
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 561

than being left for derivation by repetition and diminution, respelt in imperfect modus
(with imperfect longs instead of altered breves), but with the diminutions written out
in perfect tempus, with altered semibreves. These ad longum parts (not to be confused
with solus tenors) represent not merely a respelling but a reconstruing of the compactly
notated tenor and contratenor forms, from which they seem to derive; unless they too
were an aid to the compositional process, simply spelt in unambiguous values after a
more complex mensural conceit had been worked out.23
Besides Petrum Marcello (no. 18), the only other motet possibly by Ciconia with tenor
coloration is no. 20, Padu[a] . . . ex panis, where it is specified ‘Canon tenorum: Rubee
dicantur de modo perfecto et tempore e converso; nigro vere e contra’ (red L =​3 imper-
fect B, black L =​2 perfect B). Since the hockets at the end of each section of Padu[a] . . . ex
panis span four-​semibreve phrases, this would allow a complex interlocking of four
hocketing parts, the two cantus parts and the plural tenores. Both motets have rubrics
referring to ‘tenors’ in the plural, which may indicate that they have or had integral and
original contratenors and were conceived in four parts, the plural referring to a twinned
tenor and contratenor, both with coloration; in Petrum Marcello the contratenor is con-
spicuously different from those of Ciconia’s other motets. While the references to tenors
in the plural (as noted above) might be thought to imply equal supporting status for the
lower parts, the contratenor does not have this role in Petrum Marcello and probably did
not for Padu[a] . . . ex panis, though there remains a chance that the rubrics could have
been provided later or rewritten. None of the fragmentary motets in Pad1106 preserves
a contratenor, though evidently Padu[a] . . . ex panis may have had one because of the
plural tenores.
While at least in O felix templum and in some works by other composers there is ev-
idence that contratenors were later additions and not integral to the original composi-
tion, or that they are unstably transmitted or exceptionally problematic, it may well be
the case that a few of these contratenors are indeed part of the original conception. This
is most likely for O virum omnimoda and Petrum Marcello. However, in all Ciconia’s
motets including these, a contratenor (if any) can be omitted without grammatical
damage.
Compositions in Q15 by other composers appear similarly to have been provided
by the compiler with added contratenors at stages II or III (c. 1425–​35). Q15, no. 242,
the motet Pie pater by Antonius de Civitate, was copied at stage I, but an unlabelled,
untexted contratenor was added late in stage III (with the fine pen of the latest additions)
on f. R246/​A275. I have shown that the Du Fay Gloria and Credo Q15, nos. 107–​8
(CMM 1/​1, pair no. 5), originally each on a single opening, must have been recopied
at stage III over two openings each, in order to make space for added contratenors, and
also to unite this musically matched pair. The contratenors of two motets by Antonius
Romanus (Aurea flammigeri, Q15, no. 219, on f. R227/​A256, and Ducalis sedes, no. 243,
on f. R247/​A276) were present at stage I, but their more compressed recopying at stage
II (after the manuscript had been trimmed for binding) suggests that even at stage
I the contratenors were an afterthought, added to motets originally composed without

23 In PMFC 24 the pair of ad longum parts are transcribed on small staves below the main score and are not

intended for performance. The contratenor of Petrum Marcello is printed on a normal-​sized staff. See Allsen,
‘Tenores ad longum’.
562 Italian Motets

them.24 Other pieces in Q15 to which contratenors may have been added later, on sim-
ilar grounds of spacing and stage-​II recopying, include Grenon’s motet Plasmatoris
humani generis/​Verbigine mater ecclesia, no. 223 (ff. R230v–​231, A259v–​260), the Hugo
de Lantins Credo no. 68 (ff. R95v–​86, A86v–​87), and the Gloria no. 76 (ff. R97v–​99,
A98v–​100) by Antonius Romanus.25

Notation

The transmission and presentation of Ciconia’s music reflect the notational fluidity cur-
rent in northern Italy c. 1400. It is possible to reconstruct with some confidence the
original form of notation in which certain pieces, since changed, were conceived; this
is especially true of the motets, but also of Ciconia’s Gloria PMFC 24, no. 3.26 All of
Ciconia’s motets survive in Q15 in French notation, but use characteristically Italian
rhythmic configurations (usually within the breve of tempus perfectum, and including
duplet and triplet minims), which strongly suggest, with the further supporting evi-
dence of erasure or change, that they are transcribed from Italian originals.27
Most striking in this regard is the homographic tenor of Doctorum principem (no. 17),
composed in such a way that it could be notated just once (in Italian notation), and
ço c
performed in three successive mensurations ( , and ) for the three sections of the
motet (see Fig. 28.2). By the rules of Italian notation it works perfectly, where in perfect
time the lengthening of a semibreve by via naturae (the second semibreve of a ligated
pair) does not require it to precede a breve; but a rubric had to be added to this homo-
graphic tenor to override French alteration rules for the perfect-​time section, to permit
the improper alteration of a semibreve before another semibreve: ‘Et dicitur primo
inperfecto maiori 2o perfecto minori semper ultima semibrevis alteratur 3o imperfecto

Fig. 28.2 Tenor of Doctorum principem in Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca

della Musica, MS Q.15 (Q15), f. A299v. Reproduced with permission from the Museo
internazionale e biblioteca della musica di Bologna

24 In the case of Ducalis sedes, BU2216 has no contratenor, while the Q15 version does have an added and

inessential contratenor. Q15 names the doge as Tommaso Mocenigo; BU2216, although an earlier version,
substitutes ‘N’ for his name, indicating that it was copied after his death but not explicitly recycled for his suc-
cessor. Q15 also implements a notational translation of the upper part from to .ç o
25 Bent, Q15, i. 140, 146–​47.
26 This is possibly also true of Gloria no. 6, whose 4:3 relationships in the upper parts may reflect the in-

fluence of Italian notation as expounded by Prosdocimus for .i.–​.o. (senaria imperfecta to octonaria), and
where the layout on the second opening suggests that the long Amen may be an addition post-​dating the
contratenor. See Honisch, ‘The Transmission of Polyphonic Amens’, and Bent, Q15, i, commentaries to indi-
vidual pieces.
27 See the commentary comments in PMFC 24 for affected pieces, and those in Bent, Q15 for all the pieces

here named.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 563

minori.’ Contrary to its classification in PMFC 24, I now emphatically withdraw the
isorhythmic designation from this motet. (See Ch. 2 for isorhythmic definition.) This
motet and Ciconia’s Gloria Q15, no. 74 (PMFC 24, no. 3), require reinterpretation of
the same notated tenor in imperfect and perfect mensurations, with a similar anomaly.
Both must originally have been conceived in Italian notation.28
Ciconia’s four Italian-​texted madrigals in Lucca184 and Perugia3065 and some
of his ballate are in Italian notation with pontelli, but this is true of none of his mass
music. Other ballatas are in French notation, even in early sources including Lucca184
and the Padua fragments, and even alongside Italian-​notated pieces. Nevertheless,
most if not all of his motets may have been conceived in Italian notation, as the
upper-​part triplet passages and the rhythms of the tenor parts in perfect time suggest.
Notational evidence supports this in several ways. The Ox213 copy of O felix templum
(no. 12) is actually in full-​black Italian notation with downstemmed major semibreves
(instead of imperfected breves) and oblique stems, though without pontelli and there-
fore suggesting a newer stage. Extensive erasures in triplet passages in some of the
Q15 motets suggest that the scribe had trouble with how best to renotate these typi-
cally Italian gestures, or at least that he had second thoughts.29 Only three of Ciconia’s
ascribed motets, O felix templum, O Padua, Venecie mundi splendor (nos. 12, 13, 14),
have minim triplet passages. The only pieces copied in Q15 at stage I with upper-​part
minim triplets, Venecie and O Padua, have full-​black triplets whose flags and filled
bodies were laboriously erased and replaced with the void unflagged forms that the
scribe preferred at stage II; the stage-​II copy of O felix templum has void minim triplets
with no such alteration; the scribe evidently had a settled preference by this time. Many
internal indications and anomalies indicate that the—​albeit older—​French-​notated
copy in Q15 is an adaptation of the Italian-​notated version in Ox213 and not vice
versa. Similar anomalies in other motets for which we depend on the French-​notated
versions in Q15, and sources related to it, strongly suggest that their originals, too,
were in Italian notation. The Santa Cristina motet in Ox16 (Ex. 26.1) is in pure Italian
notation, with characteristic rhythms and imitations; if it is indeed judged to be by
Ciconia, this would provide further support.

Isorhythm

Isorhythm is a term coined by modern scholarship primarily for French motets using
repetition with diminution, organised around or over a tenor and requiring pre-​
compositional planning. I have meanwhile sought to disqualify diminution and men-
sural manipulation from inclusion in this term, which means ‘equal rhythm’ (i.e. not
‘the same but faster’), and to reserve it for passages that are rhythmically identical
(Ch. 2). The only Ciconia motet to have any diminution in the lower parts is Petrum
Marcello (no. 18). As stated above, it is unusual in following each half of the tenor (and

28 Michael Scott Cuthbert reminds me that the two Ciconia songs (Aler m’en veus and Dolçe fortuna) in

Pad1115 (PadB) show no signs of Italian notation, although that is probably the earliest source of his music
and contains other pieces in pure Italian notation. My case for the motets is genre-​specific, though it seems to
apply also to the Gloria no. 3 in PMFC 24.
29 See Bent, Q15, i. 148–​49.
564 Italian Motets

contratenor, called tenores in the rubric) by its own repetition and in an unusual (3:1)
diminution because the perfect modus diminishes to perfect tempus. The two halves
of the motet are rhythmically identical in all parts, as are Ciconia’s two other ascribed
isorythmic motets, Albane misse celitus and Ut te per omnes, and the two anonymous
incomplete motets nos. 20 and 21, Padu[a] . . . ex panis and O proles Yspanie. Ironically,
these motets with exact replication are more truly isorhythmic than the more complex
structures which have enjoyed a blanket application of the term to motets with tenor
diminution or mensural transformation and which ranked higher on the status spec-
trum of ‘the isorhythmic motet’. Albane starts with the two cantus parts before the lower
parts enter, but this introduction is included in the isorhythmic scheme, unlike no. 20
(Padu[a]), whose introduction (presumably for two upper parts of which one survives)
stands outside the isorhythmic structure.

Texts

Some motets have a single Latin text for both upper parts, some two; and one, O virum
omnimoda veneracione/​O lux et decus tranensium/​O beate Nicholae (no. 15), also has a
third text, a differently texted tenor (see Table 28.1 above). The texts were edited and
translated for PMFC 24 by M. J. Connolly. The verse texts have now been authoritatively
evaluated and annotated in a magisterial study by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens, who
writes: ‘Ciconia presents himself in his treatise Nova Musica as a musical humanist anx-
ious to rescue the true ancient theory of music from the corruption of the Guidonistae.
Nevertheless his Latinity is far from humanistic, and reaches a pinnacle of pretentious
incompetence in the dedication of De proportionibus.’30
The texts signed with Ciconia’s name strongly suggest that they as well as the music
are by Ciconia. All the texts are in rhythmic verse with three exceptions: the three prose
texts of the unsigned O virum (no. 15); with three sources, this is his most widely dis-
tributed and possibly his earliest motet. Two texts, Ut te and Padu[a] . . . ex panis (nos.
19 and 20) ‘aspire to be metra, poems in classical quantitative meter’.31 All texts appear
to be originally composed except the opus dubium O proles Yspanie (no. 21), in honour
of St Anthony of Padua. This text by Julian of Speyer was later used by Du Fay for his
motet O proles Hispanie/​O sidus Hispanie; one of its sources is a fourteenth-​century
Franciscan breviary from Padua.32 If this motet is by Ciconia, it would be his only use
of a pre-​existent text. Probably not by Ciconia, on grounds of their greater competence,
are the three texts of O virum omnimoda (no. 15), not covered by Holford-​Strevens,
but which he rates as ornate prose rather than rhymed doggerel, and having ‘a fluency
both in language and versification that Ciconia lacks’. Also judged too competent to be
by Ciconia are the texts of O Petre Christi discipule (no. 23) and O beatum incendium
(no. 22), by ‘the cleric at home in devotional Latin who contrafacted a verse hymn for
Ciconia’s virelai Aler m’en veus’.33

30 Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, 437–​38.

31 Ibid. 438.
32 See PMFC 24, 208.
33 Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, 454, 453.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 565

Chronology and Datings

Most of Ciconia’s motets are dedicatory or occasional pieces referring to Padua or

Venice. O felix templum jubila (no. 12) honours Stefano Carrara, illegitimate son
of Francesco Carrara ‘il Novello’, administrator of the Paduan see from 1396. Clercx
suggested that this motet was written to celebrate the dedication of an altar to St Stephen
in Padua Cathedral by Stefano Carrara in 1400,34 but several allusions in the text suggest
that it must either celebrate or post-​date his assumption of the bishopric on 10 April
1402. This would place the motet first in a sequence of three by Ciconia honouring
successive bishops of Padua, perhaps for the installations of the next two Venetian
bishops of Padua, Albano Michiel (8 March 1406: Albane misse celitus, no. 16) and Pietro
Marcello (16 November 1409: Petrum Marcello Venetum, no. 18).35 The incomplete
and unascribed motets are also clearly Paduan, no. 21 O proles Yspanie in honour of
St Anthony of Padua, and no. 20, Padu[a] . . . ex panis, for Andrea Carrara, nominated
abbot of Santa Giustina in 1398, a post he held in the period 1402–​4.
O Padua, sidus preclarum (no. 13) refers to Antenor, the mythical founder of the city.
Absence of reference to Venice suggests that it precedes the 1405 conquest; on the other
hand, the ‘bright flowering garland’ of stanza 1 might be the constellation of Venetian-​
dominated cities thereafter.36 The motet for St Anthony, O proles Yspanie (no. 21), and
the two for Francesco Zabarella, Doctorum principem and Ut te per omnes (nos. 17 and
19), presumably date from 1401–​12 when Ciconia was in Padua.
The two texts of Venecie, mundi splendor/​Michael, qui Stena domus (no. 14) honour
Venice and Michele Steno, doge from 1400 to 1413. Some but not all motets for doges and
bishops are overtly inaugural. But for Ciconia’s known association with Padua, the most
obvious dating would fall in the period of or immediately following the doge’s election.
Padua was conquered by Venice in 1405, and the motet can be more readily explained as
an expression of Paduan acceptance of the new regime. More likely than Clercx’s dating
of 1407, based on the granting of privileges to the Cathedral in that year in recompense
for confiscated Carrara goods, is the occasion of Padua’s formal surrender to Venice on
3 January 1406, when Ciconia’s patron Francesco Zabarella delivered an oration and
presented the doge with the emblems of the Signoria before the doors of San Marco,
in the name of the Comune of Padua. Venice responded officially on 30 January with
the ‘Golden Bull’ acknowledging the surrender of Padua and promising to respect the
privileges, customs and statutes of the city, the university and the wool trade.
Francesco Zabarella was archpriest of Padua from 1398 until his appointment as
bishop of Florence in 1410.37 He presented Ciconia to his first Paduan benefice on 11
July 1401, and Ciconia’s close association with him is cemented by the survival of two

34 Clercx, Johannes Ciconia.

35 Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, 451, notes: ‘There is no excuse for Marcello instead of Marcellum,
but whether the error be the scribe’s or the poet’s is impossible to determine.’
36 Stoessel, ‘Music and Moral Philosophy’, 111–​ 15, suggests a chronology for Ciconia’s motets
(table 1), with a date of 1401 or soon after for O Padua, based on an undoubtedly correct reading of
the second text line, ‘boece’ instead of the meaningless ‘bocce’, referring not to Boethius but to the con-
stellation of Boötes, permitting the association of this motet with the astronomical emblems of the
Carraresi of Padua and their political circumstances in 1401, which he had previously discussed in ‘Arms,
a Saint’, 32–​34.
37 See Hallmark, ‘Zabarella’.
566 Italian Motets

motets in his honour. No. 19, Ut te per omnes celitus, addressed to Zabarella’s patron
saint Francis, intercedes for him as a great teacher and Paduan lawyer, and prays also
for the Franciscan order. Doctorum principem (no. 17) praises Zabarella directly as
‘prince of teachers’ and ‘nourisher of the clergy’, alluding to music. No reason remains
for Clercx’s datings of these pieces at 1390–​97 and 1406–​9 respectively, though as the
outer limits of Zabarella’s teaching career in Padua (1398–​1410) the motets must also
fall within Ciconia’s nearly co-​terminous Paduan career.
One possible exception to the general pattern of the genesis of the motets in Padua in
the years 1401 to 1412 is O virum omnimoda (no. 15) honouring St Nicholas of Trani.38
It had been assumed that ‘Trani’ was an error for the nearby city of Bari, and that the
saint referred to was the more famous bishop whose remains were retrieved from Myra
in the eleventh century and installed at Bari. Although rival claimants to the honour
of housing St Nicholas brought about a certain degree of confusion in his legend, that
of Nicholas of Trani does have separate features clearly identifiable in the text of this
motet. Also known as Nicholas Pilgrim (‘Nicholaus peregrinus’ in the motet text), he
was a pious and simple-​minded Greek shepherd boy who crossed the Adriatic from
Greece (by one account, on the back of a dolphin) and wandered throughout Apulia,
collecting and distributing alms and fostering the Kyrie eleison, which he continuously
intoned (translated as the ‘Miserere nobis, Domine’ obsessively repeated in the ver-
sion of the motet in BU2216). He died in Trani in 1094 at the age of nineteen, from
the combined results of his own asceticism and of the persecutions which he attracted.
Miracles were reported, his Life was written, and he was canonised by Urban II in 1097.
Accounts of his cult outside Trani are scarce, and it remains something of a mystery how
Ciconia came to celebrate him. His feast day is given as 2 June, but a different date of 30
May north of the Alps suggests that the observance was more than local.
A possible occasion for the composition of Ciconia’s motet was proposed as the 300th
anniversary of the saint’s death in 1394.39 In the early 1390s, before his Paduan career
a decade later, Ciconia was in the household of Philippe d’Alençon in Rome; a letter of
Boniface IX dated 27 April 1391 gave him a dispensation for illegitimacy, opening the
way for an expectative prebend in Liège.40 Giuliano Di Bacco and John Nádas were able
to show that the saint’s anniversary coincided with the presence in Rome of curialist
associates of d’Alençon, one of whom (Richardus de Sylvestris) was bishop of Trani
from 1390 to 1393; they suggest that the election of the new bishop, Jacobus Cubellus,
coinciding with the 1394 anniversary, could have occasioned the composition of the
motet, which may therefore be older by about eight years than the earliest of the Paduan
motets (datable 1402–​9). This early dating has unexplored implications for the dissem-
ination of a motet style hitherto associated with the Veneto.41 But more recently, David
Fallows in a study of Ciconia’s earliest songs, has challenged this early dating. He sets out
a careful argument for Ciconia’s early works by a young man in his twenties in the 1390s
experimenting with many styles from the existing repertory, including the madrigals
and some of the ballate in the so-​called Mancini codex (dated before 1410 by Nádas

38 Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, 207–​8, and AASS, Junii, tomus primus (Paris and Rome, 1867), 229–​54.
39 In PMFC 24, p. xiii this anniversary is suggested but offered no answer to the puzzle of how Ciconia came
to write a motet for him.
40 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’, 31–​32.
41 Among those who accepted this date is Buff, ‘Ciconia’s Equal-​cantus Motets’, 54–​68.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 567

and Ziino), and Sus un fontayne, before finding ‘his own highly distinctive style’ in the
next decade. Even allowing for the dangers of cross-​genre stylistic comparisons, Fallows
judges that O virum does not fit this pattern and is inclined to place it after 1400, finding
little support for placing it so long before the other motets dating from 1402, and I tend
to agree. So we are back to lacking an occasion, but this is a much more comfortable
conclusion stylistically.42

Pad1106 and Opera dubia

The only two motets listed here that are not in Q15 are the incomplete and anonymous
Padu[a] . . . ex panis and O proles Yspanie (nos. 20 and 21). Both are unique to Pad1106
(part of PadD) and to different degrees rubbed, faded, and difficult to read. No. 21, O
proles Yspanie/​Tenor O proles nobile depositum, in honour of St Anthony of Padua, uses
(as mentioned earlier) a pre-​existing Franciscan text.43 No. 20, Padu[a] . . . ex panis,
honours Andrea Carrara, brother of Stefano, as Abbot of Santa Giustina in Padua, a
post to which he was nominated in 1398 but held effectively from 1402 until his death in
1404, a year before the fall of the Carrara at the Venetian conquest. Since there is no evi-
dence of Ciconia’s presence in Padua before 1401, a date c. 1402 seems more likely, if this
could indeed be by him, albeit not the only composer in Padua at the time. His first two
Paduan motets would then be for these two clerical Carrara brothers. Although musical
style and the Paduan context remain strongly suggestive of Ciconia’s authorship, and
recent work has accepted them more confidently than I did for PMFC 24, I will review
some arguments for and against.
Both motets have two sections which are fully isorhythmic in both surviving parts.
Padu[a] . . . ex panis in addition has a sixteen-​breve melismatic (but not self-​contained)
cantus introduction which stands outside that scheme, unlike any motet ascribed to
Ciconia; the two-​voice twelve-​breve introduction of Ciconia’s Albane before the tenor
and contratenor enter is included in the isorhythmic scheme of that motet.44 Tenor co-
loration is found otherwise only in Petrum Marcello. The hockets are texted, whereas in
Ciconia’s ascribed motets, and in O proles, they are untexted.45
Range, tonality, and some melodic features of Padu[a] . . . ex panis are shared with
the other Carrara motet, probably of the same year, O felix templum; the sequences,
hocketed cross-​rhythms and isorhythmic replication are typical. The text is very cor-
rupt and/​or incompetent; Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, diagnoses it as an un-
successful attempt at elegiac couplets; otherwise only the texts of Ut te per omnes are
in a classical metre, iambic dimeters. This may provide a Ciconian link. The texts of O
virum, no. 15 are in prose of a higher quality, as noted earlier.
Both nos. 20 and 21, Padu[a] . . . ex panis and O proles, have links to Padua during
Ciconia’s lifetime and share features of his style. They were included in PMFC 24 as opera

42 Fallows, ‘Ciconia’s Earliest Songs’.

43 See PMFC 24, Commentary, p. 208.
44 On introitus as a term for self-​contained introductions, see Ch. 1.
45 The text is transcribed very incompletely in Plamenac, ‘Paduan Fragment’ and analysed more or less

in this form by Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’. Its plural tenor rubric (‘tenorum’, implying also a
contratenor) has been discussed above.
568 Italian Motets

dubia because of their topical links to Padua, their presence in the Padua fragments that
include other pieces by Ciconia and were compiled there while he was present in that
city, and because they seemed to share stylistic traits with the ascribed motets. In view
of the now-​uncovered precedents for features that are typical of the Italian motet rather
than personal to Ciconia, it might seem riskier to ascribe these two motets to him on
purely stylistic grounds; he may not have been the only composer in Padua who could
have written topical motets.
At stake is my earlier designation of the surviving cantus parts of nos. 20 and 21,
Padu[a] . . . ex panis and O proles, as cantus II parts; in both cases, the surviving voices
appeared to be a cantus II and tenor, therefore probably on a recto. This raises awk-
ward questions of format about the recto–​verso status of the leaves of PadD preserved as
Pad1106, of which the signed copyist is the Santa Giustina monk Rolandus de Casale.
Both motets have a 6–​8 final cadence, which occurs in all of Ciconia’s motets between
cantus II and tenor; they were presumed to lack their cantus I parts in equal or nearly
equal range, which would have cadenced 10–​12 with the tenor. However, Cuthbert has
made the case on stylistic and codicological grounds that the surviving voices are in
both cases cantus I parts with tenor. The stylistic argument is that echo imitation, when
present, always starts in cantus I, and that these voices have no initial rests, as would
be expected for a cantus II participant in echo imitation.46 However, of the attributed
Ciconia motets, only nos. 12 and 15 start with echo imitation, and in both those cases
the tenor enters together with cantus I. In no. 20 (Padu[a] . . . ex panis), the tenor enters
only after sixteen breves, so the introduction must have involved both upper parts,
therefore not with echo imitation. Although the surviving voice opens with a brief simi-
larity to that of O felix templum, its opening phrase is not followed by rests such as would
be needed for a spaced opening echo imitation, and such an imitation cannot be made
to fit in canon here.47 In most of Ciconia’s motets, the tenor enters at or near the begin-
ning (though in Ut te the first tenor long is followed by five breve rests, as in no. 21, O
proles Yspanie, where the opening tenor long is followed by eight breves rest). Albane
misse celitus opens with a non-​imitative duet, and the tenor enters after twelve breves, in
a duet that is within the isorhythmic structure. I suggest that something similar could
have happened in Padu[a] . . . ex panis. The absence of initial cantus rests and the un-
likelihood of initial echo imitation, therefore, do not compel us to assume on stylistic
grounds that it is a cantus I part. But for codicological evidence about the status of the
surviving parts, we need to turn to the three leaves that constitute Pad1106.
Folio 1 was a pastedown at the front of the host volume.48 The faded contents of f. 1r
are complemented by its reverse image on the board to which it was glued; it contains
all five notated voices of the anonymous O Maria virgo/​O Maria maris stella, namely the
two cantus parts, tenor, contratenor and solus tenor, all on one page. This is of particular
interest, as Q15 preserves only the solus tenor as a supporting lower part.49

46 Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 190–​92.

47 The older motet Marce Marcum (PMFC 13, no. 44) is unusual in that in the opening echo imitation
cantus I does not have rests while cantus II echoes its opening.
48 The foliation is that used by Plamenac, RISM B IV4, and Cuthbert’s inventory of the Padua fragments,

‘Trecento Fragments’, 98–​111.

49 Q15 and MuEm do not give the tenor and contratenor parts, only the solus tenor (so labelled in Q15,

tenor in MuEm). PadD (Pad1106) gives all five parts. The tenor has two color statements without diminution;
all parts have four isorythmic taleae. The tenor, possibly liturgical, has not yet been identified. A transcription
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 569

On f. 1v are the badly rubbed and partly illegible cantus and tenor parts of
Padu[a] . . . ex panis (no. 20). I designated this a cantus II part because it takes what
would be the lower note (6–​8) of two cantus parts for the standard final cadence, as
in all the ascribed Ciconia motets. But cantus II would normally be on a recto. In this
case it would have had to precede O Maria virgo, which is complete on one page. It
often happened that the first recto of a new gathering presents a motet such as this
that was short enough to be accommodated on a single page, so that f. 1r is very likely
an original recto.50 If that was the case, the surviving voice of Padu[a] . . . ex panis
would be on its verso, and hence probably cantus I, despite taking the lower note at
the final cadence. Since the cantus parts were almost certainly equal in range or very
nearly so, and the opening here must have been a duet for the cantus voices before the
tenor entry, that does not help to determine its status.
The tenor is labelled ‘Tenor pastor bonus’. If this were the incipit of a cantus part, one
would expect it to denote the incipit of cantus I. But the incipit of the surviving cantus
I part is not Pastor bonus. It is more likely to be an epithet for the dedicatee, as was
apparently the case for Francesco Zabarella in the tenor label of Doctorum principem/​
Melodia suavissima, as ‘Tenor Vir mitis’. This would also explain its nominative case. If
Pastor bonus was the incipit of a missing cantus part, one might expect a vocative form
of address to the dedicatee. The plural tenorum in the tenor rubric suggests that there
was a contratenor. Thus if this was a verso, it would have contained cantus I and the
tenor, leaving cantus II and the contratenor for the missing recto, a more normal ar-
rangement than placing the contratenor on the verso. It is not known if there were one
or two texts but, if Pastor bonus was not a text incipit, either is possible. It is clear in this
case either that the expected recto–​verso status was reversed, or that cantus I did not
take the upper note at the final cadence.
Folios 2–​3 were pasted down at the rear of the volume. Cuthbert diagnosed that they
formed an intact bifolio (but not a centre gathering); this would fix the recto and verso
status of the two leaves.51 All four pages contain some of the characteristic note shapes
and pontelli of Italian trecento notation, which are not found on f. 1.
Folio 2: the recto and verso status of both sides of f. 2 is what would be expected
from its contents. The recto contains the sole surviving voice part of Principum
nobilissime, thought to be by Landini on grounds of the text words me Franciscum
peregre canentem. Because of its initial rests, and because it takes the lower note at the
final cadence (6–​8), this appears to be a cantus II part, lacking the cantus I and tenor
on the missing facing verso.

from Pad1106 is in PMFC 12, no. 41, p. 147; this version has an unsatisfactory and non-​coincident ending;
bar 82 of cantus I should be omitted. Cox, ‘The Motets of Q15’, ii. 323–​29 follows Q15 (no. 227, R233v–​234,
A262v–​263), which completes the isorhythmic repeat with (texted) repeated notes on c for bars 82–​85, thus
ensuring a convincing cadential arrival, albeit an unusual rhythmic extension. Q15, however, inverts the two
penultimate notes of cantus II as e d; the d e of Pad1106 makes a more normal cadence for an Italian motet.
MuEm, no. 97, ff. 56v–​57 rhythmically adapts the ending in order to ensure an appropriate cadence. See Ch. 1
and Ex. 1.3 for the anomalous ending(s) of this motet.

50 Examples of one-​page compositions on a recto include Dunstaple’s canonic Gloria in Tallinn (part of

RC), Ex. 25.4, and Salinis, Ihesu salvator in Ox213.

51 Cuthbert notes that the distinctive hair spotting pattern on staff 6 of the folio containing Hic est precursor

continues onto staff 6 of the folio containing Laudibus dignis, showing that the folios form a bifolio, resolving
the caution he expressed earlier about their status (Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 190 n. 132).
570 Italian Motets

Folio 2v has a cantus part and tenor of Hic est vere martir, with the upper note at the
final cadence (10–​12), suggesting cantus I. Rather than a two-​part piece as published
in PMFC 12, this is surely an incomplete motet lacking cantus II on the missing facing
recto, very much in the Italian tradition. There are no particular reasons to attribute
it to Ciconia.52 Thus the recto and verso status of both sides of f. 2 is as expected. The
problems arise with f. 3. In what follows, I accept Cuthbert’s judgement, but I would be
happier if it could be shown that the join had resulted from a modern restoration, ena-
bling the status of the sides of f. 3 to be reversed.
Folio 3r, one of the pages scribally signed by ‘Frater Rolandus monachus’, contains
the cantus part Laudibus dignis merito tentatively attributed to Jacopo da Bologna
on grounds of the Visconti dedicatee acrostic: lines 1–​11 of its sixteen lines make the
acrostic ‘Luchinus dux’.53 This has been designated a cantus I part because it takes the
upper note at the final cadence (10–​12), but if ff. 2–​3 are indeed a bifolio (though not a
centre gathering), it has to be on a recto and must probably, and with some reluctance,
be treated as a cantus II, with cantus I and the tenor on the missing facing verso.
Folio 3v contains O proles Yspanie (PMFC 24, no. 21). Here again, much of the mu-
sical content can be retrieved from the offset on the back board of the volume. Despite
it taking the lower note at the final cadence (6–​8), I equally reluctantly concede that
this too may after all be a cantus I part. This would place O proles Yspanie on a verso,
with the tenor beneath it, making the Pad1106 motets inconsistent as to whether the
tenor is placed below cantus I on the verso or cantus II on the recto. The tenor label is
followed by the words O proles nobile depositum. These do not indicate a different text
for the other cantus part,54 for the words nobile depositum occur later in the surviving
cantus part and are therefore not the incipit of a missing cantus part. The text O proles
Yspanie is, as already noted, from a rhymed office for St Anthony of Padua; it would
be the only text in a Ciconia motet with a known earlier derivation. It is likely to
have been either a monotextual motet, or the second cantus may have inserted nobile
depositum as a cue during a rest. If bitextual, cantus II may have used another known
text, perhaps O sidus Hispanie, the text paired in Du Fay’s motet with O proles Yspanie.
That text, according to Alejandro Planchart, is an imitation of Julian of Speyer’s work
that was attributed to Simon de Montfort, so if this text was used by the earlier com-
poser it would increase the likelihood of Du Fay having known it, and of using them
as a pair.55
My earlier assumption that f. 3 was reversed (because on both sides the final ca-
dence is contrary to expectation) would have to be abandoned if ff. 2–​3 are indeed an
intact bifolio, fixing the recto–​verso status of f. 3 with a reversal of cantus I and II parts

52 Another more recent discovery is the post-​Ciconian motet O Antoni expulsor demonum, Ex. 26.3,
as reconstructed in Bent and Klugseder, A Veneto Liber cantus, 154–​56. It is in triple time, with equal cantus
parts, wide-​spaced echo imitation, a contratenor that is contrapuntally problematic but integrated into the
four-​beat hocket limbs, so clearly part of a four-​part conception. It is unusual in that the final cadence is
reversed, cantus I taking the lower part of the 10/​6–​12/​8 cadence; but see the preceding discussion of recto-​
verso status in PadD.
53 Jacopo’s complete and ascribed motet Lux purpurata/​Diligite justitiam bears the acrostic ‘Luchinus’,

followed by vicecomes, in its cantus I part. Both motets are in PMFC 13. On the correction of the acrostic to
vicecomes, see Ch. 26 n. 26.
54 As suggested in Cuthbert, ‘Trecento Fragments’, 191.
55 Planchart, Du Fay, 409. See Ch. 27 for Salinis’s use of older texts.
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 571

between recto and verso. It goes against Ciconia’s normal practice of giving cantus I the
upper note at the final cadence. But cantus II seems to end on top here on f. 1v, for
Padu[a] . . . ex panis (no. 20). All these factors, including the use of an existing text,
slightly weaken the case for Ciconia’s authorship of these two motets, even with the
status of opera dubia.

O Petre Christi discipule

Two two-​part Latin-​texted pieces are presented in PMFC 24 as contrafacta, O beatum

incendium and O Petre Christi discipule (nos. 22 and 23).56 O beatum incendium is
preserved in Q15 with this contrafact Latin text. Its top part survives in the Padua
fragments as a French-​texted virelai Aler m’en veus (separately edited in PMFC 24 as
no. 44). O beatum incendium retains ouvert–​clos endings and was therefore not a motet
proper. Both pieces share a texture of two equal low-​cleffed voices on six-​line staves
without the need for a supporting tenor, which places them outside anything known
from the Latin motet repertory, but they have little else in common. O Petre is a different
matter. There is no evidence that it is a contrafactum other than its anomalous style and
superficial kinship with the demonstrable contrafact O beatum incendium, and I with-
draw the contrafact classification. Fallows, however, believes the two are a pair, and that
O Petre can be divided in two halves to resemble a virelai, just like Aler m’en veus, whose
contrafact status is corroborated by survival in both forms.57 It likewise has a single sa-
cred Latin text. In musical style O Petre is more like a madrigal, but in imperfect time,
major prolation and without a change of mensuration for a ritornello. It lacks the tell-​
tale repeat indications that mark O beatum incendium as a contrafact, but even if these
could have been obliterated by an arranger, none of its many cadences clearly stands out
as an undisputed midpoint. The commentary to PMFC 24, no. 23 already casts doubt on
its contrafact status, and in the years since that publication I came to agree with Robert
Nosow that this must indeed be an original composition.58 Unlike the motets nos. 12–​
14, 16 and 18 it lacks an authorial signature within the text, though it is ascribed in its
only source, Q15, and is entirely consistent with Ciconia’s musical style. The text is as
follows, with translation by Leofranc Holford-​Strevens, who judged the verbal text too
proficient to be by Ciconia (‘The Latin Poetry’):

Voices I, II Translation
1 O Petre, Christi discipule, O Peter, Christ’s disciple,
prime pastor ecclesie, shepherd of the first church [Rome: the Pope]
funde preces quotidie pour forth prayers every day
pro Petro nostro presule. for Peter our bishop.

56 Due to an unfortunate error in the database that generated the indexes and tables, this title is in several

places in Bent, Q15, misspelt as O Petre, Christi discipuli.

57 Fallows, ‘Ciconia’s Earliest Songs’, 120.
58 Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, and Nosow, ‘Equal-​Discantus’. I classified it as a motet in

Bent, Q15, before Buff, ‘Ciconia’s Equal-​Cantus Motets’ reached the same conclusion.
572 Italian Motets

2 O princeps apostolice, O prince of the apostles [St Peter:

turbe Cephas dominice, Cephas =​Peter], rock of the Lord’s multitude,
pastorem nostrum dirige, guide our shepherd,
quem omni malo protege. protect him from all ill.
3 Da sit in cunctis providus, Grant that he be foresighted in all things,
corpus et mentem candidus, fair in body and mind,
omni virtute splendidus, resplendent in all virtue,
in bono semper fervidus ever eager in what is good.
4 O Christi ductor ovium, O leader of Christ’s sheep,
perempne presta gaudium; grant eternal joy;
pastorem, clerum, populum save thy shepherd, clergy, and people
salva per omne seculum. throughout all ages.

Various occasions and honorees for O Petre have been proposed. The text invokes
‘Peter, Christ’s disciple’, on behalf of ‘Peter our bishop (or prelate, ‘presul’), so at least
two Peters are involved. Disagreement arises as to which Peters are referred to. Clercx
attempted to associate the second Peter with the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII, Pedro
de Luna, from the records of whose chapel at the time of his election in 1394 and in
the surrounding years Ciconia is absent; but the more recent references associating
Ciconia with Rome and with Roman obedience, while removing the need to place
him in Avignon, make this unlikely, and in any case Ciconia’s biography has mean-
while been revised in a way that excludes Avignon. Zacara and Ciconia were present
in Rome in the early 1390s, Ciconia perhaps until the death of his patron Philippe
d’Alençon in 1397.59 Then he may have spent some time at the Visconti court in Pavia,
accounting for his Visconti pieces from that period before he is documented in Padua
from 1401. Zacara had initially followed Gregory XII but switched to Pisan obedience
in 1409.
In the commentary to PMFC 24 I presumed that it was ‘votive to St Peter, and is
probably in honour of Pietro Marcello, Bishop of Padua (1409–​1428), hence composed
between 1409 and Ciconia’s death in 1412’.60 Di Bacco and Nádas, followed by Nosow,
then recognised that three Peters were involved, and that Filargo was addressed as pro-
tector of a bishop Peter. They accepted my suggestion that this was Pietro Marcello,
bishop of Padua (for whom Ciconia’s Petrum Marcello was written), and that the Peter
of stanza 2 was Saint Peter (Cephas, rock).61 I followed with the revised suggestion that,
as Marcello was appointed in 1409 by a different pope, the third Peter was more likely to
be Pietro Emiliani, appointed by Filargo to the bishopric of Vicenza soon after his elec-
tion as pope in 1409: ‘The text addresses Saint Peter, protector of Peter the new Pope,

59
Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 50–​58.
60
PMFC 24, no. 23 and p. 209.
61 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’, 33 n. 63: ‘Il testo si articola in tre invocazioni suc-

cessive; a Pietro Filargo (prima stanza: perchè vegli su Pietro Marcello, protetto di Filargo, eletto nello stesso
1409 vescovo di Padova); la seconda a S. Pietro (seconda e terza stanza: “Cephas”—​come Cristo chiama Pietro
nel Vangelo—​perchè protegga il nuovo papa “candidus” ovvero Pietro da Candia); la terza a Cristo “ductor
omnium” perchè assicuri la prosperità alla cristianità nel suo complesso, nella sua organizzazione a tre livelli
“pastorem, clerum, populum”).’
 The Motets of Johannes Ciconia 573

who in turn watches over our Bishop Peter, that is, Filargo and Emiliani respectively.’62
Holford-​Strevens accepts the reading of Nádas and Di Bacco as addressing three Peters,
and the identity of the third as Emiliani.
A revised ‘three-​Peter’ reading addresses, first, not St Peter, but Pietro Filargo, the
Conciliar Pisan Pope Alexander V, elected 1409, as ‘Peter, Christ’s disciple, shepherd of
the first church’ (1. 1–​2), the first church being Rome, first in dignity, not chronology.
He is requested to pray daily for Peter our bishop (Emiliani, appointed by Filargo: l.
3–​4.) The second stanza addresses St Peter as prince of the apostles (a higher form of ad-
dress to the saint than that used for Peter the pope in stanza 1), requesting guidance and
protection for our shepherd (‘our’ bishop Emiliani). Stanza 3 may refer to him as ‘our
bishop’, though ‘candidus’ could also refer punningly to Filargo’s origin from Candia,
i.e. Crete. Stanza 4 invokes St Peter to grant ‘our shepherd, clergy and people’ eternal life
and salvation, and to look after the bishop and his flock.63
It could be asked why Ciconia, established in Padua, would have composed a motet
for the bishop of Vicenza. If, as hinted by his Visconti-​linked compositions, he was in
Pavia in the late 1390s, he may well have encountered Filargo there, and possibly also
Emiliani. There is no direct evidence to associate Ciconia with Filargo, but by 1409
his connections with Vicenza were well established through his close friend Giovanni
Gasparo, canon and singer at Vicenza, and almost certainly thence with the polyphony-​
loving bishop Pietro Emiliani, promoted to that bishopric by Filargo in Pisa that year.
This could have led to a commission for a composition in honour of Emiliani. Emiliani
spent at least as much time in Padua as in Vicenza, and surrounded himself with singers;
both he and Filargo were documented patrons of polyphonic music.
This three-​Peter reading has been challenged by Jason Stoessel, who proposes a dif-
ferent interpretation. He reports a visit to Padua by Cardinal Pietro Filargo, then bishop
of Milan, on 6 March 1406, which occasioned a fulsome oration by Francesco Zabarella,
comparing Filargo to an angel and to the apostle Peter, pointing out that Filargo was
also cardinal and papal nuncio in 1406, and a citizen of the Venetian republic. He notes
parallels between Zabarella’s speech and Ciconia’s motet, and dates O Petre to that oc-
casion. He reads this as a votive piece to St Peter in honour of Filargo, declaring that
‘the motet text is concerned with not three Peters, but only two: Saint Peter and another
Peter, a prelate of the church. No one else is named.’64 Stoessel is right (in continuation)
to point out that there is some ambiguity as to whether two or three Peters are meant,
but ambiguous it remains, and both readings have merit. I am not sure why anyone
in Padua would have referred to Filargo in 1406 as ‘our prelate’; he was then cardinal-​
archbishop of Milan. But by drawing attention to this visit, Stoessel provides an op-
portunity for Ciconia to have come to Filargo’s attention through his patron Zabarella,
which could have paved the way for a musical tribute in 1409 when Filargo had become
pope and his protégé Emiliani bishop of Vicenza. He also makes the interesting sug-
gestion that the higher quality of this text noted by Holford-​Strevens could mean that
it was written by Zabarella. The 1406 occasion would provide a reason for him to col-
laborate with Ciconia on this tribute, whether in 1406 or 1409. A ‘two-​Peter’ reading,

62 Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’, 24–​26, revised here as Ch. 30.

63 Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, 451–​53.
64 Stoessel, ‘Johannes Ciconia and his Italian Poets’, 228–​33. See Ch. 30 n. 66.
574 Italian Motets

as originally proposed by me and revived in a different form by Stoessel, still has some
traction. In that case, St Peter would be the addressee of all four stanzas, and the prelate
and shepherd to be prayed for could be either Filargo or Emiliani. Holford-​Strevens
judges Emiliani to be more likely, in that case, but in favour of Filargo is the above-​
mentioned possible pun in stanza 3 on his native Candia (candidus).
I still incline to the ‘three-​Peter’ reading, and favour a dating to 1409 rather than
1406, after the appointment of Filargo as pope and Emiliani as bishop of Vicenza. Either
reading, but especially the three-​Peter one, could also relate to Emiliani’s will and the
iconography of his funerary chapel in the Frari in Venice, where (over the portal) God
the father blesses St Peter, who in turn stands above the Emiliani arms, and (over the
tomb) St Peter with key and papal tiara surmounts Emiliani’s effigy. Filargo is not di-
rectly represented, but Emiliani invoked him in his will of 1429, where Pope Alexander
(Pietro Filargo) ‘who made me a bishop’ is the only non-​family member for whom
prayers are mandated.65 Emiliani was uniquely aware of his three-​stage Petrine lin-
eage: St Peter the apostle, Pietro Filargo as pope, and himself, Pietro Emiliani. Thus,
there is still room for interpretation with respect to the date and destination of O Petre;
and the balance of evidence now points slightly away from Ciconia for the two ‘Paduan’
motets in Pad1106.

65 Bent, ‘The Emiliani Chapel in the Frari’, and Girgensohn, ‘Il testamento’.
 29
Ciconia, Prosdocimus, and the Workings
of Musical Grammar as Exemplified in
O felix templum and O Padua

The understanding of musical practices within any given repertory, in all their partic-
ularity, depends primarily on readings of the musical works themselves in the written
texts transmitted to us, however much those readings are enriched by the knowledge
we have built up about performance practices and contexts. By ‘readings’, I mean
the spectrum of understanding that reaches from textual criticism and diagnosis of
error, through analytical recognition of cadentie or sense breaks and their appro-
priate inflections, to the rhetorical projection of unnotatable nuance in performance.
Since we are no longer native speakers of old musical languages, our readings can
be helped by recourse to whatever contemporary testimony seems helpful and rele-
vant.1 Elementary pedagogy reminds us, for example, that musical grammar around
1400 is fundamentally dyadic, not triadic, an orientation that has greater explana-
tory power than alternatives lacking contemporaneous anchorage. Readings that take
this as their point of departure can in turn confirm, amplify, revise, refine, extend
the elementary but vitally important guidance derived from counterpoint treatises,
evidence to which the notated examples stand in symbiotic relationship. This is no
more and no less a circular process than the acquisition and use of language, or in-
deed many other arts that combine practice with internalised theory, such as cooking
or dancing, whose notations (where they exist) tend to be even less prescriptive than
that of late medieval music. Just as the understanding of a verbal sentence depends
on knowing (usually intuitively) the grammar in terms of which it was formulated,
so musical sense can be communicated and understood in terms of its own back-
ground grammar, rather than of the intuitions of a modern listener which have been
developed through later music. All musical texts are incomplete or underprescriptive
by some standards; for old music we lack not only the irrecoverable life-​blood of per-
formance conventions affecting unknowable things like vocal timbre, use of dynamic
change and tempo, but also some partly knowable things like pitch and rhythm.
Further aspects of performance practice that are totally lost to us are the rhetorical
nuances by which performers communicate the sense and direction of the music as

Originally published as ‘Ciconia, Prosdocimus, and the Workings of Musical Grammar as Exemplified in O
felix templum and O Padua’, in Vendrix (ed.), Johannes Ciconia (2003). I am grateful to Bonnie Blackburn,
Jan Herlinger, Leofranc Holford-​ Strevens, Pedro Memelsdorff and Theodor Dumitrescu for helpful
comments and corrections to that earlier publication. This revised version is published with permission
from the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, together with the music examples beautifully
set by Vincent Besson.
1 For the dyadic basis of counterpoint see Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early Music’; for cadentia see Ch. 1.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0030
576 Italian Motets

they understand it, its articulations, forward motion and resting points. This involves
more than simply following editorially supplied accidentals, let alone imposing later
criteria of tension and resolution. The notated text of any music can be taken liter-
ally, at face value, as a basis only for certain kinds of analysis-​on-​paper, and then with
many limitations.2 Contemporary theorists, moreover, are incomplete witnesses; they
are silent about many of the things we most want to know, either because these were
so obvious that they did not need saying, or because they were not the concern of a
particular treatise, where they might be hinted at, if at all, only in tantalising asides.
Absence of mention by a theorist cannot be taken to prove that something was not
the case.
In seeking to understand our musical texts, allowance must also be made for in-
dividual usage and local dialects. For most purposes, theoretical help brings us little
closer to specific repertories than to state the generalised rules of counterpoint, whose
lowest common denominators remained fairly constant over some time, with only
gradual change, as a basis both for composition and for the construal of notation by
performers—​the analytical activity that guided their performance choices—​in turn
communicating this understanding to listeners.
In musical styles involving highly disciplined part-​writing, whether by Bach or
Ciconia, criteria for judging dissonance are context-​dependent and not necessarily
equated with local dissonance, or with the actual sonority at any one moment. Such
dissonant events may exist only at surface level, needing to be construed against their
presumed harmonic or grammatical background, from which the surface sonorities
may be displaced or ornamented. For pedagogical purposes, which are the foun-
dation of trained intuition, progressions can be reduced to their essentials. In thus
reducing a Bach chorale harmonisation, dissonant notes as heard will be eliminated
in favour of the consonances to which they relate as appoggiaturas or passing notes.
The structure is parsed back to a skeleton that uses legitimate progressions where
possible, avoiding solecisms such as parallel fifths, just as a verbal sentence is in the
first instance construed in terms of legitimate grammatical norms or expectations.
If it proves impossible to construe the sentence or the musical progression in such
terms, we then have to judge whether the irregularity is an original stroke of pre-
cocity, stretching or advancing the musical language, or whether it is simply idio-
syncratic, local, personal, anomalous, barbaric, or erroneous. The same procedure
applies to older music, taking due account of different harmonic language. Any mo-
mentary dissonance needs to be judged by reference to its context, function, or lat-
eral displacement. I see no problem in referring to appoggiaturas and passing notes,
given that there is no contemporary terminology for these and other usages. The
strict contrapuntal background cannot, by definition, contain dissonance. We should
always be open to seeing such anomalies as possible surpassings of the norms, but
may be forced to judge a reading as an error of transmission or an anomaly of com-
position. Many analyses of early music have not yet made such distinctions against
any defined background. I have tried to do this for Machaut in a study of the Gloria

2 See, for example, the important observations in Leach, ‘Interpretation and Counterpoint’.
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 577

of the Mass (Ch. 11), reading the music against its background counterpoint and
recognising layers that are superimposed grammatically, not necessarily chronolog-
ically. Here I propose to read Ciconia’s motets against the background of contempo-
rary Paduan theory, as stated in treatises and, crucially, extended by observation of
surviving compositions.
In the case of Ciconia, we are in the fortunate position of having a theoretical
point of reference that is not only close to him in time and place, but offers quite a
good fit with his own music. Unfortunately, this is not his own treatise, Nova musica,
a massively learned work presumably written some time after his first documented
appearance in Padua in 1401. Later, in December 1411, he revised book III as the
separate treatise De proportionibus, directing it to his singer-​colleagues to save them
from error, and dedicating it to the singer Giovanni Gasparo da Castelgomberto,
described as Ciconia’s frater carissime, a canon of Vicenza and preclarus cantor.3
Nova musica is by far the most substantial of the flurry of treatises attributed to
composers dating from around 1400; it is a speculative work, largely eschewing prac-
tical or elementary pedagogy. Even De proportionibus with its avowedly practical
aim does not resolve the mysteries of different transmissions of the proportional
and mensural signs in Ciconia’s Sus une’ fontayne.4 Nova musica contains no discus-
sion of hexachordal solmisation, nor does it discuss counterpoint in any way that
bears on our present enquiry. It sheds little direct light on the contrapuntal craft
of Ciconia’s own compositions, but nevertheless gives some encouragement to the
present view of how music was construed. I have invoked grammar as an analogy
for the parsing and delivery of under-​prescriptively notated music. I have devel-
oped this line of thought to show that many medieval theorists use the same range
of models, invoking grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, in some cases going so far
as to equate musical procedures with those of grammar or rhetoric.5 For present
purposes it suffices to note that Ciconia, in the most original part of his treatise,
invokes Aristotelian ‘accidents’ for the orderly classification of ‘songs’ (cantibus) in
‘declensions’ (declinationibus), and notes that

sicut grammatica de partibus nominum vel litterarum disputat, ita quoque de

declinationibus accidentium cantuum musica tractat.
just as grammar reasons out the parts of names or letters, so also music treats of the
declensions of the accidents of songs.6

Practical testimony of the kind we seek, however, is forthcoming from another

Paduan treatise written in the year of Ciconia’s death, Prosdocimus’s Contrapunctus.7

3 Ciconia, Nova musica, ed. Ellsworth, 10.

4 PMFC 24, no. 45, and Stone, ‘A Singer at the Fountain’.
5 Much of this work remains unpublished. It was set out in a series of public lectures for Royal Holloway,
University of London, 2001–​2, entitled ‘Soni pereunt: Sense and Nonsense in Early Music’, and in lectures
given in Montréal in 2010. Related published articles are Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early Music’, ‘Sense and
Rhetoric’, ‘Grammar and Rhetoric’, ‘Performative Rhetoric’ and, especially, ‘Reading, Memory’.
6 Ciconia, Nova musica, 364–​65.
7 Prosdocimo, Contrapunctus.
578 Italian Motets

Although there is no archival evidence of direct contact between Ciconia and the
professor of quadrivial arts at Padua University, Prosdocimus de Beldemandis, it is
not often that we can draw on relevant theoretical testimony with such a close fit in
time and place. Although his short counterpoint treatise is still less detailed than we
might have hoped, it does provide both a clear starting-​point for analysis informed by
contemporary theory, and also some striking specific observations. It is dated from
Montagnana near Padua in 1412, the year of Ciconia’s death, and the year following
the dated explicit of Ciconia’s revision of De proportionibus. Prosdocimus’s treatise also
exists in a revised form, dating from 1425–​28, the last three years of his life, in which
he amplifies some points and attacks Marchetto’s use of the natural or ‘cross’ sign and
his division of the whole tone into five equal parts.8 Marchetto is dismissed as a mere
practicus; one wonders what Prosdocimus thought of Ciconia’s treatise, which long
antedated Prosdocimus’s sharpest criticisms of Marchetto. Is his silence significant?
Paradoxically, Prosdocimus’s Contrapunctus is unabashedly practical, and is one of the
most important treatments of counterpoint between those of Johannes de Muris and
Johannes Tinctoris, some sixty years earlier and later respectively. Prosdocimus admits
that there is controversy, ‘rejecting some things customary among modern writers’; it
is unlikely that this could be an attack on Ciconia’s treatise, which does not deal with
counterpoint.
What follows is a summary of Prosdocimus’s counterpoint teaching, with glosses,
indicating how certain passages might be understood. With minimal modifications,
I adopt the excellent edition and translation by Jan Herlinger. First, Prosdocimus’s defi-
nition of counterpoint, quoted in full:

Quia igitur cantum contra cantum sumere Because the phrase ‘melody against
duobus modis inveniri potest, scilicet melody’ can be construed in two ways—​
quando plures note contra unicam solam when many notes are employed against
notam sumuntur et supra vel infra ipsam a single note and are to be written or
scribi vel cantari habent, et quando unica sung above or below it, and when a single
sola nota contra aliam unicam solam note is employed against another single
sumitur et supra vel infra ipsam scribi note and is to be written or sung above
vel cantari habet, est sciendum quod or below it—​counterpoint can also be
contrapunctus potest sumi dupliciter, construed in two ways, in the ordinary
scilicet comuniter sive large et proprie sive or loose sense and in the proper or strict
stricte. sense.
Contrapunctus largo modo sive comuniter Counterpoint construed in the ordinary
sumptus est plurium notarum contra or loose sense is the placing of many
aliquam unicam solam notam in aliquo notes against one single note in a melody,
cantu positio, et de tali non intendo hic and this sort I do not intend to treat
determinare, nec talis vere contrapunctus here; nor is this sort truly to be called
nominari habet; counterpoint.

8 Ibid., 54–​57, 86–​95.

 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 579

contrapunctus vero proprie sive stricte Counterpoint construed in the proper or

sumptus est unius solius note contra aliquam strict sense is the placing of one single note
aliam unicam solam notam in aliquo against another single note in a cantus, and
cantu positio, et de tali hic bene intendo this sort I do intend to treat here, since it is
determinare, cum hic vere contra-​punctus truly to be called counterpoint, because in
nominari habeat, eo quod in ipso est vera it there is a true counterplacement of note
contrapositio, quia scilicet contrapositio against note. This counterplacement is the
note contra notam, que contrapositio vere true meaning of the term counterpoint,
est interpretatio istius termini contra-​ which is defined as the counterplacement
punctus, cum contrapunctus dicatur quasi of note against note—​one note to be
contrapositio note scilicet contra notam, written or sung above or below the other
quando scilicet nota supra vel infra notam note. Counterpoint construed in the
scribi vel cantari habet, et est huiusmodi proper sense is the foundation of the
contrapunctus proprie sumptus alterius other kind, construed in the ordinary
comuniter sumpti fundamentum, eo quod sense, because by understanding the
habita noticia huius, statim haberi potest one, the experienced can straightway
noticia alterius, saltim apud usitatos circa understand the other, the practice of florid
cantum fractibilem. composition (or song: cantus).9

This could not be clearer. Strict counterpoint is a two-​part procedure which places
single note against single note, point against point. It is the basis for counterpoint
‘in the ordinary or loose sense’, free counterpoint in which more than one note is set
against another, and in turn for composed, contrapuntally based polyphonic music,
of which those experienced in counterpoint (apud usitatos) are thereby vouchsafed
immediate understanding. I suggest that this implies habits of analytical listening
and construing, whether conscious or internalised. Not surprisingly, this process is
implied in a number of fourteenth-​century treatises, of which a few samples follow.
The fourteenth-​century Abbot Engelbert of Admont recognises the principle of anal-
ysis or construal for chant: ‘Just as in the other senses the delight in what is perceived
proceeds from perception and perception from observing distinctions, so in the
hearing of song there will be no pleasure unless the song is clearly perceived, nor can
it be clearly perceived unless correctly parsed (distinguatur).’10 Arnulf of St Ghislain,
writing around 1400, makes several references to the kind of musical understanding
communicated by performers to listeners, perhaps most vividly thus: ‘Who will not
marvel to see with what expertise in performance some musical relationship, dissonant
at first hearing, sweetens by means of their skilful performance and is brought back to
the pleasantness of consonance?’11 Johannes Boen most interestingly discusses a harsh
but logical dissonance at the beginning of Se grace/​Cum venerint, the Ite missa est motet
of the Mass of Tournai (Ex. 29.1a): ‘the harshness is covered over with the surrounding
sweetness’. Example 29.1b shows the triplum–​motetus reduction: the motetus here

9 Prosdocimo, Contrapunctus, 28–​31.

10 GS ii. 366. See Fuller, ‘Delectabatur in hoc auris’, at 467 and n. 6.
11 Page, ‘A Treatise on Musicians’, 16, 20.
580 Italian Motets

usurps the tenor’s contrapuntal function. Example 29.1c reduces motetus and tenor
to their essential progressions. The disturbing sonority remarked by Boen arises from
superimposition of these two pairs of voices, and from appoggiaturas between them.
He allows for auditory expectation, describing how imperfect consonances attract and
allure the ear towards their resolution in perfect intervals.12

Ex. 29.1 Johannes Boen, Musica, example from Se grace/​Cum venerint, Mass of Tournai: (a)
transcription of the opening; (b) triplum–​motetus reduction; (c) motetus–​tenor reduction
(a)

(b)

(c)

Prosdocimus undertakes to deal with counterpoint only in the proper or strict sense,
the placing of a single note against another single note of an [existing] melody—​in
aliquo cantu. Thus, while the existence of a cantus prius factus is, as usual, acknowl-
edged, the technique of counterpoint itself stresses the succession of dyads. Only indi-
rectly does counterpoint result in placing melody against melody; the melody resulting
from the contrapuntal operation is secondary to the principles governing the succes-
sion of dyads. Counterpoint in its proper or strict sense is not concerned with multiple-​
part writing, nor does it include cantus fractibilis, florid writing with several notes set
against a single note. Like the grammatical base of a verbal utterance before it has been

12 Johannes Boens Musica, 158–​59, discussed by Fuller, ‘Delectabatur in hoc auris’, 475–​76. I disagree with

Fuller’s cs in motetus, b. 1, and with PFMC 1, p. 129, where Schrade suppresses the tenor cs. The manuscript
accidentals are unambiguous: see the facsimile (f. 33v) in La Messe de Tournai, but those editors also introduce
cs in the motetus (p. 104). See also Fuller, ‘Contrapunctus Theory’, 144–​47. Ivrea, f. 21v has bb at the beginning
of the motetus, apparently applying to both bs, and cs in the tenor, thus corroborating the reading of Tourn27.
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 581

clothed in rhetoric, strict counterpoint is stylistically neutral. Note that he calls this
clothing process not cantus fractus but cantus fractibilis, not already fractured, but with
that potential.
Prosdocimus’s precepts pertain both to vocal and written counterpoint; these he
distinguishes as two distinct types, treating neither type as a consequence, or a different
presentation or format, of the other. He affirms the practical mastery of plainsong as the
basis and prerequisite of counterpoint, and promises to confine himself to essentials. He
defines intervals as major and minor, expressed in hexachord syllables, and using what
he calls the ‘modern names’—​generic numerical designations such as fifth and second,
rather than the older size-​specific Greek names (ditone, diapente, etc.). He feels the need
to define these: ‘the discrete quantity of tones and semitones consists of the number by
which that interval is named, less one’, so that the second, minus one, yields one, since
a second consists of either a tone or a semitone. He acknowledges octave equivalence
for purposes of interval discernment and treatment. The unison, fifth and octave are
perfect consonances. The status of the octave is counted like the unison, and therefore
given slight pre-​eminence over the fifth; thirds and sixths are consonant but not per-
fectly so. The second, seventh, diminished fifth and diminished octave are discords, not
to be used ‘in counterpoint’. In other words, they are not to be used between any two
parts that are at that time in a strictly note-​against-​note dyadic contrapuntal relation-
ship with each other, or whose florid relationship must be reduced to such progressions.
To determine how parts are related, one may need not only to strip away a grammati-
cally inessential part, perhaps a contratenor, but also to reduce florid counterpoint to its
underlying dyadic progressions.
I have referred several times to reduction. Far from being a modern term, it is used
by Petrus dictus Palma Ociosa in his surprisingly early demonstration of florid coun-
terpoint (1336), making explicit that for him the rhythmic elaboration of simple coun-
terpoint was to be understood against just such a background as I find implicit in
Prosdocimus. It is clear that for Petrus, too, surface dissonance even on strong beats of
florid counterpoint (by appoggiaturas, etc.) was not counted as part of the background
counterpoint:

Dicunt enim flores musicae mensurabilis, They are called flowers of measurable
quando plures voces seu notulae, quod music when several pitches or notes,
idem est, diversimode figuratae secundum which is the same thing, notated in
uniuscuiusque qualitatem ad unam vocem various ways according to the quality
seu notulam simplicem tantum quantitatem of each, are reduced to a single pitch or
illarum vocum continentem iusta proportione note containing the full value of those
reducuntur.13 notes in due proportion.

For purposes of counterpoint, the fourth is counted among the dissonances, but is
‘less dissonant than the other dissonant intervals’; Prosdocimus mediates its anomalous

13 Petrus dictus Palma Ociosa, Compendium, 516–​17. Petrus’s account of florid counterpoint is discussed

insightfully in Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Written and Improvised’.

582 Italian Motets

position (as having acoustic perfection, but the status of a dissonance requiring res-
olution in counterpoint) by placing it between true consonances and dissonances. In
the revised version of this passage, he adds the familiar observation that inexperienced
singers easily confuse the fourth with the fifth (still today a common error), and goes on
to distinguish the fourth from the ‘exceedingly dissonant’ tritone (augmented fourth).
The augmented and diminished forms of the octave are truly discordant, he says, but he
gives no parallel for the inflected unison or fifth.14
Prosdocimus then gives six rules for counterpoint (ch. 4):

1. Dissonances are excluded from counterpoint (here understood as the under-

lying dyadic relationship) but may occur fleetingly in florid writing, where
they are excused because they are so quickly over that they are not perceived as
dissonances—​an interesting and rare early reference to duration in relation to
dissonance treatment. However, he does not explain longer dissonances, which
would have to be treated either as licences or as a consequence of the composing-​
out process based on the contrapuntal skeleton. Such sustained fourths sometimes
occur between lower parts, as in the Gloria and Credo of Machaut’s Mass and in
some four-​part motets by Ciconia, but in these cases it is always the contratenor
which causes the fourth.
2. Counterpoint should begin and end only with a unison, fifth or octave; the lis-
tener ought to be charmed at the beginning and sent away at the end with sweet
harmony, a perfect interval, a unison, fifth or octave.
3. No parallel perfect intervals are permitted in counterpoint. Here again, the prohi-
bition is qualified, and I take it to apply to any two voices that are in contrapuntal
relationship. For example, in the normal Italian motet cadence 10/​6–​12/​8, there
are parallel fifths between the upper parts, but those parts are not in contrapuntal
relationship with each other, as defined here (Ch. 26). Each is related to the tenor,
with which it cadences by contrary motion.
4. Counterpoint should not be made entirely of imperfectly consonant intervals
(thirds and sixths) without inserting perfectly consonant intervals (unisons,
fifths and octaves) between them; it would sound harsh, ‘for no harmony what-
ever would be found in the counterpoint, and harmony seems to be the end of
all music’. I understand this use of ‘harmony’ to be an aesthetic judgement, not a
technical statement.15
5. He forbids mi contra fa (and vice versa) in perfectly concordant intervals, be-
cause the forbidden interval would make the perfectly consonant intervals minor
or augmented. Although he does not say so directly, this prohibition also has

14 For ‘imperfect’ perfect consonances, see Bent, ‘On False Concords’, where in ex. 3.5 (p. 101), the edito-

rial gs in b. 45 is correct in version (a) but should be deleted in example (b), and the editorial bb in example
(a) deleted.
15 At least for this period, I see no need to posit any tradition other than counterpoint to explain

combinations of notes. This point was eloquently made by Crocker, ‘Discant, Counterpoint, and Harmony’.
See also rule (2) above. Note that armonia here is a sonority of two notes, not a compositional technique or
a means of regulating progressions. In a series of articles, Bonnie Blackburn has argued for the later use of
armonia to refer to a codified tradition of harmony, as opposed to the counterpoint teaching which operates
at this period. See Blackburn, ‘On Compositional Process’, ‘Leonardo and Gaffurio’, and ‘The Dispute about
Harmony’.
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 583

consequences for the approach to a perfect interval; solmisation expresses a linear

contextual dimension as well as a simultaneous occurrence.16
6. Thirds and sixths are acceptable, whether of identical or different sizes in suc-
cession, but perfectly concordant intervals should be interspersed with them.
Conversely, perfect intervals should be separated by, and hence approached by,
imperfect consonances. The progression of a third to a fifth, a sixth to an oc-
tave, results in an ‘extremely sweet way of singing’, ‘dulcissimus modus cantandi’.
Indeed, Prosdocimus says, ‘there are many such ways, which it would be difficult
and perhaps impossible to write down, because they are infinite; a variety of com-
positional practices arises on account of them, but they are omitted here’.

Note that rule (4) was given on account of avoiding what sounds harsh, the related or
complementary rule (6) on account of what is hard to write. Remember that he tells
us that his precepts apply both to written and to vocal counterpoint. This is, I believe,
where he sets the only (and significant) distinction between written and sung coun-
terpoint. He surely intends here at least the cadential semitone approach, usually un-
marked but necessarily sung, but he may well mean more than that. It is of course
possible to signal cadential semitone inflections notationally, again, like punctuation
in verbal text. But while it is necessary to inflect in performance (‘delivery’), it is not al-
ways either necessary or possible to notate such inflections, in verbal or in musical texts.
Just as punctuation was primarily a readerly rather than an authorial function in verbal
text, fictive inflections have a parallel function in music, a means whereby performers
communicate their understanding of sense breaks and articulations to the listener. The
music may be set up in such a way that adept performers listening attentively to their
colleagues can hear how the music should go, or is going in this particular performance,
and respond accordingly.
Beyond the normal requirement for the major form of third or sixth, could he
also be referring in rule (6) to unnotated practices such as those praised by Arnulf of
St Ghislain? Women singers, deemed rather angelic than human, are said to divide
‘tones into semitones with a sweet-​sounding throat, and . . . semitones into indivisible
microtones’.17 Subtleties of rhetorical delivery and communication of sense defy nota-
tion both in verbal text and in music, and these may be among the kinds of infinite va-
riety that Prosdocimus meant here, as they may continue to be implicit in the ongoing
quotation of Isidore’s famous ‘nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni pereunt,
quia scribi non possunt’; the sounds themselves perish, even after the invention of mu-
sical notation to represent them.18 Some aspects of both verbal and musical perfor-
mance can never be notated.
Prosdocimus’s tantalising nod at infinity leads on to his well-​known final chapter,
on musica ficta, defined as the feigning of syllables in places where they do not exist
on the hand. The purpose of musica ficta is to colour consonances; it should be applied
before the note whose syllable is to be changed in order to colour the consonance. In
other words, once it has been decided which inflection is to be made, the sign should be

16 Bent, Counterpoint, chs. 1 and 3.

17 Page, ‘A Treatise’, 16, 20.
18 The second clause of this statement is: ‘sonus praeterfluit in praeteritum tempus imprimiturque

memoriae’ (‘sound flows by as time passes and is imprinted on the memory’).

584 Italian Motets

written or imagined, and the hexachord changed, in time to accommodate the semitone
cadential approach. He explains that, in rising intervals, r (‘round b’) lessens the ascent
and q (‘square b’) augments it; in descent, r augments the descent and q diminishes it.
Finally, he requires that octaves, fifths and their octave duplications should be made
perfect if they would otherwise have been dissonant (augmented or diminished).
He advises choosing that form of the imperfect interval which, in the interests of
dulcior armonia, is nearer to the intended destination. While he does not use the for-
mulation causa pulchritudinis, this seems to be his way of describing approaches, whose
melodic aspect sometimes seems to be equated with beauty, as opposed to the necessity
of correct simultaneities. I increasingly believe that the frequent association of necessity
with perfect simultaneities and beauty with melodic inflections might best be under-
stood against a background of grammar and rhetoric respectively: the arts of writing or
composing correctly (criteria of necessity) and of delivering or performing well (criteria
of beauty).
He gives an example in order that that this may be better understood, the sole and
notorious notated musical example in the treatise (Ex. 29.2).19 He says neither that
inflections must be notated, nor that the notation is complete, but perhaps his circum-
locution implies that it is, here. Rather, he notates for purposes of demonstration what
might otherwise not be notated, by drawing attention to the fact that the example is pro-
vided with signs. But note that he uses the square q sign here, a sign usually reserved for
treatises and not for practical notation in musical sources.

Ex. 29.2 Prosdocimus, Contrapunctus, example of musica ficta

After the example he goes further. He extends this rule of proximity to the antepenul-
timate, the sixth before the sixth immediately preceding the octave. He seems to justify
the melodic augmented fourth in the tenor (without directly saying so) on the grounds
that it makes the sixth cs–​a, the antepenultimate to the perfect interval that is the next
dyad but one, adhere more closely to the penultimate sixth d–​bb, which tends to the per-
fect octave a–​a. The rules are given not at all in melodic terms, but by the requirements
of dyadic contrapuntal successions.
At the end of his revision of this treatise, Prosdocimus invokes the criterion of
inflecting according to where the inflections sound better (not whether to use them at
all).20 I take ‘applying the signs’ to refer to implementing but not necessarily writing the
inflections. If they sound better in the tenor, one should do that, if in the discant, that; if
equal, give preference to the discant, lest it be necessary to apply one of the signs in parts

19 Prosdocimo, Contrapunctus, 84–​ 85. Note also the similar example in his monochord treatise,
Prosdocimo, Parvus tractatulus, 106.
20 Prosdocimo, Contrapunctus, 94–​95.
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 585

other than the discant and tenor, i.e. to address the relationship between superimposed
parts whose primary relationship is not with each other but with the tenor. At two points
in the treatise he mentions the contratenor (also triplum and quadruplum), showing
clearly that he has in mind the consequences of applying dyadic counterpoint teaching
in a composed multi-​voice context. But the context commends that this judgement of
the ears should be applied only subject to respecting the more binding rules: taste can
no more override those rules than it can in verbal grammar. There may not always be
a choice; where there is, it may be a constrained choice, and Prosdocimus goes some
way towards formulating bases for making such choices, thereby licensing us to do so.
There are some non-​negotiable locutions in this music, but there are also opportunities
for alternative interpretations, both ones that could and ones that could not have been
notated.
One aspect of Ciconia’s style has been obfuscated in debates about the role of the
tenor, and even indeed about whether there is or is not in late medieval composition
a two-​part core, a discant–​tenor Gerüstsatz. Without completely denying it, Heinrich
Besseler’s theory of the Harmonieträger depends on subservience of the tenor to a
contratenor, where the contratenor is lower.21 But a contratenor does not necessarily
become ‘essential’ by being lower than the tenor; many contratenors, including some of
Besseler’s examples, can be contrapuntally ‘inessential’ and still be lower than the pri-
mary harmonic support, a tenor which ‘makes sense’ with the upper parts without the
contratenor.22 The main criterion for an ‘essential’ contratenor is that it underpins oth-
erwise unsupported fourths; it is ‘inessential’ if the tenor has no unsupported fourths
with the upper parts.
The emphatic and characteristic final 10/​6–​12/​8 cadences that conclude all Ciconia’s
motets establish a norm of finality within the genre of the Italian motet: the respective
6–​8 and 10–​12 cadentie of each upper part with the tenor are superimposed.23 So when
we hear the penultimate sound, what Sarah Fuller rightly calls the ‘doubly imperfect’ in-
terval that arises from superimposing a sixth and a tenth above the tenor, a double reso-
lution is called for, the sixth to the octave and the tenth to the twelfth. The parallel fifths
between the cantus parts at the surface level in no way violate the theorists’ proscription
of parallel perfect intervals; the prohibition is presented in counterpoint treatises, or
the prohibition is qualified as ‘in counterpoint’, that is, at the background level between
parts that are in dyadic contrapuntal relationship, here, between each cantus part and
the tenor. The parallels here are between the two cantus parts which are not so related,
though on a musical level Ciconia calculated his imitations, hockets and interlockings
in a very careful way, taking all three parts into account (see also below).

21 Moll, Counterpoint and Compositional Process, passim. The reverse claim, that understanding of me-

dieval music has been impeded by precisely the analytical stance that can be well grounded, albeit in a
caricatured statement, is made in Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Machaut’s Rose, lis’, 9. See the important classification
of contratenor procedures in Memelsdorff, ‘Lizadra donna: . . . Ars contratenoris’; also Bent, ‘Notes on the
Contratenor’.
22 These constraints are recognised by theorists who distinguished between tenor and gravior vox. In

discussing the solus tenor, I have made allowance for multiple tenor functions: when it is carrying a plain-
song, it may not also be functioning as the contrapuntal tenor. It is also possible for parts to be written in such
a way (i.e. not completely self-​contained, as in the canonic parts of a caccia or of an accompanied fugue) as
to anticipate what will support it, recalling the architectural term ‘toothing stone’ (pierre d’attente). See Bent,
Counterpoint, chs. 8, 9, and pp. 38–​46.
23 As in the cadences marked in Ex. 29.3. A section on cadentia, originally here, has been moved to Ch. 1.
586 Italian Motets

Prosdocimus, like Boen, excludes thirds in final chords, and Ciconia’s music offers no
encouragement to think that he considered arrival on a third capable of defining closure,
or that he would have considered this an acceptable way to end a piece or even a section.
A third or sixth preceding a perfect interval at the level of the underlying counterpoint
is always to be construed as a penultima. This sharper recognition of the status of the
third in theory and practice invites a new evaluation of its arrival in the fifteenth century
(in English music much earlier than elsewhere), sometimes even as a final sonority. It
suggests that a different grammar is in play, just as the grammar governing contratenor–​
tenor relationships may differ from that governing the relationship between tenor and
upper parts. The gradual establishment of the third as a legitimate point of rest is an ex-
ample of gradual shifting of the rules as music evolves, just as, earlier, the fourth made a
transition from the status of a perfect interval to that of a dissonance requiring resolu-
tion when used in counterpoint.24 Fourths and fifths, similar in acoustic status, are thus
differentiated in use. Something similar is true of thirds and sixths, which enjoy similar
status as imperfect intervals: thirds gradually come to be admitted as final sonorities,
as they can be combined with fifths and octaves; sixths cannot be so combined and are
not so used. It is this differentiation in use that gradually leads to a distinction in contra-
puntal status between thirds and sixths. In the motets of Ciconia, the status of thirds and
sixths remains unquestionably imperfect, unquestionably expectant of resolution. In
the last section of Venecie mundi splendor, the final cadence of the piece is anticipated at
the juncture of the end of the texted section to the Amen, where Ciconia and secula (bb.
89–​90) must be linked to Amen (see Ex. 29.3).25
This does not preclude a pause for sense or breath after bar 89 and at similar points
between the imperfect interval and its resolution, but if a pause is taken, forward energy
must be maintained, and any sense of closure on the imperfect interval avoided. In both
cases a doubly imperfect interval (i.e. a simultaneous third and sixth above the tenor,
superimposed dyads) resolves to a doubly perfect combination (octave and twelfth).
The grammatical function is the same in each progression. The end is clearly an ending,
bar 90 a transition, an arrival immediately redefined as a beginning, but one which
prolongs the interval of arrival over an f pedal.
Even with the end of the verbal sense at bars 88–​89, something has to be done to
communicate that the held chord is not itself an ending, not resolved, but demanding
resolution. The textual and musical sense do not coincide; the join is overlapped. The
effect, in terms of rhetorical punctuation, must surely be that of a colon, maintaining
energy even if there is a pause for breath, rather like the expectant 6/​4 chord that
launches a classical cadenza. I am here questioning not a choice of ficta articulation,
but the musical sentence division, the construing of points of tension and resolu-
tion, which will determine that choice. As with parallel situations in speech, there is
a range of literate possible ways to approach such a junction, and a wide range of il-
literate or incorrect ways. Some recordings (misguidedly) make a polite or uncertain
pause and then start the Amen as a new beginning. Others in different ways rightly

24 See Prosdocimo, Contrapunctus, 40–​41, for his definition of fourths as occupying a middle place be-

tween true consonances and dissonances, and his very interesting expansion of this point in the later revision
of the treatise.
25 A shorter version of this example is given in Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early Music’, 46–​47, where it is

misprinted with misaligned barlines.

 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 587

Ex. 29.3 Ciconia, Venecie mundi splendor, bb. 85–​end

connect bars 88–​89 to what follows.26 Whatever the sense of this held chord, it marks
not closure, but rather expectancy, anticipation. The choice may be further condi-
tioned by text sense and placement. In this case, the final vowel of Ciconia and secula

26 In the former category are recordings by the Dufay Consort, Munich Capella Antiqua, and in the latter,

the Huelgas Ensemble, Alta Capella, and Mala Punica. Mala Punica, interestingly, even repeats the entire
motet as if it were the second limb of one of Ciconia’s bipartite motets in which the second statement is in all
voices a simple replication of the first.
588 Italian Motets

could continue into Amen. One could breathe here before the Amen. One could creep
into the Amen, conveying connection; or make a short breath-​break before the Amen
while maintaining energy, perhaps with an interrupted crescendo up to the hiatus.
The one ‘wrong’ reading is to treat imperfection as though it were perfection, to treat
anticipation as if it were closure, tension as resolution. The chord containing the im-
perfect interval should not sound like a point of arrival, but rather resolve onto the
Amen, with or without a break.
The musical orator communicates expectations of closure or continuity by appro-
priate inflections (musica ficta) as well as by the infinite and often unnotatable means
available to verbal orators—​the equivalents of punctuation, dynamics, agogic accents,
pauses, crescendos, variations of speed in delivery, all destined to communicate the
sense, the continuities and discontinuities, of his literate reading of the composer’s
notated text. (He may of course also know the piece in performance, with or without
the composer’s authority.) The complementary role of the listener is to respond to
performerly signals of closure or continuity, and to understand when those expecta-
tions are being met, delayed, or artfully side-​stepped. A major third or sixth resolves
outwards and/​or upwards, with a semitone step to the ensuing perfect interval; if the
semitone step is not, as usual, in the upper voice (mi–​fa, a leading note), it will be in
the lower (fa–​mi). The interval is made major in order to achieve the nearest approach
to a perfect interval; likewise, the listener expects the reader’s voice to drop at the end
of an English sentence, or to rise for a question or exclamation. A minor third or sixth,
conversely, resolves inwards or downwards. This reflects Prosdocimus’s spelling out of
preferences: the semitone step in this case is more likely to be in the upper voice. Held
chords, then, must be evaluated as to whether they have the status of arrival points or of
anticipations, and if anticipations, which ones are directed, which ones are ambiguous,
which are left hanging, perhaps for longer-​term resolution, and which are deliberately
softened or side-​stepped.27
Prosdocimus’s prescriptive procedure needs to be reversed for diagnostic purposes.
As in a grammatical parsing, the florid composition is reduced to its underlying coun-
terpoint, the note-​against-​note dyadic background against which an experienced ear
construes the musical surface. The first step is to strip off any part that stands out-
side the main contrapuntal relationships, such as the contratenor of O felix templum,
reserving it for separate consideration, as one would do with a subsidiary verbal clause.
This contratenor is of dubious status and is not included here.28 To remove it for ana-
lytical purposes in no way demeans its possible musical, stylistic and rhetorical contri-
bution to the whole, though the unstable transmission of contratenor parts in general
and this one in particular suggest that performance without them was common.
Professional groups are sometimes reluctant to perform these pieces in anything less
than the maximum number of surviving voices. As a result, we get to know the pieces
in their thickest versions and come to like them that way, leaving the probably original
(‘reduced’) versions sounding thin. A vicious circle of habituation is thus set up in our
aural training.

27 For this point, see also Ch. 11 above, on long held notes in the Machaut mass.
28 On the status of this contratenor, see Fig. 28.1 and Bent, Q15, i. 145.
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 589

Such reductions are made in a way quite different from the Schenkerian reductions
that some analysts have (inappropriately) applied to early music: the end product
is defined in the treatises themselves, the procedure for achieving it inferred by us.29
The reduction should normally retain adjacence of tenor notes: special cases of pro-
longation are discussed below. Reductions should avoid prejudging or imposing long-​
term tonal goals, the a priori assumption of which remains to be justified. Terms of
approbation, such as ‘coherence’, need to be defined in relation to specific musical
languages. Getting back to the essential counterpoint is one vital tool, if not the only
one, for understanding the grammar and sense of the music as composed. The com-
poser needs no more to have started with this contrapuntal skeleton than an articulate
native speaker needs to construct a complex sentence by starting with a simple one.
But the skeletal grammar can be extracted, as I believe both Prosdocimus and Petrus
imply. A fledgling composer might use such a model as a chronologically prior stage,
as allowed for by the pedagogy of two-​part counterpoint; but for the experienced mu-
sician, conceptual pre-​eminence does not necessarily entail temporal pre-​eminence.
An experienced speaker will have internalised the grammar and can use it correctly
without consciously building up from, or even being aware of, its underlying grammat-
ical structure. Likewise in music, an experienced composer could have conceived in his
mind’s ear a texture with a contratenor, one that never usurped the tenor function; and
he could have controlled, by internalising the grammar of counterpoint, discant–​tenor
relationships that can be parsed back to that skeleton. Such reductions were not neces-
sarily his procedural starting point, not even necessarily conscious; but they constituted
a stage, like solmisation, easily elided by the experienced, and can indeed be counted as
conceptually pre-​eminent rather than chronologically prior. Analysis of this kind is not
necessarily anachronistic, contrary to the claim that analysis is itself an anachronistic
activity. They may not have called it that, but the singer has in effect to analyse in order
to inflect appropriately. Ciconia would have been no more baffled than Petrus by the
reduction of a composed piece, as of a Latin text, to its grammatical core, reversing the
pedagogy of counterpoint.30
The superimposed duets formed by each equal upper part with the tenor are clear ev-
idence, if any were needed, of composition conceived in three parts while being gram-
matically grounded in superimposed dyads. The intimate imitative, rhythmic and tonal
relationships between the upper parts attest that they were conceived together, but each

29 See Everist (ed.), Models of Musical Analysis, chs. 5 (Saul Novack) and 9 (David Stern). On the other

hand, the historical grounding of Sarah Fuller’s analytical work on this repertory has produced many val-
uable insights. She sets out her premises with admirable clarity in Fuller, ‘On Sonority’. Her contrapunctus
reductions, however, rather embody total sonorities (usually of three parts), than unpicking them to a two-​
part core. She admits some dissonance and parallels at the background level, which I think can usually be
avoided by recognising lateral displacement and appoggiaturas. In ‘Guillaume de Machaut: De toutes flours’,
she gives more consideration to dyadic pairings, but begins her analysis with linear motion, part by part,
introducing counterpoint at a relatively late stage, whereas I view it as fundamental to the generation of those
lines, not a consequence of them.
30 Wegman, ‘Das musikalische Hören’, p. 452, n. 37, referring to Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early

Music’: ‘Similarly, it is unclear why the reader should accept her premise that analysis depends for its “va-
lidity” on the avoidance of anachronism, given that it is itself an anachronistic procedure to begin with.’ I did
not ask for ‘avoidance of anachronism’ but for the music to be approached on the basis of the appropriate mu-
sical grammar, the better to appreciate apparent deviations or innovations against that shared background,
rather than an inappropriate one of, say, Riemannian tonal harmony (or even of Schenkerian Ursatz), which
has led to so many misguided analyses.
590 Italian Motets

of them relates perfectly and independently to the tenor. As stated above, the criteria for
evaluating dissonance are the successions of intervals in the underlying counterpoint,
not the actual sounding combinations at any one moment.

O felix templum

Two of Ciconia’s motets have a widely spaced imitative introduction for the uppermost
cantus part, accompanied by the tenor: O virum omnimoda and O felix templum. O felix
has an unstably transmitted contratenor, which will here be excluded from consider-
ation. Each introduction presents two separated imitative statements by the two top
voices in turn; we will here consider O felix templum, whose first twenty-​seven bars are
given as Example 29.4.31 A reduction is shown in Example 29.5.32
Sometimes there are alternative possibilities for the contrapuntal reduction (joined
by angled lines in Ex. 29.4). These choices have consequences for how the sense of the
piece is understood, and for how it is articulated by fictive inflections. Ambiguity arises
when different rules compete for priority. Just as a literary text may lend itself to dif-
ferent readings and indeed to ambiguity, the composer may have contrived the piece
in such a way that more than one understanding is possible, and still more ways of
projecting those readings.
The two introductory statements begin at bars 1 and 10. Each is differently
harmonised, yielding different background counterpoint. Excluded from that back-
ground counterpoint are (1) notes dissonant with the tenor and (2) choices that pro-
duce parallel perfect intervals. Some pre-​performance analytical choices have to be
made where there are legitimate alternatives as to what constitutes the background. To
treat all the cadentie as points for inflection may seem to us to impede the flow too
much, just as punctuation can be taken to excess; it may sometimes be decided to use
less to improve the communication of a larger sense unit. I do not necessarily recom-
mend taking every local opportunity for inflection, but I believe it is instructive to know
where those opportunities are, so that a balanced choice can be made.
The cantus–​tenor background reduction (Ex. 29.5) avoids parallel fifths in bars 3,
9, 12, 18. In bar 16, a may be preferred to g to avoid parallels. To parse the music in
accordance with Prosdocimus’s injunctions, I read the underlying counterpoint of O
felix templum, bars 3, 18 and especially 12, and 50–​51, not as a succession of coin-
cident beats yielding a row of parallel fifths (as in Ex. 29.6 below), but rather have
picked the underlying notes that make the best simple counterpoint with the tenor.
The parallel fifths heard in the compositional surface between I and tenor on succes-
sive semibreve beats are prohibited ‘in counterpoint’, compelling the melody to be
construed in some other way, namely, by not treating the parallels as belonging to the

31 The boxed notes in I and II of Ex. 29.4 indicate notes in those parts that form the background coun-

terpoint of those parts respectively with the tenor. They differ with the different harmonisations of the two
statements of the introduction; it is not necessarily the note of simultaneous attack that carries the back-
ground progression, avoiding dissonance and parallel fifths. The caret joining two such notes indicates points
where either of two notes could be interpreted as forming the background. Curved arrows show cadentie.
Alternative readings are shown for 22–​24, cadencing on 24.1 (main system) or 24.3 (above the staff).
32 For bars 1–​3 an alternative reading for I and tenor is given below the staff, and for 15–​17 two further al-

ternative versions for II are given above the staff.

 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 591

Ex. 29.4 Ciconia, O felix templum jubila, bb. 1–​27

592 Italian Motets

Ex. 29.5 Ciconia, O felix templum jubila, contrapuntal reduction of bb. 1–​27

background. The audibility of such surface parallels can be mitigated or neutralised

by ornamentation. If there appear to be fifths on the surface between an upper part
and the tenor, a first assumption would be to reconstrue them in such a way as to pro-
duce a grammatically correct result in the underlying counterpoint, irrespective of
what happens on the surface. Parallels between the upper parts themselves, as often
happens conspicuously at final cadences, are not ‘in counterpoint’ with each other,
and are therefore not ungrammatical.

Commentary to Examples 29.4 and 29.5

Bar 2. If the cantus f were chosen for the reduction, essential counterpoint would
require a tenor bb against it (Ex. 29.5b). But in this case, the following unison ca-
dence on d could not be easily accommodated without an augmented second in the
tenor line. Such awkward melodic leaps are not excluded, and they clearly may be
present in the background, if that is indeed what Prosdocimus’s notorious examples
are, here and the similar one in the monochord treatise. But Ciconia’s elegant me-
lodic clothing of that skeleton often avoids such angularity in the composed-​out
surface, if not in the tenor, which survives in the contrapuntal reduction. In what
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 593

I take to be his examples of strict or background counterpoint, Prosdocimus allows

angular tenor progressions when they serve the higher priority of making correct
cadential approaches. As noted above, he goes beyond what we would otherwise
judge melodically acceptable in giving also to the antepenultimate ‘closer adhesion’
to the penultimate, even where this results in a melodic tritone. We today might
choose to resolve such conflicts of priorities otherwise, perhaps by avoiding the me-
lodic angularity that results from thus privileging the antepenultimate, preferring
the reading represented by the version of the reduction at Example 29.5a, cantus gn
with tenor bn. In this case, the sounding of f against bn would not form part of the
background counterpoint and can therefore simply be excused as a passing dis-
sonance, not an illegal one; its normal melodic trajectory would not need to be
adjusted by a sharp.
Assuming the last beat of bar 3 to be not f but d (avoiding parallel fifths from 3 to
4), the tenor b in bar 3 is flat because of the progression of third to fifth from bars 3–​4
rather than because of the f sounding with it. There is no harm in perfecting such sur-
face fifths where this can be done easily, even if they have no status in the background
counterpoint.
Bars 4–​5 and 13–​14 are simply rhythmically animated prolongations of the same
background sonority, both with simple repetition. What lies between the downbeats
of bars 4 and 6, 13 and 15 could be regarded as ornamental emphasis or prolongation
anticipating the a–​e fifth, hence secondary to the underlying counterpoint and not
governed by its rules of succession.
If the background of bars 6–​7 were to be construed as a sixth proceeding to a fifth,
with repeated e in I, only one part moves and the other repeats its note, resulting in very
weak cadential status and no tenor gs; in a strong cadentia, both parts move. The choice
of f may be better for the first beat of bar 7, a succession of non-​cadencing sixths, which
in turn become candidates for inflection by Prosdocimus’s criteria for ‘closer adhesion’
in antepenultimate approaches.
Bars 7–​8, if treated as a third proceeding to a fifth, with g–​a in I, invite a gs (major
third); but this might seem over-​punctuated, drawing too much attention to a
fleeting local close. It also involves an angular augmented second if f is preferred
to e in bar 7, avoiding repeating the e of bar 6. Although implicit in the counter-
point, we might therefore decide not to inflect this cadence at 7–​8, also because
of the strong movement towards the d cadence at bar 10. However, the melodic
augmented second resulting from a gs reading in bar 7 would be rather like the aug-
mented fourth in Prosdocimus’s own treatise example (Ex. 29.2 above). If, however,
f rather than a is read in I as the background for 8, avoiding the cadence, all awk-
wardness is avoided; it also makes a smooth cadential transition to 9, minor tenth
to fifth.
In bars 15–​16 f rather than e on the downbeat of 16 avoids interpreting the back-
ground progression with a repeated note e. Although not expressly mentioned,
progressions in which one note remains stationary seem implicitly weaker.
In bars 16–​17, note how the harmonisation of II differs from the parallel passage
for I, bars 7–​8. Tenor bb in the cadence 16–​17 avoids the need for melodically angular
sharps in II.
594 Italian Motets

From this point on, we have to consider the effects of the two superimposed upper
parts and their independent relationships with the tenor, an independence already set
up in the different harmonisations of their identical material in the introduction. For
the next stage, we consider passages where both upper parts are present. Each is taken
as a counterpoint with the tenor; we see that each may imply a different underlying
counterpoint, just as the two widely spaced imitations of the introduction were differ-
ently harmonised.
At bar 21, cs in II would resolve the overlapped cadence onto the first beat of 22, a
third to a fifth between II and tenor; but this might be seen as an over-​punctuation,
given that the primary and sustained sonority at 22 is the imperfect interval in
I demanding resolution. The two cadentie are superimposed. One of the parts (II)
forms a perfect interval with the tenor and the other (I) an imperfect, as at bar 22,
g d b. This of course sounds to our ears more like an arrival point than the ‘doubly
imperfect’ penultimate of Venecie (Ex. 29.3 above), because here one of the intervals
is a fifth and not a sixth. We should recognise the ambiguity of superimposed dyads
where one interval is perfect and one imperfect, not treating such chords as wholly
points of arrival.
Where is this sonority going (b. 22), and what are our options for interpreting it? In
most performances, and indeed in PMFC 24, no bb is suggested. But consider the un-
derlying counterpoint. There are two possibilities. One is that there is a superior logic
to bb here, a minor tenth resolving to a perfect fifth with fa–​mi in I. We may not like
this at first, for no better reason than that we have always heard it performed with bn.
What is the alternative? At bar 24, the top-​part a could be treated as an auxiliary note,
not a resolution, going on to define the approach to c on a weak beat, via bn, as a ca-
dence, with fs in voice II. This involves making judgements about the relative strength
of cadences; either interpretation can make sense.
Another area of choice is how early in a phrase an inflected cadential progres-
sion should be anticipated, which in turn raises the complementary question of
how distantly a part may be considered to resolve an imperfect interval. This is
surely another place where Prosdocimus’s judgement of the ears comes into play.
The listening singer may be encouraged or discouraged from anticipating a caden-
tial sharp by what he hears in the other parts; this, as proposed above, may affect the
decision.
In bars 50–​51 (see Ex. 29.6), if we were to take the first sound of each group of
triplets there would be consonance with the tenor, but, as in bar 11 and elsewhere,
parallel fifths between the first beats. This again disqualifies them from being part of
the underlying counterpoint; therefore they are to be construed as ornamenting notes
other than the first one of each group. In this case, there is no resolution of b–​c in I as
there was at bar 24. The resolution could perhaps be treated (somewhat irregularly) as
transferring to voice II, which rises to c at 60, but even this oblique resolution does not
come soon enough to be persuasive, and the case for anticipating it with an expectant
bn at bar 55 seems weaker than the immediate resolution of a bb (as performed by the
Orlando Consort). At bar 22, bb might therefore be preferred, by hindsight. At bar 54
II the last minim c is not part of a background progression, and therefore it needs no
cadential inflection.
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 595

Ex. 29.6 O felix templum jubila, bb. 47–​62

O Padua

Let us now look at an entire three-​part piece: Ciconia’s O Padua, given in full as
Example 29.7. Here, there is no contratenor part to complicate matters. Some cadences
are superimposed and some are not. Cadences between two of the three parts either
coincide with, overlap with, or are not connected with, a cadence between two others.
Inflections punctuate or articulate just such a range of cadences in the context of gram-
matical and rhetorical norms and expectations. Barring is by cadential arrival, marked
between all three, or just two of the parts.33 Momentary dissonance between the upper
parts is often due to different lateral displacement of their essential counterpoint in re-
lation to the tenor. Bars 9–​10 are only mildly dissonant, but the essential notes do not

33 For 12 II, alternative readings with sharp and natural are given, depending on how the resolution

is construed. At 8 there should probably be no sharp, for the same reason that there should be no gs in
29–​30 and 38.
Ex. 29.7 Ciconia, O Padua
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 597

Ex. 29.7 Continued

598 Italian Motets

Ex. 29.7 Continued

 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 599

Ex. 29.7 Continued

Ex. 29.8 Ciconia, O Padua, bb. 9–​10, showing the contrapuntal reduction of each upper
voice with the tenor
600 Italian Motets

coincide: see Example 29.8. Prolongations (in addition to interludes where the tenor
rests) occur at bars 4–​7, 22, 44.
Several degrees of cadencing may be distinguished:

1. Cadences made by both upper parts with the tenor, either arriving onto or from
(as penultimate) a breve or longer value in the tenor, are shown by a solid or
dotted bar through the whole system, following the arrivals in bars 3 (a), 4 (g),
10 (g), 15 (g), 17 (g), 19 (c), 25 (e), 28 (d), 32 (d), 33 (g), 40 (d), 42 (d), 43 (d), 54
(c), 56 (f), 58 (d), 59 (c), 63 (g), 71 (c), 72 (d), and the end, 74 (c). The cadence
on d in 38 could in principle be anticipated with inflected g and c, preparing the
sound of the cadence at 40, but these inflections are discouraged by the unison
imitation of opum, and impossible to implement on 38.1. The fleeting cadence
at 42 could be inflected, but this is discouraged by surface angularity. To inflect
the cadence on d at 72 is not only angular but arguably detracts from the prep-
aration of the final cadence in 71. The irregular distribution of these cadentie is
analytically suggestive.
2. Cadentie made by only one of the upper parts, from an imperfect to a perfect in-
terval, always with the tenor, are shown by coincident bars through the affected
parts only, at 24 (I); 34 (II), where eb is rejected; 35 (I) d, with bb; 36 (II) a, with bb;
41 (I) f; 65 (II) d, 66 (I) a. Bars 65 and 66 can both have semitone resolutions in
cantus I. Bars 34–​35 show superimposed successive cadencing, with II and tenor
resolving onto 34 and I and tenor onto 35. Similarly, II and tenor cadence onto 65,
I and tenor onto 66.
3. Non-​cadences: a succession of two perfect intervals. In rule (6), Prosdocimus says
that perfect intervals should be separated and hence approached by imperfect
consonances. Jacobus defines cadentia as the progression from an imperfect to a
perfect interval, not the approach to a perfect from another perfect interval (see Ch.
1). Properly cadencing parts coincide with such non-​cadences at 8 (I), 24 (II), 45 (I).
4. Delayed or avoided resolutions: 8 (II) c—​possibly a long-​term resolution to
d in 10? If this is signalled by cs, maintained in 9, it would be denied by the cn
of I in bar 9. In 12 (II) there is a choice: either fs resolves melodically to the g
of 13, albeit unsupported except by c in I, or fn achieves delayed resolution in
14, with a semitone step in the resolution of the minor third to the fifth, in-
terrupted by the tenor rest. At 45 (II) the resolution of cs to d is implied but
withheld: if the c is made s, it will imply d, and be heard to resolve at 48 (I) and
50 (II). Resolution is avoided at 21 (I): the b third with tenor is not resolved un-
less indirectly at 24 (II); 36 (I) is incomplete and unresolved. Some successions
of perfect intervals are not cadentie, because they are not approached from an
imperfect interval. Bars 12 and 21 are both preceded by a tenor rest, with no
preparation. At 27, although I and II arrive together with the tenor d, the tenor
is not approached by step from e but from g, and there is therefore no need to
consider gs and cs in 26.

In all these cases, the performers’ choice between a major and minor third prepares
the listener to expect how they will resolve the cadence, and if the held note is it-
self a resolution, it will likewise have been prepared. They are informative about
 Ciconia, Prosdocimus and Musical Grammar 601

how Ciconia operates the basic grammar, and about the kinds of choices he passes
on to us.

Conclusions

Counterpoint, analysis and ficta are all parts of the same process, just as grammar,
parsing and punctuation are to verbal understanding. Counterpoint (in Prosdocimus’s
strict sense of note-​against-​note two-​part combinations) underlies what we would
call florid counterpoint, and it also underlies composition, which may of course be in
multiple parts. Many analytical systems, including Schenker’s, were initially driven
by interpretative needs. The principal performance decisions that depend on analyt-
ical understanding of early music include musica ficta. If viewed merely as addition,
ficta is a surface matter. But if viewed as an integral part of the engine of counterpoint,
construing and parsing made audible, then it is not at all cosmetic. Prosdocimus’s
treatise is very concise, and he says he has not treated matters covered elsewhere,
making it all the more striking that he devotes so much space to ficta at the level
of background. Ficta articulates the performer’s understanding of the musical sense
as punctuation articulates grammatical structure and delivers it rhetorically. These
analytical exercises therefore need to be undertaken before or during performance.
Performers experienced in the style could have done this almost instantaneously.
Today we are often exposed to ‘white-​note’ performances without cadential inflec-
tion, another instance of circular mistraining of our aural understanding of the mu-
sical grammar.
The more under-​prescriptive the notation, the greater an understanding it calls for
on the part of interpreters. A reader of ancient Greek or Latin texts needs to under-
stand sense and grammar in order to separate words that are written without breaks,
as do readers of medieval texts with abbreviations and little punctuation, or of Semitic
languages written without vowels. To enunciate and communicate anything beyond a
very simple sentence in a language, one needs to understand its grammar; this under-
standing is communicated by pauses, emphasis, and by the rise and fall of the voice.
The amount of written punctuation (or other markings) actually notated may vary.
An experienced native speaker may need little help, while someone reading aloud
a speech in a foreign language might mark it up heavily. This obvious point needs
making for two reasons. First, the readings I have discussed here are not necessarily
the heard surface simultaneities but go back to the underlying counterpoint, which
can in some cases be construed in different ways, and needs to be invoked in defending
alternative readings, just as grammar does for an ambiguously, wrongly, or under-​
punctuated sentence. The singer will communicate an understanding of the sense, of
the structure, by pauses and ficta. Second, did composers intend a single version with
respect to ficta choices, choices which singers were expected to second-​guess, or did
they envisage multiple solutions arising from different possible readings? I believe
that the answer is a mixture, but not a random mixture. Some solutions are definitely
right or possible grammatically, while others are wrong or impossible. Beyond that,
there is some flexibility, some room for choice and judgement in rhetorical delivery.
As with language, there is some but not infinite latitude for different interpretations
602 Italian Motets

and inflections. In most musical situations, there is no choice but to perfect a written
perfect consonance which is present in the underlying simple counterpoint. In other
cases, as with reading verbal sentences aloud, there are different ways of articulating
sense, bringing out ambiguities or even different meanings, but the ends of sentences
or other major sense units will usually be clear and unambiguous, and inflected
accordingly.
From all this one might perhaps begin to tease out a general grammar for a period
and see what is specific to Ciconia in his use of that grammar. I tried to do this for music
a century later by extrapolating, from Pietro Aaron’s musical examples taken from real
music, what were his underlying rules for the Josquin period.34 Prosdocimus serves as
a guide but not necessarily an arbiter. To bring him into dialogue with Ciconia suggests
there is little or nothing they would have fundamentally disagreed about, which makes
it all the more remarkable that neither mentions the other.
Such investigation may reveal significant differences between different repertories
and composers in the management of the underlying grammar. Much more detailed
investigation along these lines has the promise of producing analytical data that could
give us more informative composer or repertory profiles than are yielded by surface
features and descriptive analysis. For example, reductions of music roughly contempo-
rary with Prosdocimus (Ciconia, early Du Fay) tend to yield backgrounds like those of
Prosdocimus’s examples, with more frequent insertion of perfect intervals, resulting in
angularity when those intervals are correctly approached. Late fifteenth-​century pieces
usually reduce to less angular skeletons, more like those found in the counterpoint
examples of Tinctoris, which have longer successions of imperfect intervals between
cadential arrivals.35 The difference was not in the way the reduction was made, but was
inherent in the background interval successions themselves and in changing priorities
in the basic teaching.
The result is certainly not to have solved all problems of musica ficta, inflection
and caesura, nor necessarily to have offered firm prescriptions. I have suggested a
basis from which to approach problems and their solutions, as well as setting ficta in
a larger grammatical and rhetorical context. The hypothesis is grounded in the music
and receives endorsement and encouragement from at least one authoritative con-
temporary theorist. Pre-​performance analytical judgements may, indeed must, affect
performances, while still leaving performers considerable freedom in how they com-
municate inherent musical sense, by strategies of grammar and rhetoric as well as by
sonority.

34 Bent, ‘Accidentals, Counterpoint and Notation’, reprinted in Bent, Counterpoint.

35 Similar arguments about background counterpoint from Tinctoris are made in Bent, ‘On False
Concords’.
 PART VII
MU SIC F OR P OPE S A ND
T HE C OU RT S OF BU RG U NDY
A N D CY PRU S
604 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

This final Part brings together revised versions of three previously published papers.
Chapter 30 is a survey of music composed for popes from the early fourteenth to the
mid-​fifteenth century, updated from its earlier version on the strength of new insights
and discoveries. Chapter 31 revises my earlier study of the Trém index with a number
of new identifications and concordances. Chapter 32 updates my previous study of the
Cyprus motets in Turin, from the first third of the fifteenth century, and considers re-
cent suggestions about its compilation and provenance.
 30
Early Papal Motets

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were perhaps the most protracted period of in-
stability the papacy has ever suffered. For much of the fourteenth century the papal
residence was not in Rome but at Avignon, with notably lavish cultural flowering, espe-
cially under Clement VI (r. 1342–​52). During the Great Schism from 1378 there were
two popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome. Instead of ending the Schism, the election
of a third pope at Pisa in 1409 ushered in a period of threefold division, since neither of
the other popes was prepared to resign; but at least briefly it gave occasion for celebra-
tion and optimism. This threefold Schism lasted until the election of Martin V in 1417
at the Council of Constance. He and his successors gradually re-​established the papal
seat in Rome, though not without continuing schismatic rumblings. Not until later in
the fifteenth century could there begin the golden period of building and patronage
that led to the sumptuous architecture, sculpture, painting, and manuscript collections
that now constitute the Vatican galleries and library. The famous series of music books
for the newly stabilised choir of the Sistine Chapel also started in the late fifteenth cen-
tury but, as Alejandro Planchart pointed out, the emphasis in the preceding centuries
was on a team of singing clerks who brought multiple general skills to the curia, rather
than on a choir as such, let alone a team of composer-​singers, an image fostered by a
line of composers from Du Fay onwards.1 In his essay, Planchart dealt with the standard
repertory of the papal chapel in the period before and including Du Fay. Even then, oc-
casional or ceremonial music written especially for popes or papal ceremonies seems
to have been exceptional. Before Du Fay our knowledge of any such compositions is
extremely sketchy and scattered. Moreover, very little time between about 1320 and
1420 was spent by any pope in Rome. The schismatic popes were of necessity itin-
erant; travelling courts or communities are less likely to leave permanent monuments,
whether architectural, artistic, or musical.
Various scholars have identified isolated polyphonic compositions between the early
fourteenth century and the mid-​fifteenth as being written for, or in honour of, popes. It
is my purpose here to assemble this interesting and varied collection, which as a con-
tinuing repertory or even genre has received little notice. It is on the texts of such pieces
that we depend for a papal association, which they signal with varying degrees of ex-
plicitness. In some cases, the text is reflected in aspects of the music, by choice of chant,
or by some form of number or constructional symbolism; such evidence may support

An earlier version of this chapter was published under the same title: ‘Early Papal Motets’, in Richard Sherr
(ed.), Papal Music and Musicians in Medieval and Renaissance Rome (Oxford, 1998), 5–​43. It meets OUP’s
conditions for reuse without obtaining formal permission. It has been considerably updated, most signif-
icantly to review possible circumstances for the composition of Per grama following suggestions by Anna
Zayaruznaya, and to take account of her analysis of the recently found lower parts of Petre clemens. These in
turn prompted revisions to parts of my earlier discussion and in some cases supersede them. The main discus-
sion of O Petre Christi discipule is now in Ch. 28.
1 Planchart, ‘Music for the Papal Chapel’, and now his monumental Du Fay.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0031
606 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

a papal association but is never the primary evidence for it. The number of motets for
popes surviving before Du Fay is rather small, and two of them are incomplete and
unperformable. The longer list given here includes pieces other than motets—​ballades,
Gloria tropes, and pieces of anomalous form—​that appear to be written specifically in
honour of popes, named or unnamed. To this list could be added pieces that deal di-
rectly with the Schism, praying for or celebrating its end; for an interim list of all these
pieces see the Appendix to this chapter.
I have not gone further to include other music written by papal chaplains and
familiars, and music generally from papal circles, though some of it is mentioned in
passing. Such a list would quickly become unmanageable, potentially comprising the
known works of all composers who at some time in their careers appear to have served
in any papal chapel or household. These composers include Philippe de Vitry,2 Matheus
de Sancto Johanne,3 Magister Franciscus, Haucourt (=​Altacuria), Johannes Symonis
(=​Hasprois), Pelisson (=​Johannes de Bosco),4 Antonio Zacara da Teramo,5 Matteo da
Perugia, Hubertus de Salinis,6 Nicolaus Zacarie,7 Guillaume le Grant (=​Guillaume le
Macherier),8 Nicolas Grenon, Pierre Fontaine, Guillaume Modiator (=​Malbecque),
Barthélemy Poignare, Gautier Libert, Jean Sohier (=​Fedé), Arnold de Lantins, Johannes
Brassart, and Guillaume Du Fay.9 Names of chaplains and singers attached to papal
and cardinalate chapels have been splendidly augmented for the late fourteenth cen-
tury by Giuliano Di Bacco and John Nádas, but with the striking exceptions of Ciconia
and Zacara, few of the new names produced clearly identify composers of surviving
works with chaplains listed for Popes Gregory XI, Urban VI, or Clement VII.10 Matteo
da Perugia is documented in the service of a prelate later elected pope (Pietro Filargo

2 Vitry was a commensal chaplain to Clement VI (Tomasello, Music and Ritual, 26) and has been fur-

ther tied, together with Petrarch, to cultural circles surrounding his court. See Coville, ‘Philippe de Vitri’.
Refinement of the context of Vitry’s motet for Clement VI (Petre clemens/​Lugentium) reinforces older claims
linking him closely with papal circles in the 1340s. See Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, especially 121, and
Tomasello, Music and Ritual.
3 Matheus was a papal chaplain 1382–​86. See, inter alia, Günther, ‘Matheus de Sancto Johanne’, NG1, xi.

820; Günther, ‘Zur Biographie’, 180–​85; and Tomasello, Music and Ritual, 252–​53. See also Wathey, ‘The Peace
of 1360–​1369’. For a disambiguation with the ‘Mayshuet’ of OH, see Ch. 24, where I withdraw the identifica-
tion of Mayshuet with Matteo de Sancto Johanne made in the earlier version of the present chapter.
4 He served in the chapel of Clement VII (r. 1378–​94).
5 Zacara was a singer and papal secretary in the Italian chapels of Boniface IX (r. 1389–​1404), Innocent

VII (r. 1404–​06), and Gregory XII (r. 1406–​15); his presence in the chapel of Alexander V (r. 1409–​10) is in-
directly inferred, but he is documented as magister capelle to John XXIII (r. 1410–​15). See Ziino, ‘Magister
Antonius dictus Zacharias’; Pirrotta, ‘Zacarus Musicus’; Nádas, ‘Further Notes’; and all contributions in Zimei
(ed.), Antonio Zacara.
6 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, summarised in Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, 87–​92,

and reported here, Ch. 26. His Gloria Jubilacio was copied into early layers of Q15 in company with other
music by Zacara and Salinis that may have formed part of the repertory of the papal chapels in Pisa and
Bologna between 1409 and 1414.
7 A papal singer in 1420–​24 and 1434; it appears to be coincidental that the similarly named Antonio

Zacara da Teramo was also a papal singer a generation earlier. Reaney’s attempt to identify the two (NG1)
must be set aside since the clarification of Antonio’s biography by Ziino and Nádas; see above, n. 5.
8 See Schuler, ‘Zur Geschichte’, 40, and Higgins, ‘Music and Musicians’.
9 For most of these names see Planchart, ‘Music for the Papal Chapel’, ­tables 3.1 and 3.2, also Planchart,

‘Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices’; Planchart, ‘The Early Career’; and now Planchart, Du Fay.
10 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’ and Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’.

Composers among these include Renzo da Pontecorvo (with Gregory XII), Nicolaus Ricci de Nucella Campli
(with Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII), perhaps the ‘Nucella’ of Stras, Ugolino of Orvieto (with
Gregory XII), Guido de Lange (with Gregory XI and Clement VII), composer of a number of songs in the
Chantilly MS, and perhaps Richardus de Bosonvilla (with Clement VII), who might be the ‘Richart’ of Apt
and Stras.
 Early Papal Motets 607

as Alexander V), but we lack evidence of his continuing service in the papal chapel.
Hubertus de Salinis, on the other hand, is confirmed as a member of the papal chapel
shortly after the election of the same pope, but no prior association is documented (see
Ch. 27). Musicians could move freely between often rather short periods of papal em-
ploy and that of secular patrons, as the now well-​documented case of Du Fay shows.11
The church councils of Pisa, Constance and Basel have frequently been cited as
opportunities for recruiting and exchanges both of personnel and repertory; this was
undoubtedly the case, and in this respect the councils must have functioned like large
present-​day American meetings of professional and learned societies. The scattered re-
mains of early papal pieces with ceremonial or political content reflect the itinerant con-
dition of the chapel. Not until the papacy was securely re-​established in Rome in the late
fifteenth century, with adequate buildings and a stable establishment, can we point to a
full and continuous series of associated polyphonic manuscripts.12
Most of the pre-​Schism music gathered in this chapter survives only in a single
source, and some of it is fragmentary. When there is no network of concordances to
define circulation, it is hard to estimate what is lost, beyond the uncontested assump-
tion that the highest polyphonic skills must always have been an elite preserve and their
practitioners few in number. The number of pieces with papal associations increases
in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, that is, from the latter part of the
Avignon papacy and the period during and immediately after the Schism. Arguments
of varying strength have been advanced to associate manuscripts and fragments with
itinerant papal courts in the early fifteenth century, but any such associations have to
be argued from the contents and composers represented, not from a known papal prov-
enance for the source itself. If a general thesis emerges from this survey, it is that the
number of individual cases in which such pieces are not or cannot be inaugural is suffi-
cient to dislodge the common presumption of first resort that they are more likely than
not to be inaugural. There was often little time between the election and coronation of a
pope; customised compositions may have followed later.

Music for Avignon Popes before the Schism

After the death of Clement V on 20 April 1314 it took the cardinals over two years to
elect the Dominican Jacques Duèse, which they did on 7 August 1316 in Lyon, where
he was crowned in September as John XXII. This delay is among the events darkly
chronicled, alongside the misfortunes of the French royal house, in the apocalyptic
interpolations to the Roman de Fauvel in Paris146 and the parallel chronicle and nar-
rative dits in the same volume (see Chs. 3–​6). The papal court had often been alienated
from Rome and partly itinerant in the previous three centuries until established in
Avignon by Clement in 1309, and retained there by John, beginning the period of so-​
called Babylonian captivity.

11 For Du Fay’s biography see Wright, ‘Dufay at Cambrai’; Planchart, ‘Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices’; ‘The

Early Career’; and Du Fay.

12 Sherr, ‘Music and the Renaissance Papacy’; pl. 147 shows the first list of singers for Eugene IV (1431) in-

cluding Du Fay. For the state of the city of Rome and old St Peter’s prior to the re-​establishment of the papacy
in Rome, see Grafton, ‘The Ancient City Restored’, and Reynolds, Papal Patronage.
608 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Per grama protho paret: for John XXII?

Per grama protho paret had been considered the earliest papal motet, but questions have
been raised, both in my original article and since, about its dating and its dedicatee.
Motetus and tenor only are preserved in McV. The tenor, Valde honorandus est beatus
Johannes (Blessed John is worthy to be honoured), is from a responsory for the feast of
St John the Evangelist. The first line of the motetus announces an acrostic, to be resolved
as Petrus: ‘through the first letter [of each stanza] is revealed the name of the Romans’
constancy, whereby the glory of the church now has lustre’.13 The first two letters of the
first stanza (PE) are required to give the name of Peter, hitherto assumed to refer to St
Peter, the first pope, and the rock on which the Church is founded. The text goes on,
apparently, to refer to the beloved disciple, i.e. John, and to make further unmistakable
papal references (‘he is raised up on high, worthy of papal dignity’). Taken together
with the tenor for St John the Evangelist, the conclusion seemed inescapable that the
motet must indeed be for John XXII, 1316–​34; no other pope during this period had the
Christian name John before election.

PEr grama protho paret Through the first letter is revealed

onema14 constancie the name of the Romans’ constancy,
romanorum quo claret whereby the glory of the Church
iam decus ecclesie. now has lustre.
Tellus ovans satorem Let the cheering earth exalt
tollat sapiencie the sower of wisdom,
catholicorum florem the flower born of
genitum progenie. Catholics’ lineage.
Regi nato Maria It pleased the King born of Mary
placuit sic mittere thus to send,
largitione dya by divine bounty,
radium phox supere. the ray of heavenly light.
Vere manet electus Truly he remains the elect,
non a kari nomine not apart from the name of the dear one [i.e. John, the
beloved Disciple],
omni bonoque tectus and covered with all good things
propinanti numine. by God’s gift.
Summe vivens benignus Living with supreme good will,
Christo sic opifice Christ thus being his maker,
pontificali dignus he is raised on high,
sublimatur apice. worthy of the papal dignity.

13 The motet with its tenor designation was first noted by Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 218, since when it has re-

ceived little attention. Besseler claimed, not convincingly, that the illegible word at the top might be an ascrip-
tion to Johannes de Muris. He missed the acrostic, which I reported in the 1993 conference paper eventually
published in 1998 as ‘Early Papal Motets’ and from which the present chapter is revised; I was there able to
take account of Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Ars nova’, where it was meanwhile independently reported with a discus-
sion and transcription of the music. Leech-​Wilkinson reads the ‘illegible’ word as Invidie and offers a compar-
ison with Vitry’s motet Cum statua/​Hugo, Hugo, princeps invidie/​Magister invidie.
14 Onema =​ onoma; not enema =​ aenigma; this corrects the misreading of Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 218.
 Early Papal Motets 609

Most motets are dated or placed on the basis of their texts, and this is no exception,
though without the triplum we may lack a significant clue to its true destination. Daniel
Leech-​Wilkinson proposed Per grama as ‘possibly celebrating the election of Pope John
XXII and in that case dating from soon after 7 August 1316, or his coronation on 5
September 1316’.15 This early date was encouraged by the similarly early dating that
Leech-​Wilkinson proposed for Flos ortus/​Celsa cedrus/​Quam magnus pontifex, for the
canonisation of Louis of Toulouse in 1317, a motet similar in style, technique and nota-
tion to Per grama, both credibly attributed by Leech-​Wilkinson to Philippe de Vitry.16
My earlier publication went on to express serious doubts about these early datings;
those doubts still stand, and are addressed in the context of the disputed early dating of
Machaut’s Motet 18 in Chapter 13. That Per grama might have been written for a papal
coronation is neither supported nor discouraged by the text alone. However, placing
it at the beginning of John XXII’s reign is irreconcilable with what we know about the
rapid technical and notational developments in French music of that period. Given the
accepted dating of the most advanced Fauvel motets in the mid-​to later 1310s, these
early datings now seem not merely precocious but impossible on notational and sty-
listic grounds. Both motets have features that place them so far in advance of the most
progressive motets in Fauvel that a dating before c. 1320 is almost inconceivable, even
if enterprising composers outside the Fauvel project, and perhaps away from the latest
developments in Paris, such as the young Machaut, were experimenting independently
at the same time.
1316–​17 is precisely the time when musicians in Paris were adapting, assembling,
and composing music for the massive Fauvel enterprise in Paris146, whose compilation
Roesner had dated to 1317–​18, but in the light of more recent work could have extended
towards but not beyond the death of Philip V in 1322.17 Its motets present for the first
time some of the most advanced musical and notational usages then known, including
imperfect time and the earliest appearance, in Garrit gallus, of mensurally transforming
coloration. Its composers were pushing at the limits of what could be conceived in the
current state of the notational art, and introducing innovations, both in musical struc-
ture and in the specification of details. But although the tenor of Firmissime/​Adesto has a
newly rhythmicised second color in shorter values, there are no real diminution sections
in the Fauvel motets, no color and talea overlaps, no significant isorhythmic recurrences
in the upper parts. Per grama protho paret has extensive isorhythmic recurrences in the
surviving upper part over a cunningly overlapped color and talea in the tenor, another
feature present in Flos/​Celsa, but not in Fauvel, and found in only a few of Machaut’s
motets.18 The tenor of Flos/​Celsa has 3½ taleae imposed on 2 colores, which are then

15 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars nova’, 309.

16 Indeed, Leech-​Wilkinson described Flos/​Celsa (1317) and Machaut’s Motet 18 for Guillaume de Trie’s el-
evation to the archbishopric of Reims in 1324 as ‘the only reasonably certain dates for motets between Fauvel
and Vitry’s Petre/​Lugentium [1342]’ (‘Ars nova’, 285 n. 3). Louis was the second son of Charles II of Naples; he
became a Franciscan and bishop and was canonised in 1317 (feast day 7 Apr.). Louis was the brother of Robert
of Anjou, King of Naples (r. 1309–​43), honoured in another motet by Vitry: see below. Flos/​Celsa is published
in PMFC 5, no. 7. For the dating, see Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars nova’, 309 n. 45. Kügle gives an
account of 14th-​c. motets and their chronology which accepts Leech-​Wilkinson’s early dating of Flos/​Celsa
and related motets: Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 124. But see Ch. 13.
17 See Le Roman de Fauvel, ed. Roesner et al., Introduction, 49; and now here the essays in Part II., espe-

cially Ch. 3.
18 Per grama protho paret has three tenor colores of 15 notes each, a total of 45 notes, also patterned as 5

taleae of 9 notes each. Each talea is 12 longs, making a total of 60 longs. Machaut motets nos. 4, 7, 8, 9, 14, 19,
610 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

repeated in diminution. Per grama has 5 taleae imposed on 3 colores and no diminution.
On any spectrum of style-​based chronology these ‘advanced’ tenor patterns of irregu-
larly overlapping color and talea would fall later, at least in the 1320s.
The Fauvel motets use two to five semibreves per breve of imperfect time, with almost
no minim stems—​indeed, none are necessary to deal with the rhythmic vocabulary of
Fauvel, that is, what would later be notated as major and minor semibreves and minims,
in standard groupings, but here with no minim rests or hockets. The conventional inter-
pretation of unstemmed semibreves is confirmed in all cases where later concordances
are more explicitly notated with stems, and conforms to the default groupings set out in
treatises.19 Between them, the theorists provide for up to three minims per semibreve
in imperfect and perfect time—​what was later called major prolation, though at that
early stage without requiring stems when standard combinations were to be interpreted
conventionally. Groups of five semibreves (mostly unstemmed) occur only in Quare
fremuerunt, conspicuously placed on f. 1r of Fauvel, and Servant/​O Philippe (on King
Philip V, r. 1316–​22), one of the most modern motets and perhaps a kingpin in the
planning of the collection.
Per grama makes use of the same groupings of two to five semibreves as the Fauvel
motets, all in the standard default patterns for imperfect tempus. It also uses stems, not
because those standard groupings needed them but because, by the time it was notated,
other options were possible, necessitating the general introduction of clarifying stems
for what had previously been standard, unambiguous default resolutions of unstemmed
semibreves. However, there are two factors that mark the construction and notation
of this motet as being more advanced than anything in Fauvel. Per grama must always
have had some stems, because it also uses minim hockets, which cannot be notated
without rests, either what came to be stabilised as paired minim rests, or their possible
antecedents as general-​purpose short rests, such as suggested in Chapter 13. Fauvel
motets use no rests shorter than the breve, though the ballade En chantant (ff. 23v–​
24, p.mus. 56) has short rests that sit on the line and have the value of a semibreve.
The upper voices of both motets follow the default rhythms that would apply if their
minims were unstemmed, and could thus fall relatively early in the 1320s. Both have
minim hockets, Per grama throughout and Flos/​Celsa in the reduced section. In both
cases, these hockets involve paired but not single minim rests, which allows the default
rhythm of fg to continue as Ìg.
This suggests that they were not yet dependent on a
fully formulated prolation system, and earlier in date than when interlocked hockets
needing single minim rests appear.20 The upper parts of Flos/​Celsa are isorhythmic in
the diminution section with hockets. The motetus of Per grama has substantial passages
of isorhythm at the beginning of each tenor talea and in the hocket sections, a feature

22 also have overlapping color and talea: Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’, 30; and see now Guillaume de
Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart.

19 Philippe de Vitry, Ars nova in CSM 8, which includes a re-​edition of CS III, Anonymous III. See Fuller, ‘A

Phantom Treatise’, and Desmond, ‘Did Vitry Write an Ars vetus et nova’, ‘Texts in Play’, and ‘Omni desideranti’.
20 See Earp, ‘Tradition and Innovation’. French sources, however, lack clear instances of the notated English

distinction between major and minor semibreve rests (the latter interchangeable with paired minim rests)
found in sources throughout the century, especially Ox7 and Durham20 (see Ch. 18 on Musicorum and Ch.
13 on Machaut’s Motet 18). O . . ./​Nostris lumen in Br19606 has undifferentiated rests, some of which must
stand for a minor semibreve, some for a major semibreve. See Ch. 13 and n. 9.
 Early Papal Motets 611

understated by Leech-​Wilkinson and hardly present yet in most earlier motets of

Machaut.21 Taken together, these features of structure and detail point to datings in the
years from the mid-​1320s towards or around 1330.
It is thus clear that the two motets in question cannot date from as early as 1316–​17.
The date of Flos/​Celsa is easier to move; it is indeed for Louis of Toulouse, but he was
celebrated throughout the fourteenth century. The motet does not have to be for his
canonisation in 1317 and could have been written at a later date.22 Its attribution to
Vitry is highly plausible on many grounds, including the separate survival of its texts
in the tradition now documented by Andrew Wathey.23 But the motets of Vitry it most
resembles probably date from the late 1320s and early 1330s, present in the much later
Ivrea manuscript, and in some intervening fragmentary sources, but not in Fauvel.24
The dating of Per grama is much more problematic, its occasion now uncertain.
There are no explicitly inaugural references in the text; the missing triplum might have
clarified the identity of the dedicatee, or given other textual clues to its original con-
text.25 With its hockets, small notes and rests, it is hardly a manifesto piece written to
the austere prescriptions of a Cranmer or a Council of Trent. If John XXII is recognised
in the tenor, could it even have been this piece that prompted the striking technically
informed condemnations that he consented to promote in the famous bull Docta sanc-
torum of 1324–​25?26 It is more likely that the motet was written after the bull, either in
negligence or nescience of the approved style guidelines. John or his musical advisors
could hardly have been pleased by something that so plainly flouted his directive, un-
less the story, and his position, is much more convoluted than we have thought it to be.
However, the bull seems not to condemn these stylistic features in themselves, but to
proscribe them in liturgical observance, together with other features (such as secular
texts in motets).27 If this were to provide an oblique hint against the performance of
these motets in a liturgical context, we might have good reason to dissociate them from
papal coronation ceremonies. I concluded that a date closer to 1330 would be more mu-
sically acceptable, perhaps even from the mid-​1320s, especially if either or both motets

21 Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘The Emergence of Ars nova’, 309 ff. Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’. Ten Machaut

motets have diminution in the second section, all with hockets.

22 Julian Gardner has generously provided me (email of 3.1.2021) with information derived from Bullarium

Franciscanum V, of some of the occasions for which a celebratory motet might have been appropriate. In ad-
dition to the bull of canonisation Sol oriens mundo of 7 Apr. 1317 (no. 267, pp. 111–​14), an indulgence was
granted on 8 Nov. 1323 for the feast of the translation of Louis to the Franciscan church in Marseilles (no. 517,
pp. 255–​56). On 15 Jan. 1326 Philip I, Prince of Taranto, established a foundation in Louis’s honour in Naples
cathedral (no. 599, p. 296). Chapels in honour of St Louis were founded in Barcelona and Vienna in 1327.
Payment survives from 30 Apr. 1338 for a reliquary in Naples which survives in the Louvre: Leone de Castris,
‘Une attribution à Lando di Pietro’, and Cioni, Scultura e smalto, 296–​99, figs. 35, 36, 39–​42. On 26 Nov.
1343 Clement VI granted to Louis equivalent privileges to those of SS. Francesco and Antonio. Bullarium
Franciscanum VI (no. 182, p. 105).
23 Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Vitry’.
24 Kügle now dates Ivrea in the 1380s and 1390s (‘The Manuscript Ivrea’, 130–​33).
25 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 196.
26 For the observation that the musical part suggests a different author from the rest of the bull, see Hucke,

‘Das Dekret’, 122.

27 The bull complains that disciples of the new school, concerned with measuring out breves in new notes,

prefer to fashion (fingere) their own music rather than sing the old songs; that ecclesiastical chants are sung
by the moderns in semibreves and minims, and that everything is struck through (punctured? percutiuntur)
by little notes. For they cut across (intersecant) the melodies with hockets, they make them slippery with
discants, they even stuff the tripla and moteti with vernacular [texts]. See Hucke, ‘Das Dekret’; Donella, ‘La
Costituzione’; Klaper, ‘Docta sanctorum’.
612 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

are to be considered candidates for the authorship of Vitry. Assuming that the most ad-
vanced motets in Fauvel represent Vitry’s then-​current notational vocabulary, he could
not have composed these other motets before c. 1320. That does not exclude the possi-
bility of concurrent innovations in the late 1310s, outside the Fauvel orbit, by a younger
composer such as Machaut.
Because of the apparently immovable connection with John, I did not then consider
the alternative, now proposed by Anna Zayaruznaya, that the acrostic ‘Petrus’ of the
surviving motetus part might refer not to the apostle Peter as first pope, but rather to
Pierre Roger, who would be elected as Clement VI in 1342, and whose relationship with
Vitry is established. She is right to observe that motetus acrostics more commonly cel-
ebrate dedicatees. However, she has not yet offered strong reasons for the choice of the
St John tenor, and the possible reference within the motetus text to the beloved disciple.
She observes that ‘the fragment of chant actually excerpted for Per grama does not in-
clude the word ‘Johannes’—​the borrowed notes span only “Valde honorandus est.” Only
the tenor’s liturgical context, then, and not the tenor qua tenor, implicates a Johannes’. If
Johannes was not to be featured, one might ask, why is the full text Valde honorandus est
beatus Johannes given in its only source, McV, when an abbreviated incipit could have
avoided this? Rightly pointing out that the end of the poem could nearly as well signify
an episcopal mitre as a papal tiara (though the poet could have written ‘episcopali’, and
‘dignity’ is perhaps a more prudent translation than any form of headgear), she goes on
to suggest that ‘if the motet celebrated one of Pierre Roger’s promotions before 1334,
then the papal authority elevating him would have been John XXII’.28 She thus concedes
that the motet could date from the reign of John XXII, which is more consistent with its
musical style, though it would be rather unusual to combine a new bishop with his papal
promoter in this way.29 She also points to Pierre Roger’s devotion to St John, which led
him, as pope, to build a chapel dedicated to the saint; but this was after 1342, which is
late for the style of the motet.
To distance Per grama from John XXII, however, would remove the apparently un-
comfortable anomaly that he appeared to have been honoured by a motet exhibiting
precisely the musical features castigated in Docta sanctorum, though as pointed out
above, the prohibitions may have been restricted to their use in a liturgical context.
The question, then, is whether a later dating must fall within the reign of John XXII for
him to be the John honoured in the tenor, whether there is another explanation of that
tenor, or whether Per grama could be late enough to be for Clement VI as pope. Having
disqualified it from a dating a dozen years earlier than its style suggests, I am now reluc-
tant to place it a dozen years later than a new notional style-​based dating of c. 1330 or
earlier.
In the absence of better explanations, I saw no alternative to accepting that John XXII
was honoured in Per grama, but looked for an occasion as late in his reign as possible,

28 Zayaruznaya, ‘Evidence of Reworkings’, 174 n. 41, and Zayaruznaya, Vitry. I am grateful to Anna

Zayaruznaya for discussing this issue and for sharing her material before publication. One other link be-
tween John XXII and Pierre Roger—​though hardly occasion for a motet—​was a treatise that Roger wrote in
1325 condemning the anticlerical stance of Marsilius of Padua and defending John against the Holy Roman
Emperor Louis IV.
29 The possible combination of Pietro Filargo and Pietro Emiliani with St Peter is handled in a different way

within a single text, O Petre Christi discipule. See Ch. 28.

 Early Papal Motets 613

especially one that also involved Pierre Roger. One such was 1333, when a successful
case was made to the still very active Pope John XXII to authorise a crusade; the dele­
gation was led by Pierre Roger, the future Pope Clement VI and a colleague and con-
temporary of Vitry.30 Vitry was involved in crusade politics through his patron Louis
of Bourbon, whose political relationships with Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, were
close enough in the mid-​1330s to have provided the occasion for Vitry’s composition of
the motet in honour of Robert, O canenda/​Rex quem, on a tenor for St Louis (the French
king Louis IX), and with full isorhythm, diminution, and minim hockets. Robert’s name
appears as an acrostic in the motetus, a normal place for a dedicatee, which could argue
in favour of ‘Petrus’ in Per grama being for Pierre Roger rather than St Peter.31 The same
Vitry–​Bourbon–​Anjou link might also have occasioned the composition, at the same
period, of Flos/​Celsa for the king’s saintly brother, Louis of Toulouse, and Vitry’s com-
position of all three motets.
Looking for another John in connection with Pierre Roger, we find another—​perhaps
remote—​possibility. When Pierre Roger was elevated to the archbishopric of Rouen
on 14 December 1330, he was required to swear allegiance to his feudal overlord, the
Duke of Normandy. But although Philip VI had promised the dukedom to his eldest
son, later King John II, John was not installed as duke until 27 April 1332. The dukedom
being vacant in 1330, Roger evidently made homage to the king, but was required to
do so also to John as duke in 1332. He temporised, fearing that if someone other than
a member of the French royal family might in future become duke, the archbishopric
could then be detached from the French crown. His temporalities were seized, where-
upon he negotiated an agreement that if the duchy of Normandy passed out of the royal
line, the right to receive homage would revert to the king; this settlement of the matter is
reported in documents of 1334. Roger acted as a conciliator between Norman interests
and those of the French king, but otherwise enjoyed an uninterrupted good relationship
with Philippe.32 Could the resolution of this matter following the installation of duke
John in 1332 have occasioned a motet celebrating both names? It seems impossible to
take this further without the missing triplum.
However, circumstances in 1330 do suggest a possible occasion unconnected with
Pierre Roger.33 John XXII had refused to ratify the 1314 election of Louis of Bavaria
as King of the Germans. In 1324 he excommunicated Louis, who was crowned king
of Italy in 1327. In January 1328, Louis had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor in
Rome, which could in the circumstances show the opposite of the Roman constancy
lauded at the beginning of the motetus of Per grama, and a reason for asserting it by
an opponent. Later that year Louis declared John XXII deposed on grounds of heresy
and, still under excommunication, installed Pietro Rainalducci in Rome as antipope

30 For information on the crusade-​related Bourbon–​Anjou connections in the 1330s I am much indebted

to Andrew Wathey (private communication of material in a paper delivered at the AMS annual meeting,
New York, 1995), who proposed a mid-​1330s date for O canenda/​Rex quem on grounds quite independent of
the stylistic ones included here.
31 Kügle suggests the period 1319–​24, when Robert was in the north (‘The Manuscript Ivrea’, 145), but

Wathey’s most recent suggestion makes a northern constraint unnecessary.

32 Cazelles, La Société politique, 137. I am grateful to Andrew Wathey (email correspondence of Nov.

2020) for helping to untangle the chronology of these events, based on Fisquet, La France pontificale.
33 Andrew Wathey should have the credit for developing this suggestion more strongly than stated in Bent,

‘Early Papal Motets’, in email correspondence of Dec. 2020.

614 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Nicholas V. Support for Louis collapsed; both were driven from Rome in 1328 by Robert
of Anjou, king of Naples, the dedicatee of Vitry’s motet O canenda/​Rex quem metrorum,
as noted above, and brother of Louis of Toulouse. Nicholas was excommunicated by
John XXII in April 1329 and, on making his confession to Pope John, was absolved in
August 1330. This restoration of John’s authority following the submission by Nicholas
could be reflected in formulations in the motetus text: ‘Truly he remains the elect, not
apart from the name of the dear one’. John, carrying the name of the beloved disciple,
is acknowledged as the true pope, on Petrine and Roman authority as set out in the
first verse: ‘Through the first letter [of the acrostic ‘Petrus’] is revealed the name of the
Romans’ constancy.’ The ideological victory is implicit in asserting the authority of St
Peter and old Rome (the historical papal seat) at the beginning. At the end of the text,
the affirmation that the dedicatee is ‘worthy of the papal dignity’ could be seen as a re-
buttal of Louis’s charge (in deposing him) that he was a heretic. In this way, nuances in
the text could explain the combination of Peter and John and support a dating of 1330,
when these crises were resolved; but the dating and circumstances of Per grama remain
uncertain.
John XXII, an austere and elderly Dominican, was followed by the likewise ascetic
Cistercian Benedict XII, pope from 20 December 1334 to 25 April 1342. Had we ac-
cepted for Per grama a dating as late as the 1340s for Clement VI as pope, no poly-
phonic music could have been associated with either earlier reign. We have tentatively
suggested that the motet could be restored to John XXII. But with the election of Pierre
Roger as Clement VI, a golden decade of cultural and artistic patronage, including
music, was about to begin.

Clement VI: Petre clemens/​Lugentium (Vitry)

Cardinal Pierre Roger, archbishop of Rouen, and previously chancellor to Philip VI,
was elected pope on 7 May 1342, partly in reaction against Benedict’s austere rule. As
Clement VI he held the most brilliant court in Europe; it was he who did most to estab-
lish the luxurious image of the Avignon papacy. He exercised notable patronage of all
the arts, cultivating contacts with the leading intellectuals of his day, including Petrarch.
Among non-​musical works dedicated to Clement are several by Johannes de Muris, in-
cluding an astronomical calendar from the fifth year of Clement’s pontificate, a set of
prophetic prognostications referring to planetary conjunctions in 1357 and 1365, and a
treatise in collaboration with Firmin de Belleval on the reform of the Julian calendar in
1344–​45.34
Compositions that can be associated with him are, most significantly, the motet Petre
clemens/​Lugentium/​Non est inventus; and with only slightly less confidence, a motetus
text troping a Gloria, Clemens Deus artifex tota clementia, no. 45 in Ivrea, and possibly a
related Kyrie, no. 71. The possible claim of Per grama as a work for Clement VI has been
discussed above and, with some reluctance, cast into doubt.

34 See NG1, s.v. Jehan des Murs, and Gushee, ‘New Sources’. And more recently, Desmond, Music and the

Moderni, ch. 3: ‘Jean des Murs, Quadrivial Scientist’.

 Early Papal Motets 615

The most substantial and interesting of the tributes firmly associated with Clement is
Philippe de Vitry’s motet Petre clemens/​Lugentium. The music was known and published
as a three-​voice motet from Ivrea, its unique musical source until the discovery of
Aachen, which presents it for four voices, with a tenor, contratenor and solus tenor,
which show the Ivrea ‘tenor’ to be in fact a solus tenor conflation, differing from the
Aachen solus tenor mainly in providing an accompanying line to the upper parts before
the entry of the contratenor and solus tenor in Aachen. What this source reveals about
the motet has been set out by Anna Zayaruznaya, together with a full transcription.35
It is one of a number of motets for which texts survive separately in humanist
collections. None of these texts is for any named fourteenth-​century composer other
than Vitry, and the anonymous texts belong only to those compositions that at least
some modern scholars have suspected to be possibly his work.36 Leo Schrade reported
the presence of the triplum text in Paris3343, and its ascription to Vitry. Andrew
Wathey reports no fewer than fourteen text-​only sources, one of which, Vienna4195,
was a new one for this motet in a collection of Clement’s sermons copied in Avignon in
the late 1340s.37 It is therefore the earliest of the text-​only copies of Vitry motet texts,
made during the lifetimes of both Clement and Vitry.38 The texts in the sermon volume
are immediately preceded by a longer verse celebration of Clement’s rule, beginning
Aperi labia mea. They are followed by a tenor incipit, Non est inventus similis illi, and
then by a brief colophon, added in a different but contemporary hand, which not only
attributes the texts to Vitry but supplies a date for their composition: ‘Magister Philippus
de Vitrejo in laudem Pape Clementis vjti anno suo primo circa natalem domini’ (i.e.
around Christmas 1342; taking the confines of the feast literally, this could be narrowed
to 24 December 1342–​5 January 1343). There are two sermon cycles: the first includes
sermons of Pierre Roger as Archbishop of Rouen preached in Avignon in the 1330s; the
second consists exclusively of sermons by Clement dating from immediately before his
coronation and from the early years of his pontificate. Most are associated with special
occasions and special themes. The most important of these are for April 1343 and April
1346, and refer to part of his campaign against Louis of Bavaria, the pretender to the
Imperial crown. There are bulls against Louis, and there is Clement’s often-​quoted reply
of 27 January 1343 to the embassy of Roman citizens, discussed below.
The motet texts had been assumed to be for Clement’s coronation, or just gen-
erally laudatory. There is nothing specifically inaugural in them, and with this new
loosening of the—​anyway weak—​basis for assuming that motets are more likely to be
inaugural than not, a primary function as propaganda to promote papal diplomacy
can now be contemplated. At Christmas 1342 a Roman delegation came to Avignon
to petition for the return of the papacy to Rome. Clement’s reply included the famous

35 Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices’, brought to wider notice from a first report in 2001 by Lüdtke,

‘Kleinüberlieferung’. Petre clemens is in Ivrea, ff. 37v–​38, Aachen, f. 2r, and listed in the index of Trém.
Another motet preserved in some sources with solus tenor alone is O Maria virgo davitica//​O Maria maris
stella, which survives complete with five voices including its solus tenor in Pad1106 (see Chs. 1 and 28), but
only with its upper parts and solus tenor in Q15 and MuEm.
36 The only known exception to this is the separate preservation of the text of Machaut’s Motet 8 in a

Stockholm MS; see Ch. 14 and Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Vitry’.
37 Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, 122 n. 7 and table 1.
38 See Wood, Clement VI, and Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, including text and translation by David

Howlett.
616 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

expression ‘ubi papa ibi Roma’. He supported his refusal not only with practical
reasons arising from the Anglo-​French wars but also with doctrinal considerations.
He upheld the independence of the papacy from the bishopric of Rome and the uni-
versal rather than the local character of papal power. In the words of the text: ‘Petrus
primus petrum non deseris, vices eius quia recta geris’ (You first Peter [pope] do not
abandon the rock [petrus, St Peter—​i.e. of the church] because you guide it rightly in
his stead). We might find here, also, an allusion to the rocky fortress of Avignon as a
suitable seat for Peter’s successor.
On the basis of the evidence placing Petre clemens several months into the new
pope’s reign and thus dissociating it from his coronation, Wathey argues that a single
monofunctional association between motets and narrowly defined state purposes, royal
and papal coronations in particular, no longer appears justifiable in all cases. Official fes-
tivity was indeed one, but not necessarily the only, performance context. This fits per-
fectly with later evidence for multiple use of occasional pieces, and may ease the dilemma
outlined above for earlier ones. Many of the occasional motets in Q15 were written in
honour of dedicatees or occasions. In some cases they might have been inaugural, in others
they clearly cannot have been. Some motets celebrating individuals were recopied long
after the deaths of their dedicatees with musical updating but without verbal change.39
Petre clemens is anonymous in both musical sources. With 251 perfect breves of
major prolation, it is Vitry’s longest motet and, until some of the music was found for Phi
millies, probably his latest surviving musical work.40 If it seemed less compactly struc-
tured than his earlier works, that is partly due to the lack, until recently, of its true tenor,
labelled in Aachen with the text provided in the text manuscript Vienna4195, ‘Non est
inventus similis illi’. These words are also echoed at the end of the motetus part: ‘Non
est inventus tuus similis’ in Ivrea, and ‘Non fuit inventus similis’ in Aachen.41 Earlier
puzzlement about the only partial correspondence of the Ivrea tenor to the chant of this
name can be laid aside now that the true tenor has been found to correspond to the en-
tire verse, ‘Non est inventus similis illi qui conservavit legem excelsi’ of the Gradual Ecce
sacerdos, making a very long single color.42
Little needs to be added to the analysis of the music given by Zayaruznaya.43 All
known instances of solus tenors involve compositions (mostly motets, but some mass
movements) with essential contratenor parts, as here, and usually embed the lowest
or contrapuntally essential note from whichever of the lower parts provides it. Vos/​
Gratissima is treated in Chapter 8; another striking but little-​known instance is the
lower-​voice canonic pair of O amicus/​Precursoris reconstructed in Chapter 22. Any lone
tenor parts whose chants are unidentified, or which deviate significantly from a chant,
invite interrogation in case they too are in fact solus tenors.

39 See Bent, Q15, PMFC 24, p. xii, and Ch. 28 for the dating of Ciconia’s Venecie.
40 The texts of Phi millies were known to Schrade from Paris3343. Part of the triplum is now in Aachen,
transcribed in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, appendix 3.
41 Might the past tense indicate that Clement VI was already dead, this copy therefore after 1352?
42 Various attempts to explain the structure were reported in Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’, but are omitted

here, as that discussion is superseded by Zayaruznaya, ‘New Voices’.

43 ‘New Voices’. However, she reads the tenor as in perfect, the contratenor in imperfect modus. But, as

confirmed in correspondence with Lawrence Earp, both lower parts must be construed in perfect modus; the
contratenor enters first, and the tenor’s perfections are displaced by a breve.
 Early Papal Motets 617

Gloria Clemens Deus artifex and Kyrie Clemens pater,

conditor syderum

This Gloria is unique to Ivrea, as no. 45, with the Gloria text in the triplum. The motetus
text carries the trope ‘Clemens Deus artifex tota clementia’, assumed to embody pun-
ning on the name of the pope. The Gloria may be paired with a Kyrie with the triplum
trope ‘Rex angelorum’ and the motetus trope ‘Clemens pater, conditor syderum’. It may
thus be a similarly punned companion piece to this Gloria, although it has no specific
language that would invite associations outside the Kyrie.44 The composition of both
Gloria and Kyrie as bitextual motets is unusual; their common technique and opening
word further encourage a pairing.

Clemens Deus artifex, The merciful creator God,

tota clementia, all clemency,
actuque specie in deed and in appearance,
mirabilis essentia, marvellous in essence,
carens carie 5 lacking decay
spurcitia, and filth,
dux venie commander of mercy
patriarcharum sent for the justice
missus pro iustitia, of the patriarchs,
pastor ecclesie, 10 shepherd of the church,
conservator fidei sanctie preserver of the holy faith,
triumphator pro victoria. triumpher for the victory.
extirpandi hostis tormenta varia of wiping out various devices of the enemy
crucem mysterii previa. with the cross of mystery going before.
o que spiritus incendia!      15 O what fires of the spirit!
o redemptor, o rex pie, O redeemer, O merciful king,
splendor eterne glorie splendour of eternal glory,
fac fidelium virtutem cause the virtue of the faithful
resistere contra vitia to hold out against vices,
ut mederi nullus valeat 20 so that none may heal one
iam infectum fecis sanie already infected by the filth of dregs,
et dimittat ius profanum and let him discard profane law,
venenosum et insanum a poisonous and insane
errorem ad fidelia error, for the faithful
perennis dona gratie 25 gifts of eternal grace,
constanter indefectivia. constantly never-​failing.
Amen Amen

44 The Gloria and Kyrie are published respectively in CMM 29, nos. 22 and 2. The Kyrie is in both Apt

(no. 1) and Ivrea (no. 71), and a fragment in Barc971. This Kyrie is the opening piece in Apt, which also
contains (no. 38, CMM 29, no. 12) a more normally troped Kyrie Summe clementissime rex eterne glorie
eleyson.
618 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

In the Kyrie Rex angelorum, Ivrea (no. 71), the motetus trope is:

Clemens pater, conditor syderum.

Mundi rector datorque munerum,
Verax Deus, destructor scelerum, eleyson.
Kyrie eleyson.
Rex pie celi potens virtutibus,
Tremor factus cunctis demonibus,
Qui ruerunt ab altis sedibus, eleyson.
Christe eleyson.
Jesu Christe, nostra redemptio.
Fili Dei vera, dilectio,
A quo cuncta manat perfectio, eleyson.
Christe eleyson.
Sacrosancte amborum spiritus
Qui vocaris semper paraclitus
Placans omnis languentium genitus, eleyson.
Kyrie eleyson.
Sacrum flamen superna bonitas.
Ignis ardens zeli[que] caritas.
Una manens in tribus deitas, eleyson.

Gregory XI

Pope Gregory XI (1370–​8) was Pierre Roger de Beaufort, a nephew of Clement VI.
The Chantilly motet Pictagore per dogmata/​O terra sancta, suplica/​Rosa vernans
caritatis must have been written for him. Ursula Günther (in CMM 39) places it early
in 1375, certainly between 1374 and September 1376, when Gregory left Avignon
in order to take up residence in Rome. The text is a plea to recapture the Holy Land,
used here as a metaphor for the recapture of Rome.45 There is play on the name
Rosiers, Roger, for the tenor Rosa vernans caritatis alludes to the Roger arms, iden-
tical for Clement VI and Gregory XI, which bear six roses. Gregory’s other paternal
uncle, Hugues, had refused the papal tiara in 1362. This motet joins a cluster of ori-
entation points in the 1370s: Ferre solet is dated 1373,46 Rex Karole has been dated
c. 1375 (1378 by Carolann Buff); most of Trém was compiled before 1376; Machaut
died in 1377, and a Basel motet must date from soon after 1378 (see below, and the
Introduction).

45 Seven planets are referred to in the text, but only six named. Günther (CMM 39, pp. xl–​xlii) believes

the unnamed planet Saturn, before his fall from power as a god, is to be identified with Gregory. Tomasello,
Music and Ritual, 26–​30, disagrees, and points to the parallel ancestries of the Roman people and of
Gregory XI. He is Mars, Clement VI his uncle was Phoebus. For planets, see also Non eclipsis atra ferrugine
in Ch. 21.
46 Louviot, ‘Uncovering the Douai Fragment’.
 Early Papal Motets 619

The Great Schism

Throughout the Avignon period, attempts were made to secure a return of the papacy
to Rome. Urban V was in Italy 1367–​70, the first to re-​establish the sedes romana, al-
beit temporarily. Gregory XI was in Rome with seventeen cardinals early in 1376, and
remained there until his death in March 1378. Under pressure to choose an Italian,
these same cardinals elected the Neapolitan canonist Bartolomeo Prignano, who was
enthroned as Urban VI at Easter (18 April). Urban behaved with an authoritarianism
that alienated the cardinals, whose lifestyle he tried to simplify and whose wish to re-
turn to Avignon he quelled. Violent outbursts, and impolitic and abusive behaviour,
created difficulties that eclipsed the firmness of purpose and austerity that had helped
his candidacy. Repelled by Urban’s behaviour, the French cardinals defected under the
leadership of Robert of Geneva, whom they elected pope at a new conclave in Fondi
on 20 September 1378, thus opening the Schism. Taking the name of Clement VII,
Robert remained in Italy at first, moving to Avignon in May 1379, where he died on 16
September 1394.

Clement VII: Gaudeat et exultet and ballades

Clement’s election is celebrated in the first part, and Urban condemned as Antichrist
in the second, in the texts of a motet discovered by Martin Steinmann and Wulf Arlt
in two independent fragments (but still incomplete): a motetus Gaudeat et exultet in
Basel71 which fits with a triplum Novum sidus orientis in Basel72 for the first talea.47
The two fragments are in different scripts; the extant triplum part of the second talea
starts in Basel71 with the words Papam querentes and in Basel72 with De scintilla, this
time to identical music. Since only the texts in the same script in Basel71 name the two
popes, it seems that Basel72, from a different manuscript, may be a contrafact (Novum
sidus) of the partisan papal motet (Gaudeat et exultet) in Basel71. The contrafaction
may have been in the other direction.48 As there is no overlap of triplum and motetus
texts between the taleae, it cannot be established whether either version was a singly or
doubly texted motet. In Basel71, lower parts are labelled Tenor solus, Contratenor cum
solo tenore, Tenor and Contratenor. In Basel72, a part labelled Tenor corresponds to
the Solus tenor of Basel71. The motet has many puzzling features of form and format,
upper-​voice status, lower-​voice facture; it merits a full study.49 This is the only known
motet that refers so explicitly to two factions in the Schism; it presumably dates from

47 Reported by Welker, Musik am Oberrhein, 77, who correctly identifies Novum sidus in Basel72 as

the triplum of Gaudeat et exultet in Basel71, as did Wulf Arlt, to whom, and to Michael Scott Cuthbert,
I am grateful for sharing their transcriptions of this most intriguing composition. The promised study by
Steinmann and Arlt never appeared.
48 Johanna-​Pauline Thöne, ‘Papal Polyphony’, will argue cogently for Gaudeat et exultet as a contrafact

of Novum sidus mainly on grounds of its text distribution. I thank her for alerting me to Vlhová-​Wörner,
‘Novum sidus orientis’, which gives two Bohemian sources for this Franciscan sequence on St Francis (tran-
scription on pp. 462–​63), permitting completion of the Basel text, which uses the first three double stanzas.
There is no apparent musical relationship between the motet and the sequence melody.
49 Thöne, ‘Papal Polyphony’, will seek to untangle the lower parts and their functions. The papal version has

a third in the final chord, rare in the 14th c. Another instance is Musicalis, Ch. 17.
620 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

soon after 1378. The recto of Basel72 preserves the end of Rex Karole, a motet in honour
of the French king Charles V, who favoured Clement, but Novum sidus on the verso
carries the non-​papal text. Rex Karole shares with Novum sidus a perfect tempus and
a spaced imitative introduction before the lower parts enter, features associated more
with Italian than with French motets.
The musical culture of the Avignon chapel is as well attested as its other artistic
manifestations. John, Duke (subsequently king) of Aragon, instructed his agents in
1379 to seek good singers in Avignon for his chapel. They were to be young, unmar-
ried, preferably able to play an instrument, and not to have been (as was Matheus de
Sancto Johanne) in the service of the Duke of Anjou. They were to bring a book of ‘cant
de la missa notat e un libre’ (containing many) ‘motets e rondels e ballades e virelay’.50
This cannot be the later Chantilly manuscript, which contains no masses but a hun-
dred songs and thirteen motets. Studies by Reinhard Strohm and John Nádas combined
to eliminate Avignon itself and to advance Visconti circles in Pavia as a likely place of
origin for Chantilly and as the centre from which French music of the so-​called ars
subtilior may have been disseminated in Italy.51
Clement VII’s court continued and extended the sumptuous style established by
Clement VI. Apart from Gaudeat et exultet, the three compositions directly associated
with him are all in ModA, and two are in Chantilly, two French ballades and one in
Latin. It is too rash to extrapolate a decline in popularity of motet composition from the
particular case of Chantilly or from the particular ethos of his court. Moreover, many
motets of this period were hardly less secular than ballades. They may have had sym-
bolic tenors drawn from chant, and as such complied with the general restrictions of
John XXII earlier in the century; but their newly composed texts were no less enthusias-
tically packed with classical allusions and sophistries.
Mayhuet de Joan’s three-​stanza ballade Inclite flos orti Gebenensis refers in its opening
line to Robert of Geneva’s origin, and the tenor in Chantilly is labelled Tenor pro papa
Clemente [VII].52 Matheus de Sancto Johanne received a canonry from Clement in
1378, while he was serving in the chapel of Louis I, Duke of Anjou. It could be that he
was personally excluded on the instructions (above) of John of Aragon. He was one
of the private chaplains of the pope in Avignon from 1382 until at least 1386. Because
of the references in this text to Spanish acceptance of Clement’s papacy, it has been
thought that this piece must date from later in his reign. Early Spanish support for
Clement was evidently undergirded by many more factors than the later confirmations
suggest: Castille recognised Clement in 1382, Aragon in 1387, Navarre not until 1390.53
However, Inclite flos and other compositions lauding the newly elected Pope Clement
VII may have been composed while Clement and his musicians were still in Naples fol-
lowing the election, between September 1378 and May 1379, especially since Matheus
was probably in Italy during those months, and he had previously served Clement.54

50 Tomasello, Music and Ritual, 40.

51 Strohm, ‘Filippotto da Caserta’, and The Lucca Codex, ed. Nádas and Ziino. See now Plumley and Stone,
Codex Chantilly.
52 ModA, f. 15, Chantilly, f. 41. On the ‘Avignon repertory’ of ModA see Stone, The Manuscript Modena,

90–​99. For a disambiguation from the OH composer Mayshuet, see Ch. 24.
53 Tomasello, Music and Ritual, 41.
54 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 46 and n. 7.
 Early Papal Motets 621

Magister Egidius’s ballade Courtois et sages affirms the validity of the election and
names ‘Clemens’ in an acrostic.55 Par les bons Gedeons, a ballade by Filippotto da
Caserta, has the refrain line ‘le souverayn pape qui s’appelle Clement’.56 In the Boverio
manuscript in Turin, which has connections with the Pisan popes Alexander V and
John XXIII, this same ballade appears with the variant antipape in this line.57
Popes named Clement of course invite punning salutations, and we must take
care not to see them where they are not, for example in the invocation O clemens in
the Salve regina. But another troped Gloria Clementie pax in the Padua fragments
(Pad1475) cannot be excluded as a Clementine composition: Clementie is the first
word of a trope that expands and further tropes the Gloria trope Spiritus et alme.
Clement VII died in 1394; this is characterised as a Gloria for a late fourteenth-​
century Marian Mass.58 The text mentions Esther, who is lauded in the motet Argi
vices for John XXIII (see below), as she is invoked as a champion on both sides in
several other English and French compositions during the Hundred Years War. But
this Gloria is not included in the Appendix, the papal reference being insufficiently
specific.
Abandoned in Rome by the cardinals who left for Fondi, Urban VI created twenty-​
five new cardinals, one of whom was the Valois Philippe d’Alençon, of whom more
below. Although the papal entourage in Italy had to moderate considerably the luxu­
rious style to which it had become accustomed in Avignon, even on a reduced scale
the retinues of pope and cardinals included foreign musicians who had been in
Avignon, thus starting a two-​century tradition of northerners in Italy.59 There is also a
reverse direction: the musicians who had been in Rome but then returned to Avignon
with Clement VII may have had some reciprocal influence.

Alme pater: Urban VI?

One of the most puzzling of papal motet survivals is another fragmentary work, Alme
pater, of which triplum and tenor only (of originally four parts) are preserved in the
English Fountains manuscript of around 1400, one of the earliest documents of void
notation, and on paper.60 Roger Bowers has proposed a convincing solution to the his-
torical events dealt with in the motet.61

55 A differently texted concordance in Leiden2720 was identified independently by Hertel,

Chansonvertonungen, 232, Cuthbert, ‘Hidden in our Publications’, and now analysed by Johanna-​Pauline
Thöne in a paper at the Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music at Uppsala, 7 July 2022, and in
Thöne, ‘Papal Polyphony’.
56 Published in CMM 53/​I, nos. 21 and 82.
57 See Il Codice T.III.2, ed. Ziino, f. 5v.
58 PMFC 12, no. 9, p. 30. It is in Pad1475 (PadA) from the older complex of Paduan fragments that also

includes the Sanctus St Omer and the Ite missa est of the Machaut mass.
59 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’. On the subject of northerners in Italy, see also

Strohm, ‘Filippotto da Caserta’.

60 Bent, The Fountains Fragments, and The Fountains Fragment, ed. Kershaw and Sandon. The provenance

remains uncertain. The host MS is an account book of Fountains abbey of the 1440s, but the music is mostly
based on Sarum chants from the English lowlands.
61 Bowers, ‘Fixed Points’, 317–​20. He extends the similar conclusion of Lefferts, Motet in England (1986),

184, 348–​49. The translation is by Bowers.

622 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Alme pater, pastor vere Kindly father, true shepherd

christicolarum omnium, of all Christ-​worshippers,
per te diu doluere for you for a long time
mentes nostrorum omnium. the minds of all our people have lamented.
....
. . . . misera trucibus You, captured,
sustulisti tam perversa alas have suffered such miserable
heu, captivatus,62 manibus improprieties from brutal hands.
......
. . . . neepolitani nobiles The Neapolitan nobles,
quos diligebas tamen indeed whom you highly esteemed,
heu, non fuerunt nobiles. were alas no gentlemen.
Ulcissi tuum munere With [due] reward, avenge your fate
egena illorum atria, upon their beggarly halls!
repleverat innumere Your ungrateful native land
ingrata tua patria. had rewarded them inordinately.
Dudum profusis lacrimis A little while ago our faces
nostre sunt uncte facies, were anointed with copious tears
quod te dum malos comprimis because, while you were restraining wicked men,
atrox obcedit acies the cruel blade threatens you.
Intra suos vidit muros, Within her walls, Luceria
omni cantanda feria. (every day to be praised in song)
casus diu pati duros has seen you for a long time
te flebiles luceria. to suffer harsh, lamentable mischances.

What is such a text doing in an English manuscript? The motet may be English or
French in origin, but neither side had much enthusiasm for Urban. The English were at
least nominally on the side of the Roman pope at this time. The pope addressed must be
Urban VI (1378–​89), the events his misfortunes at the siege of Nocera (also called Luceria
christianorum). Before his election the Neapolitan Urban had been Archbishop of Bari
and vice-​chancellor of the papal household. He was recognised by the English church
and government against Clement VII as the Schism developed in 1378–​79. To the anger
of Urban, Queen Joanna I of Naples sided with Clement. With Urban’s help, Charles of
Durazzo deposed and murdered Joanna in 1381, but as king of Naples (Charles III) he
failed to show gratitude to Urban, who then took up residence in 1384 at the castle of
Nocera, where he was besieged (captivatus) and subjected to many indignities between
March and July 1385.
Roger Bowers gives a masterly account of the competing claims and loyalties that
led not only to the composition of this piece (perhaps by an Englishman, and prob-
ably in 1385). He also suggests how it may have come to be copied in a later English
source, pointing out that few Englishmen had reason to favour Urban, especially as he

62 An irregular abbreviation. I had originally read it as captivarum, which led me down a different but re-

lated path of investigation into the captivity of Queen Joanna and her female attendants.
 Early Papal Motets 623

imprisoned and tortured the English Cardinal Adam Easton during the siege, a car-
dinal Strohm thinks may be responsible for the motet text.63 Bowers identifies John of
Gaunt as one of few Englishmen well disposed towards Urban; he recognised his coun-
terclaim to the Castilian throne in 1381 and supported his military campaign of 1386.
Bowers observes that after Urban’s death in 1389 the motet can hardly have remained
long in any live repertory, and offers parallel events in 1405–​7 as a possible occasion
for the motet’s revival and recopying, the 1380s being too early a dating for Fountains,
though 1405–​7 is quite late for a terminus post quem for that manuscript. There are,
however, instances, from Fauvel to Ciconia, of the later copying of pieces no longer top-
ical, for reasons ranging from satire to musical interest, which should caution against
over-​literal assumptions about the topical life or the need for a specific occasion for the
revival of such compositions (see Ch. 3 for Fauvel).
The motet has six stanzas—​for Urban VI? As well as being an early example of void
notation in England, the tenor uses coloration in the unusual reversed sense to pro-
vide perfect notes, the basic void notes being imperfect.64 With some irregularities, it
appears to have been isorhythmic in all voices.

The Pisan Antipopes

We move now to the events surrounding the Council of Pisa. The Veneto abandoned the
Venetian pope Angelo Correr, Gregory XII, in favour of Pietro Filargo of Candia (Venetian
Crete), who was elected Pope Alexander V (26 June, crowned 7 July 1409). The ranks of
those who were to be his supporters had been augmented in the preceding few years by
deserters from Rome, impatient at Gregory’s nonfeasance. Briefly thought to have ended
the Schism, this third papacy was of necessity itinerant, but based mainly in Bologna.
Two compositions, neither of them conventional motets, allude to Alexander, and
Argi vices is for his successor John XXIII. The two pieces for the first Pisan pope are by
two front-​rank composers, neither of them directly documented in his service, Ciconia
and, probably, Zacara.

Composers Serving Alexander V, and Works

by Ciconia and Zacara

Several possibilities have been put forward for the addressee and subject of Ciconia’s
O Petre Christi discipule.65 These are set out at the end of Chapter 28 and are not
rehearsed here, except to say that ambiguity remains as to whether the text celebrates
two or three Peters. Jason Stoessel claims that just two Peters are referenced, St Peter
and Pietro Filargo, elected as Alexander V at Pisa in 1409. He links it to an earlier 1406
oration by Zabarella in honour of Filargo, and dates it accordingly.66 I agree with Di
63 Strohm, The Rise, 16–​17; the rest of his introduction gives more comments on this repertory.
64 Also found in Alpha vibrans (PMFC 5, no. 25), Vitry’s Tuba/​In arboris, O amicus (Ch. 22) and Ferre solet
of 1373 (see Louviot, ‘Uncovering the Douai Fragment’).
65 Unfortunately, misprinted repeatedly in Bent, Q15 as discipuli, due to an error in the database that

generated the tables. Text and translation in Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’.
66 Stoessel, ‘Johannes Ciconia and his Italian Poets’, 228–​33. See Ch. 28.
624 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Bacco and Nádas that the text can be taken at three levels of invocation, first addressing
the new pope Pietro [Filargo] who watches over another Pietro, then St Peter (cephas)
who protects the new pope; then finally addressing Christ the leader of all, setting out
the three levels pastorem, clerum, populum, St Peter, Filargo, and his protégé Pietro
Emiliani, bishop of Vicenza.67
A newer addition to this two-​equal-​voice repertory, this time not a motet, is the
ballata Dime, Fortuna, poi che tu parlasti in Boverio.68 Both its manuscript neighbours
and its musical and vivid autobiographical text style strongly suggest Zacara as the com-
poser. It includes the words ‘Se Alessandro a Roma gito fosse, Fortuna, al tuo despecto
uscia de fosse’. This seems to express the speaker’s frustration at Fortune that Alexander
V had not returned to Rome; that is, that the Pisan election had not succeeded, and that
the dependent speaker was thereby deprived of going to Rome with him. If both pieces
were addressed to Alexander during his lifetime, they must date from the same nine-​
month period.
Alexander’s short papacy was followed by that of John XXIII (the Neapolitan
Baldassare Cossa, elected 17 May 1410). Before his election, he had been archbishop
and papal legate in Bologna, a prime mover in the Council of Pisa, and one of those
who helped get Alexander V elected. Together with Louis II of Anjou, he had led the
successful siege and military campaign against Rome on behalf of Alexander V, finally
taking the city in January 1410. When he was deposed and condemned by the Council
of Constance, he was accused of having poisoned Alexander and his physician, and of
all kinds of fraud and sexual misdemeanours.
Antonio Zacara da Teramo had been a singer and secretary in Rome under popes
Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII from early in 1391 to at least 1407; his
presence in Rome therefore overlapped with Ciconia’s.69 Di Bacco and Nádas have now
pushed Zacara’s Roman residence back to at least 5 January 1390, when he was paid
for the writing, notation and illumination of an antiphonal for the hospital of Santo
Spirito in Sassia, in a document that also reveals his patronymic: ‘Magister Antonius
Berardi Andree de Teramo alias dictus vulgariter Zacchara’.70 Zacara’s presence as
magister capelle of John XXIII in Bologna in 1412–​13 (after which he disappears)
shows that he had transferred to the Pisan faction at some stage.71 Indeed, an earlier
association with Alexander V is attested by the new text in Boverio. However, his
continued activity as ‘scriptor litterarum apostolicarum’ shows that he was in Rome
up to the eve of Gregory XII’s departure in June 1407. Here, if not before, he must have
come into contact with Pietro Emiliani, who had served Gregory as clerk of the papal
Camera from March of that year, and then as vice-​chamberlain. Emiliani followed
Gregory to Viterbo and Siena that summer, but left Gregory’s retinue in October
1407, and was present in Pisa as a supporter and beneficiary of Filargo.72 Zacara could

67 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’. For Emiliani, see Bent, ‘The Emiliani Chapel in the Frari’; ‘Pietro

Emiliani’s Chaplain’; Q15, i, ch. I; and Girgensohn, ‘Il testamento’.

68 Il Codice T. III.2, ed. Ziino.
69 Ziino, ‘Magister Antonius’, and Nádas, ‘Further Notes’.
70 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’, 27, drawing on the 1390 document published in

Esposito, ‘Magistro Zaccara’, 334–​42, 446–​49.

71 Nádas, ‘Further Notes’, 178–​79. See also Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Verso uno “stile internazionale” ’, 28, for

the narrowing of Zacara’s death date to between May 1413 and Sept. 1416.
72 Girgensohn, ‘Il testamento’, 19.
 Early Papal Motets 625

have done the same, or he could have left Gregory with other defectors in July 1408 to
gather in Pisa in preparation for the Council.73 The presence of Zacara’s work in the
Cividale fragments has been taken to imply that he may have been there for the abor-
tive Council of Cividale called by Gregory XII from June to September 1409 where,
deserted by most of his cardinals, he had fled with his remaining retinue. But there is
no evidence that Zacara remained with Gregory after 1407 or that he accompanied
him to Cividale; the presence of his and Filippotto’s music in Civ98 does not necessi-
tate their physical presence there.
No motet survives for the new pope by Hubertus de Salinis or Matteo da Perugia,
both known to be composer-​singers in his retinue. Pietro Filargo must be suspected of
strong musical persuasions and tastes, from the very fact of employing at least two no-
table composers. It has been suggested that the first stage of ModA may have been pre-
pared for him by Matteo; the manuscript contains three essays by Ciconia in styles very
different from each other, and each apparently unique in his output—​Sus un fontayne,
Le ray au soleil, and Quod jactatur.74 But ModA preserves neither O Petre Christi nor
Dime Fortuna, which are only in Q15 and Boverio respectively. Given that Matteo
merely disappears from the records but did not necessarily die in 1418, as previously
reported, recent work proposes a later dating for ModA, after 1412, and for the later
gatherings into the 1420s.75
Reinhard Strohm proposed that Pavia rather than Avignon was the main centre of
cultivation of the French ars subtilior, and suggested that Filippotto and Antonello
da Caserta, Ciconia, Matteo da Perugia, and Senleches may have been guests or
clients of Giangaleazzo Visconti (ruled 1385–​1402).76 Anne Stone has pointed out
that Filargo is known from later evidence to have had a house in Pavia, and convinc-
ingly suggests a possible genesis for ModA in his circle.77 Matteo da Perugia had
served in Filargo’s chapel when he was archbishop of Milan, and Salinis was con-
firmed as a member promptly after the election. In the case of this conciliar election
of a third pope, there was not an existing chapel for him to inherit, except insofar as
deserters from Gregory were available in Pisa. Q15 also presents the Paduan work
of Ciconia, including the two motets for his patron Francesco Zabarella, who along
with Jean Gerson and Du Fay’s patron Pierre d’Ailly were noted supporters of music
in addition to being the prime legal, theological and tactical movers in attempts to
end first the twofold and then threefold Schism at the councils respectively of Pisa
and Constance.
Matteo da Perugia is presumed to have followed his patron from Milan to Pisa
and remained with him after his election as pope. His continuing service is not
documented, but may be implied by his absence from Milan cathedral between 1407
and 1414.78 Hubertus de Salinis appears as a papal familiar and singer on 10 July 1409,

73 Nádas, ‘Further Notes’, 169.

74 See Strohm, ‘Magister Egardus’, 59 for the suggestion that ModA originated in Filargo’s circle, and that
the pieces listed by Bartolomeo and Corradus may have been written for his coronation. For further develop-
ment of this hypothesis see Stone, ‘Writing Rhythm’.
75 Stone, The Manuscript Modena, 101–​6. An even later dating was proposed by Andrés Locatelli. See

Ch. 26 n. 16.
76 Strohm, ‘Filippotto da Caserta’, 65–​74.
77 Stone, ‘Writing Rhythm’, 15, 44–​51.
78 Maiani, ‘Notes on Matteo da Perugia’, 4–​7.
626 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

three days after Alexander’s coronation.79 Boniface IX awarded his first papal benefice
(as a deacon) on 29 May 1403 in a document indicating that he was at the time in Braga.
This need not mean that Hubertus was Portuguese by birth; indeed his use of old texts
known in the north and a motet for the Liégeois St Lambert strongly suggest that he,
like so many other singers in receipt of high patronage, came from northern Europe.
If he was too young to be a priest in 1403, there is one work which may be out of line
chronologically, if indeed it is by him.80 This is the ballade En la saison (Chantilly) for
Thomasse le Blanc, the mother of Olivier du Guesclin. She died in 1406, but Gilbert
Reaney says it could date from Olivier’s lifetime, before 1397. The earlier date now
looks less likely. Three Salinis motets are grouped together in SL2211 (late 1410s); in
the first layer of Q15 they are scattered.81 His Good Friday motet, Jesu salvator, heads
the original opening page of Ox213; it can perhaps also be read as a salutation of new
beginnings through Church councils. We know he was at Pisa; for Constance we have
no evidence.
One other work, by Ciconia, is associated with this period and these events.
Unlike the simultaneous texting of the Gloria with its trope Clemens Deus artifex,
Ciconia’s Gloria Suscipe Trinitas is troped in the more normal manner, with alter-
nating sections, in three-​part writing for the text of the Gloria of the Mass, and
two-​part sections for the added trope, otherwise unknown. The verses of the trope
are addressed to the Trinity, to Mary, and to St Peter, the first pope and ‘heavenly
keeper of the keys’. The trinitarian references have contributed to the suggestion that
the trope must date from the period of threefold Schism between the election of a
third pope in 1409 and Ciconia’s death in 1412.82 Strohm suggests that it may have
followed the election of John XXIII in 1410, ‘whose support exceeded that of the
other schismatic popes’.83
Salinis’s troped Gloria Jubilacio uni Deo celebrates the end of the Schism, and has
usually been dated to the election of a single pope, Martin V, in 1417. However, Salinis
is no longer listed as a papal chaplain in 1413, when Zacara is named as magister
capelle for John XXIII, and there is no evidence of his activity after that. It now seems
more likely that the Gloria trope dates not from Constance (1417), but from Pisa
(1409), when the election of Salinis’s patron as Alexander V could well have been cele-
brated as ending the Schism, although that attempt turned out to be unsuccessful: for
Salinis, see Chapter 27. Until the discovery of SL2211, all Salinis’s mass music and
motets were unique to Q15, except for one motet in Ox213 and Stras, a newly dis-
covered concordance in Utrecht37 for another (see Table 27.1 above) and the Gloria
Jubilacio, which also appears in Venice145. His mass music is transmitted together
with Zacara’s in Q15; we surely have here remnants of the repertory of Pisa–​B ologna
from the years 1409–​14 as well as additions from Constance.

79 On Salinis, see Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 71–​72, and here Ch. 27.
80 See Ch. 27. Günther calls it one of the latest works in Chantilly, by a very young Salinis (‘Zwei
Balladen’, 38).
81 See Boone, ‘Dufay’s Early Chansons’, 29–​31, and here Ch. 27.
82 PMFC 24, p. xi.
83 Strohm, The Rise, 17. But Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 70–​77, argue for a date for this Gloria

between 1390 and Philippe’s death in 1397, placing it in Ciconia’s Roman years that they have so persuasively
documented. See Ch. 28.
 Early Papal Motets 627

Argi vices Polyphemus/​Tum Philemon rebus: for John XXIII

The motet Argi vices Polyphemus/​Tum Philemon rebus, unique to the manuscript Ao
in a copy much later than its date of composition, is explicitly for John XXIII, possibly
for his election in May 1410, but perhaps for the start of the Council of Constance, and
at any rate before 1414, when he was discredited.84 Argi vices joins the small number of
compositions whose texts carry an indication that they were written by someone other
than the composer.85 Here the poet is named in the text simply as Guillermus, the com-
poser as Nicolaus: ‘Hec Guilhermus dictans favit | Nicolao, qui cantavit | ut sit opus
consummatum’ (William wrote these words as a favour to Nicholas, who sang them, in
order for the work to be complete). Neither the poet nor the composer has been satisfac-
torily identified with any of the candidates of those names who have been put forward.86
Previous scholars considered both Nicolaus Zacarie and Nicolaus Grenon as pos-
sible candidates for this composer, but their candidacy has weakened in the absence
of evidence of any connection with John’s chapel. It has to be stated, however, that evi-
dence for Nicolaus Frangens de Leodio, currently assumed by some to be the composer,
is no more secure. Certainly the use of the verb frangit in triplum line 41 is insuffi-
cient: it is the clouds that are being broken through, and to attach this epithet to the
composer involves special pleading of an unacceptable kind.87 If he is to have written
Argi vices, we have to assume a change of papal allegiance for which there is no evidence
other than the wish to attribute the motet to him. This theory has him move to Bologna
shortly after (putatively) leaving Gregory. He went to Cividale, moved to Treviso on 15
September 1411,88 then returned to Cividale in 1414–​18, where he died in 1433 after
a time in Chioggia, 1419–​21. His presence in Cividale, again, after the time when Argi
vices must have been written, severely weakens the case for attributing it to him. In all,
it must be concluded that a single Christian name, Nicholas, is much too fragile a basis
for the attribution of this motet to any Nicholas not known to have been in John’s chapel
and not known to have been a musician, and the identity of the composer had better
revert to unknown status.89 The texts have many points of interest and are packed with
classical and biblical allusions.90

84 PMFC 13, no. 49. See also Allsen, ‘Style and Intertextuality’, 529–​31. The motet is discussed at length

by Cobin, ‘The Aosta Manuscript’. Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, has pulled together this
composer’s biography and itinerary. Fischer, ‘Bemerkungen’, adds it to the list of Italian motets I published
in Bent, ‘Italian Motet’ (now Ch. 26), thus vindicating Guillaume de Van’s claims for the piece, which I had
excluded because of its later transmission and because of an uncertain cut-​off date for precedents for Ciconia.
85 Other instances are Alma polis/​Axe poli, Ch. 19, and Portio nature/​Ida capillorum, for which see Zazulia,

‘A Motet Ahead of its Time?’.

86 For an authoritative edition and translation of the texts, see now Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’.
87 Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, 462 n. 46, supports this view, showing ‘Frangens’ to depend on

a false derivation. The PMFC editors reject attributions to Nicolaus Zacarie (favoured by Strohm, The Rise,
117–​18) and Grenon and favour Nicolaus Frangens de Leodio (commentary, p. 285). A Nicolaus Simonis de
Frangees de Leodio started his career in Avignon with Clement VII in 1380, though he is not identified as a
singer. He was a mansionary at Cividale (Petrobelli, ‘La musica nelle cattedrali’, 467) in 1407; he joined the
chapel of Gregory XII in May 1409 at Rimini and remained with him until Mar. 1410, by which time Gregory
had withdrawn south to Gaeta. This is summarised in Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, 84.
88 D’Alessi, La Cappella musicale del duomo di Treviso, 36–​37.
89 In the context of a magisterial survey of musical repertory and patronage of the conciliar period, Strohm,

The Rise, 116–​18, also draws attention to the motet’s Italian features and seeks to reinstate an attribution to
Nicolaus Zacarie, who first appears in the chapel of Martin V.
90 Edited and translated in Holford-​Strevens, ‘The Latin Poetry’, 461–​69.
628 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

The Council of Constance and Martin V

The powerful Roman Colonna family had provided several fourteenth-​century cardi-
nals, but Martin V was its only pope. He had been a supporter of the Malatestas, for
whom Du Fay wrote at least three pieces, of which the ballade Resveilles vous celebrates
the wedding on 18 July 1423 of Carlo Malatesta, the brother of Cleophe and Pandolfo,
to the pope’s niece, Victoria Colonna, in a grand ceremony at Rimini. This not only
cements the close bonds between Du Fay’s patron families at this time, but provides a
natural link for Du Fay’s transition from Malatesta to papal patronage in the 1420s.91
Hugo de Lantins, another Malatesta client, may have composed the rondeau Mirar non
posso for the same occasion; it refers to the Colonna family.
We have seen that Chantilly represents a high point for celebratory pieces in Latin
and French that include but are not confined to motets. The composition of cere-
monial and topical ballatas and madrigals in Italy also reached its height around
1400, as represented in the repertory of the Modena and Lucca codices. This tra-
dition is continued from the 1420s by the new generation of composers after
Constance. Many of these vernacular pieces are for occasions connected closely to
papal concerns or even driven by papal politics. Lantins’s Tra quante regione, like
Du Fay’s motet Vasilissa ergo gaude, celebrates the wedding (or at least the nuptial
journey) of Cleophe Malatesta to the despot Theodore Palaiologos of Mystra; she
departed on 20 August 1420. This wedding was part of a post-​C onstance campaign
to heal the rift between the Eastern and Western churches by marrying Italian prin-
cesses to Byzantine rulers. Du Fay’s unique vernacular motet Apostolo glorioso was
for Cleophe’s brother Pandolfo Malatesta as bishop of Patras, an appointment with
a similarly ecumenical (or even territorial) intent. It is rather striking that we have
no compositions from Du Fay’s pen that are overtly dedicated to Martin, in whose
chapel he served from 1428, while we do have pieces by him for Eugene IV from his
periods of service with that pope (until 1433, and 1435–​37 in Florence). However,
Alejandro Planchart has shown that Du Fay had already left Constance at the time
of Martin’s election, and was in Cambrai from at least late 1417 to early 1420, so he
could not yet have been a papal singer.92
Nicolaus Zacarie’s vernacular ballata Già per gran nobeltà, another two-​voice
piece (following O Petre Christi discipule and Dime, Fortuna), but not, this time, for
equal voices, may date from 1420 when this composer first appears in Martin V’s
chapel; it immediately precedes Du Fay’s Malatesta–​Colonna ballade Resveilles vous
in Ox213.93 It is certainly a better piece than Nicolaus Zacarie’s presumably later
motet for St Barbara, Letetur plebs fidelis/​Pastor qui revelavit, written (by internal sig-
nature) in Tarento, and strongly indebted to Ciconia’s O felix templum. Despite the
coincidences of name and cogent arguments on behalf of the various candidates,

91 Schuler, ‘Zur Geschichte’. For a new proposal that Du Fay’s principal Malatesta patron, following

Constance, was the clerical Pandolfo, brother of Cleophe and Carlo (of the Pesaro branch, all three with Du
Fay dedications), see Bent, ‘Petrarch, Padua, the Malatestas’.
92 Planchart, ‘The Early Career’, 361.
93 Schuler, ‘Zur Geschichte’.
 Early Papal Motets 629

I do not think he can be the composer Nicolaus of the motet Argi vices for Pope John
XXIII, discussed above.
The motet Clarus ortu/​Gloriosa mater for Martin V has been treated as anonymous
because the author’s name is cut off in its unique source: . . . composuit. Robert Nosow
persuasively reads ‘Fr[ater] Antonius de Civitato’ by analogy with the attribution to this
composer elsewhere in the same manuscript.94

CANTUS I
Clarus ortu, clarior opere Illustrious in birth, more illustrious in achievement,
clarissimus regnans in ethere most illustrious ruling in heaven,
digna laudum dignus suscipere worthy to undertake things worthy of praise,
Georgius Capadox genere George, Cappadocian by race,
tribunatum solitus agere 5 accustomed to fulfil the tribune’s office,
Palestinam festinat subdere hastens to subdue Palestine,
miserando Lydditas solvere to free the wretched men of Lydda,
truculentem draconem cedere slay the fierce dragon,
mesto regi filiam reddere restore the sad king his daughter,
pro mercede thesaurum spernere 10 refuse a treasure for his reward,
nudam fide turbam induere clothe the naked crowd in faith,
debis binis regem instruere instruct the king in twice two things:
ecclesiam mente diligere to love the church with his mind,
sacerdotum decus attollere to exalt the honour of the clergy,
officio Dei persistere 15 to hold fast to God’s service,
de misello compungi paupere to take pity on the unhappy poor man;
Christianos lugens deficere be wearied with weeping for Christians,
hos tormentis istos in carcere some under torture, others in prison;
Dacianum videns succumbere seeing the Dacian succumb, he offers
caput offert cruenti dextere 20 his head to the right hand of the bloodstained one
ut sit carnis excussus onere that freed thus of the burden of the flesh
beatorum letetur munere. he may rejoice in the rank of the blessed.
Felix Roma cujus in aggere Happy Rome on whose hill
Georgius dignatur tollere George deigns to exalt his happy name that,
felix nomen quod felix federe 25 happy in the covenant,
cardinalis levita prospere the cardinal deacon auspiciously glories
gloriatur inceptum gerere to carry on what he has begun,
velum gaudens aureum jungere rejoicing to join the golden veil;
generose martyr amplectere noble martyr, embrace
vota nostra sursum erigere. 30 the upraising of our prayers.

94 Ox213, ff. 117v–​118r, published in Polyphonia Sacra, ed. van den Borren, no. 23. Nosow, ‘Florid and

Equal-​Discantus Motet’, 73–​76. The comparable inscription is on f. 8v. The text has been emended by Leofranc
Holford-​Strevens and David Howlett, whose translation is used here.
630 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

CANTUS II
Gloriosa mater ecclesia Glorious mother church,
orbem sacris alens uberibus feeding the world with thy holy breasts,
pretiosa ducens primordia drawing the precious beginnings
ex unici Christi visceribus from the entrails of Christ the unique,
desponsari non amat pluribus 5 does not have to be betrothed to man,
sed tueri rite vicaria but properly to preserve the successions
uno gaudet de stirpe regia rejoices in one of royal stock
et Romanis imperatoribus and the Roman emperors,
cuius amor whose love
absterget lacrymam neque luctus 10 shall wipe away tears, nor shall there be weeping
erit neque clamor. or crying.
De Columna fit Odo primitus Oddo Colonna, who would then
tunc futurus basis justitie be the basis of justice,
Georgius titulum meritus first became George, having earned his title of grace,
cardinalis levita gratie. 15 a cardinal deacon.
Nunc Martinus lucerna glorie Now he is Martin the lamp of glory,
dignitate papali preditus possessing the papal dignity,
vita bonis malis interitus life to the good, death to the bad.
ad jus ejus status pastorie The state of the pastorship must be restored
redigendus 20 to its right;
hic tibi precipue sit pura mente let this above all be honoured by thee
colendus. with pure mind.
Verus pastor ut Deus colitur The true shepherd is worshipped as a god
dum residet nixus in specula while he dwells leaning on the watchpost;
lex Moysi per eum regitur 25 the law of Moses is governed by him,
archa Noe Petrina vicula Noah’s ark, Peter’s skiff,
turris David vas implens vascula the tower of David, the vessel filling smaller vessels;
lapis Jacob oleo tingitur Jacob’s stone is oiled;
vite mortalis divus efficitur a mortal is made divine,
cuncta claudens sub ejus regula 30 enclosing all things under the rule
majestatis of his majesty,
facit ut pateant celesti regna and causes the celestial to be opened
beatis. to the blessed.

The tenor is Justus non conturbabitur, an obsolete Gradual from the old office
proper to St Stephen, celebrated as pope and martyr on 2 August.95 The motet texts
honour the Colonna family, especially its members who were church dignitaries, and
above all Martin V, who before his election was Cardinal-​Deacon at the church of
S. Giorgio in Velabro in Rome, otherwise known as Sancti Georgii ad Velum aureum,
and is thus referred to in both texts. Martin’s strong connection with Rome (and even
with the Roman emperors) is stressed: Cantus I refers to the eighth-​century elevation

95 Le Codex 121, 284; Antiphonarium Tonale Missarum, 179.

 Early Papal Motets 631

of the church within the walls of Rome as the seat of the cardinalate,96 and Cantus
II expresses hopes for a return of papal law (lex moyse), stresses Old Testament
antecedents, and may also underlie the choice of tenor. A parallel is implied between
St George’s rescue of Christians from persecution at the hands of Dacian in Cantus I,
and the position of Martin V at the end of the Schism. Nosow suggests performance
on St George’s day after Martin’s eventual entry into Rome in September 1420, i.e. 23
April 1421.97
Musically, the motet has a long single color (like Petre clemens), but divided into two
sections (like St Martin’s cloak?). The tenor for the second division has a signature, v
implying four new minims in the time of three preceding. Each section has three taleae.
ç
There is an untexted twelve-​breve introitus in , with canonic imitation at two breves’
distance, strict until the last two breves. This is the first known motet composed for
Rome in the fifteenth century, celebrating the return of Martin V to his titular church as
the sole legitimate pontiff.
The title Martine sancte pontifex is cited in fifteenth-​century eastern European
sources as being in the simple style of the antiqui; the text was set in central European
sources over a long period. It must, however, refer not to the Colonna pope Martin V
but to the much earlier bishop, St Martin.98 A motet of the early fifteenth century, Deo
gracias papales/​Deo gracias fidelis in Nuremberg9, is named together with Virginem
mire pulcritudinis in Wrocław16 as using imperfect modus, perfect time and minor
prolation, implying that they are modern works (see Ch. 15).99

Motets by Brassart

Johannes Brassart is recorded as a singer with Eugene IV (elected 3 March 1431) on 5

March and 24 April 1431, and remained until November. He was succentor at Saint-​
Jean l’Évangeliste, Liège, from 1422 to 1431 and celebrated his first Mass there in
1426, and from 1428 he also held a post at the Cathedral of St Lambert in Liège. He
was admitted in his own right to the Council of Basel in 1433, was rector capelle to the

96 Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, 74.

97 The account of this motet by Nosow, ‘Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, enables us to set aside the
suggestion by Schuler, ‘Die Musik in Konstanz’, 161–​62, that it was for Martin’s nephew Prospero Colonna,
who was likewise Cardinal-​Deacon at S. Giorgio in Velabro, from 8 Nov. 1430. It seems altogether right to
recognise this as yet another papal motet with political and propaganda import, composed not for the papal
coronation itself but early in the new pope’s reign.
98 Witkowska-​Zaremba (ed.), Notae musicae artis, 536, citing treatises in BOZ3 (before 1467) and

the Prague MS of Petrus Besch, Pra103, which follows: ‘Nam antiqui notis minimis vel semiminimis non
utebantur, sed solum brevibus et semibrevibus interdum et valde raro simplicibus longis. Unde minime et
semiminime postea per subtilitatem successorum sunt invente, ut patet in Nicolai solemnia vel Martine sancte
pontifex, ubi solum plane vel simplices concordancie sunt ordinate et in talibus antiqui delectabantur. Sed
moderni ingenio subtiliores et vocibus agiliores plures invenerunt concordancias et fracturas.’ Although there
is some ambiguity in the order of this account, it seems that both pieces were in the simple style of the antiqui,
as opposed to the more elaborate music of the moderni.
99 Text and music of Deo gracias papales are transcribed in Cuthbert, ‘The Nuremberg and Melk Fragments’,

reporting (by clever sleuthing) that it was also in Gdańsk2315, lost since the Second World War, but partially
transcribed by Hanoch Avenary, giving the incipit of a contratenor (or perhaps motetus), Deo gracias salvator.
No specific pope is celebrated.
632 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Emperor Sigismund from 1434, and remained in imperial service until at least 1443.100
Two of his motets may refer to Martin V.
The texts of Magne Deus potencie/​Genus regale esperie are problematic. They have been
privately judged by no less a Latinist than Leofranc Holford-​Strevens to be ‘almost incom-
prehensible, with very little grammatical coherence, almost as bad as [the fourteenth-​
century motet] Apta caro’.101 The texts are not given here, and must await further study.
Ambros suggested that the motet was for a pope, but without venturing to say which one.102
Brassart was a member of the papal choir in 1431, which has led several scholars to believe
that Magne Deus was written for the election of Eugene IV.103 Brassart’s two motets Ave
Maria gracia plena/​O Maria gracia plena (also in Tr87, f. 51v) and Magne Deus potencie/​
Genus regale esperie (unicum) are both present in the original layer of Q15 (Q15-​I), which
has a terminal date of c. 1425.104 For this reason I reject the possibility that it could be for
Eugene’s coronation. If Magne Deus is for a pope, it cannot be for one later than Martin V,
although there is not even a columna (Colonna) in the text to encourage that association.
Brassart did, however, spend time at the curia of Martin V.105 On 16 May 1424 he
was given permission to leave Liège to visit the Roman curia, and was paid his salary
for the entire year before departing.106 1425 was a Jubilee year and Rome was thronged
with pilgrims. He reappears in the Liège archives in 1426 when, now as dominus, he
celebrates his first Mass. We cannot yet tell if this was an isolated connection with the
curia or if the visit had musical antecedents or consequents. Brassart’s papal visit could
also have permitted the indirect transmission of this or other works to Q15, as well as
opening the possibility that they acknowledge favours granted by Martin to Brassart or
that they are supplicatory motets written by Brassart for Martin.
Musically, Magne Deus resembles other motets from papal circles in the 1420s, in-
cluding Clarus ortu (discussed above), Ad honorem by Grenon, and Apostolo glorioso
by Du Fay. There is no list of Martin’s singers immediately prior to his death; but those
confirmed by Eugene in a standard supplication on 5 March 1431, just two days after
his election, surely include many of Martin’s chaplains. Brassart is one of the fourteen
singers listed; there is a strong probability that he had some previous connection with
Martin’s chapel.107

100 O rex Fridrice celebrates the accession of Frederick III in 1440. The last document referring to him is

dated 7 Feb. 1445 (Keith Mixter, NG1). For the most recent work on Brassart, see Wright, ‘A New Attribution to
Brassart?’; Saucier, A Paradise of Priests; ‘Johannes Brassart’s Summus secretarius’, and ‘Reading Hagiographic
Motets’.
101 Private communication.
102 Ambros, Geschichte.
103 For example Fallows, Dufay, 264. Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, now rejects a dedication to Eugene IV

(I agree, but for different reasons), as he rules out his own earlier suggestion that it could be for Amadeus
V of Savoy, which is much too late to fit the motet’s early transmission (pp. 286–​87). The best summary of
interpretations of this motet is given in Allsen, ‘Style and Intertextuality’, 430–​32. Allsen concludes partly on
the basis of stylistic affinity that this motet belongs with a group from the early and middle 1420s; I agree.
104 The text erasures at the beginning of this motet seem to have been made solely to clarify the underlay

and do not change the text itself. As Lütteken points out (Guillaume Dufay, 286), the common reading decus
results from a misreading of this erasure.
105 Mixter, ‘Johannes Brassart’, 40. Some discussions of the date of Magne Deus neglect this contact.
106 ‘Item xvi maii Jo. brassar de ludo pro gratia sibi facta per capitulum qui Ivit versus curiam Romanum . . .’;

Mixter, ‘Johannes Brassart’, 40.

107 Note the different case of Matteo da Perugia, who was a personal chaplain to Filargo and remained with

him on his election as Pope Alexander V.

 Early Papal Motets 633

This tentative dating of Magne Deus prompts a closer look at another motet by
Brassart, Te dignitas presularis. The single text of this motet quotes at the end an entire
antiphon for St Martin (Martinus adhuc):108

Te dignitas presularis Thee the priestly dignity,

strenuitas militaris military valour,
et fidei caritas and the charity of faith
habilem reddunt pastorem make an apt shepherd,
solertissimum tutorem 5 a most diligent guardian,
ovilis Dominici. of the Lord’s flock.
Decor nam si corporalis For if you had corporal beauty,
tamen vita liberalis yet you had generous life;
quem sanctorum paritas whom equality with the saints
adornavit qua dilectus 10 has ennobled, where the beloved
Ihesu et mundo electus Jesus is, and chosen by the world,
clarens rite magnificus. glorious, duly magnificent.
O Martine exaudi nos qui dignus O Martin, hear our prayer, who art worthy
audire Ihesum digne promere to hear Jesus, worthy to take forth,
Martinus adhuc cathecuminus hac me 15 Martin while still a catechumen clothed me
veste contexit. with this garment.

Oddo Colonna was elected on St Martin’s Day, 11 November 1417, and took the name
Martin. Given the other connections between Brassart and this pope, although they
still lack archival anchorage apart from the 1424 visit, it seems very likely that this text
to St Martin also addresses Pope Martin as the earthly type of the saint (‘ovili dominici
decor/​solertissimum tutorem’: glory of the flock of God, one and only protector). It may
also represent a petition for protection by the composer to his employer, present or fu-
ture: cover me with your cloak (St Martin).109
Nosow places Te dignitas presularis on St Martin’s Day 1430, presumably because
Brassart is assumed not to have been free to join the papal chapel until about this time.110
The possibility must remain open that after his 1425 visit Brassart retained contacts, and
a musical relationship, with Martin; we have stated that Magne Deus must be from the
first half of the decade because of its presence in the first stage of Q15.111 The fermata
chords on O Martine, the treble-​dominated style, and the single text are among stylistic
features that make a dating around 1430 quite comfortable for Te dignitas presularis, as
also for Feragut’s Excelsa civitas Vincencia of 1433.112
Te dignitas presularis (also in Tr87, ff. 77v–​78r) is one of two motets by Brassart
copied into Q15 at the second stage of compilation in the early 1430s. The other is
O flos fragrans (also in Ox213, Tr87). Gratulemur Christicole (unicum) and Summus

108 Both motets are published in CMM 35. For the antiphon, see CAO, no. 3712 and AS, pl. 594. The transla-

tion is by David Howlett.

109 A similar petition is embodied in the John the Baptist motet O amicus/​Precursoris. See Ch. 22.
110 Nosow, ‘The Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’, 116.
111 Pace Lütteken, Guillaume Dufay, 286, 91.
112 For the dating of Excelsa not in 1409 but in 1433, see Bent, ‘A Contemporary Perception’, and Q15, 90–​99.
634 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

secretarius (also in Ox213) are added on second-​layer openings but at the third stage
(from c. 1434), which also includes mass settings by Brassart. It is likely that these
latest works were collected and added by the Vicenza delegation to the Council of
Basel, c. 1434.113 Brassart’s motet Summus secretarius was thought to be for an un-
known papal secretary, but Robert Nosow claimed that we need look no further for
a candidate than the Holy Ghost, thus removing it from the list of topical or poten-
tially datable pieces.114 More recently, Catherine Saucier has located the text within
the medieval cult of St John the Evangelist and placed it at the church of Saint-​Jean
l’Evangéliste in Liège where Brassart served as a singer, chaplain, priest and canon.115
We can now tentatively add Clarus ortu and Te dignitas presularis to the list of motets
composed for a pope but not for his coronation, possibly also Magne Deus potencie/​
Genus regale esperie.
Martin V died on 20 February 1431; Eugene IV (the Venetian Gabriele Condulmer)
was elected on 3 March and crowned on 11 March. Promptly after his election he
reinstated the members of Martin V’s chapel (on 5 March), including Du Fay. Eugene
offended the Colonnas by seeking to undo the territorial web set up by Martin for his
nephews. His antagonism towards both the Colonnas and the Malatestas, two of Du
Fay’s patron families, led to some discomfort and a rapid exodus of the singers he had
retained, despite efforts soon after his election to secure benefices for them. He also at
the same time encouraged attention to both the fabric and the musical traditions of
cathedrals.

Eugenius IV and Motets by Du Fay

Du Fay’s grand and solemn motet Ecclesie militantis has invited many datings. Franz
Xavier Haberl proposed a date of 1436, when Florence, Venice and Francesco Sforza
formed a league against the Visconti, Milan and Genoa.116 A further temptation to
consider this date is provided by a bull of Eugene IV (24 November 1436) starting
Militantis ecclesie, relating to the reformed congregation of S. Giustina and naming to
office the Archbishop of Milan, the bishops of Castello and Rimini, and the Abbot of
Montecassino.117 Ecclesie militantis is the only possibly datable work by Du Fay that
might fall within the repertory cultivated by the Q15 scribe but was not included in
that manuscript. It survives uniquely, and in an anomalous layout, in Tr87, probably
copied in the late 1430s. A dating of the motet in 1436 would have helped to point to c.
1435 as the terminal date of work on Q15 and a more mundane reason for the exclusion
of Ecclesie militantis. But the church militant is too common a formulation to impose
such an interpretation; and Julie Cumming, who gives the best recent summary of the
debate about the motet’s dating, has pointed to uses of ecclesia militans in other conciliar
documents from Constance and Basel, describing Eugene’s stand as a declaration of

113 Bent, ‘Bishop Francesco Malipiero’ and ‘Francesco Malipiero and Antonio da Roma’.
114 Nosow, ‘The Florid and Equal-​Discantus Motet’.
115 Saucier, ‘Johannes Brassart’s Summus secretarius’. See also Saucier, ‘Reading Hagiographic Motets’, on

Brassart and Liège.

116 Haberl, Wilhelm Du Fay, 88.
117 Leccisotti, ‘La congregazione benedettina’, 461.
 Early Papal Motets 635

war.118 The church militant was clearly in the air. The elegiac couplet of the contratenor
confirms the militant spirit:

Bella canunt gentes: querimur, Pater optime, tempus.

The nations sing of war; we bewail, o best father, the time.

An even later date, 1439, has been suggested by David Crawford.119 Heinrich Besseler
and Guillaume de Van have won wider acceptance for their identification of the piece
as a coronation motet for Eugene IV in 1431.120 Charles Hamm’s doubt, on mensural
grounds, about a dating as early as 1431 for this piece assumes added interest in the con-
text of its absence from Q15, whose later additions were completed by about 1435.121
Alejandro Planchart has suggested that the motet might have been excluded from Q15
because it would have ‘appeared to many as a cruel joke, particularly in the years 1434–​
38. Eugene’s moment of glory went by very quickly and, in fact, were it not for Philip the
Good, he would probably be reckoned today as an antipope’.122 The survival of the piece
in the ‘conciliar’ Trent source Tr87 makes good sense in the context of the diplomatic
positions taken in relation to the Council of Basel between 1431 and 1433. The Council
had been called by Martin V shortly before his death and it got off to a slow start. Eugene
tried to dissolve it and failed to do so. It was not until 1433 that he officially supported
it and, once he was himself persuaded of its value, applied pressure on bishops for their
support. Stanza 3 refers to the pope’s election, but in the past tense, and in sombre rather
than celebratory mood. But the mention of the election with use of his previous name
Gabriel [Condulmer] would tend to place it early in his reign.
Julie Cumming’s argument is amplified with a musical analysis of the warring
elements combined in this extraordinary work, and she accepts it as a political state-
ment and propaganda on behalf of Eugene, likewise early in the new pope’s reign,
also recognising both his new and his papal name, but more concerned with the im-
mediate (and in some ways parallel) political problems that the new pope had to ad-
dress in the first year of his pontificate. Ecclesie militantis therefore probably dates
from sometime after Eugene’s election but before Du Fay’s departure from Rome for
Savoy in August 1433; he rejoined the papal chapel in Florence in 1435. Because of
the prominent mention at the beginning of ‘Rome seat of the Church Militant’ it is
presumably before Eugene was driven from Rome on 4 June 1434, not to return until
1443, unless it can be argued that the affirmation of Rome would be made precisely
because of Eugene’s exile.
Few if any of the papal motets here reviewed have any claim to be ceremonial
coronation pieces. Supremum est mortalibus celebrates the meeting of Eugene and King
Sigismund in Rome before Sigismund’s imperial coronation (31 May 1433), and is

118 Cumming, ‘Concord out of Discord’, ch. 10. For the manuscript format, see Welker, Musik am

Oberrhein, 78–​80.
119 Crawford, ‘Guillaume Dufay, Hellenism, and Humanism’. Cumming elegantly refutes his case (see pre-

vious note).
120 Among those who have more recently affirmed this dating are Fallows, Dufay, 112, and Lütteken,

Guillaume Dufay, 286, where he also speculates how Du Fay could have composed Ecclesie militantis in only a
week by starting before the pope had chosen his new name.
121 Hamm, A Chronology, 67–​70; Bent, Q15.
122 Private communication of 28.9.1980.
636 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

not a motet for the coronation itself. We should perhaps entertain the idea of their
use as edifying and politically charged chamber music in private and semi-​private
contexts.
There is surprisingly little recycling, contrafaction, or even neutralising of oc-
casional motets at this period. An isolated case is Stirps mocinigo, where BU2216
substitutes ‘N’ for this doge’s name. Rather the reverse: Q15 gives us a unique example
of repertory renewal within the detectable history of a single book. Many pieces were
jettisoned, including, for example, textually neutral Magnificats; at the same time, oc-
casional motets for long-​dead patrons were recopied up to twenty years after their and
Ciconia’s death without textual change but often with musical modification. In some
cases the circumstances of the commission and first performance can be inferred or
guessed. But why were they recopied? There is strong evidence for the use of that man-
uscript for domestic performance for Pietro Emiliani, bishop of Vicenza, by his own
familiars and by visiting musical canons of Vicenza and Padua cathedrals, depending
on where he and they were at the time. This merely confirms what we thought
happened anyway, but the evidence for it in Emiliani’s case is particularly suggestive
and multi-​stranded. Bertrand Feragut’s motet Excelsa civitas Vincencia was written
close to the time of the election of Francesco Malipiero as bishop in 1433, and the
text even makes it possible that it was in this case inaugural (though Malipiero’s entry
was made by proxy), but for Malipiero, not Emiliani; the scribe reassigned it posthu-
mously to Emiliani (bishop 1409–​33), helping to cement the view that the collection
stands very close to the loyal household familiars of that music-​loving bishop who
were antagonistic to his successor.123
A dating of 1436 is secure for Nuper rosarum flores, which celebrates Pope
Eugenius’s rededication of Florence cathedral and Brunelleschi’s new dome. The
musical proportions and their significance have been much discussed, and need no
further comment here.124 With these and the other political and commemorative
motets of Du Fay we enter well-​trodden ground and more certain anchorage, a good
point at which to end this survey. It has perhaps provided a framework and incen-
tive for further discussion of connections and topoi that establish papal motets as a
subgenre, albeit of a tradition fragile at first in identity and in preservation. Dating
considerations presented here suggest that we should, again, be cautious in applying
the default assumption that a commemorative motet is likely to be inaugural. That
leaves open the question on whose initiative or commission such pieces were written,
and may shift more of the responsibility from formal papal commission to individual
initiative by composers, whether already within the curia or as supplicants from
outside.

123 See Bent, Q15, and earlier studies.

124 Most notably Warren, ‘Brunelleschi’s Dome’, Wright, ‘Nuper rosarum’, and Trachtenberg, ‘Architecture
and Music’. I would only add that the text itself forms a kind of cupola, formed by what lies between the
words Eugenius and Florentie, which are respectively preceded and followed by 28 words, the main number
governing the motet’s musical structure. From Eugenius to Florentiae inclusive are 25 words (the rededica-
tion took place on 25 Mar.) and flank praise of the templum and of the Virgin to whom it was dedicated. In
the prose Nuper almos rose flores (Wright, p. 436), possibly also by Du Fay, the word ‘Gabriel’ (Eugenius’s
Christian name as Gabriele Condulmer) is also precisely placed at word 29, the same position that ‘Eugenius’
occupies in Nuper rosarum. See, most recently, Zazulia, Where Sight Meets Sound, ch. 3.
 Early Papal Motets 637

The crusades form an abiding theme, and aspects of the motet texts reflect the shift
from the particular crusade politics of the 1340s, which provide the context for Vitry’s
Petre clemens, to those of a century later. Military elements are increasingly common
in papal discourse in the fifteenth century, with more emphasis on reconciliation with
or recovery of the Eastern church, crusades against the Turks, and eventually the fall of
Constantinople in 1453. Indeed, connections with the crusades and their papal com-
ponent have often been pointed out in discussions of the complex of l’homme armé
compositions. In the fourteenth century there is naturally a stronger emphasis on the
recovery of Rome, the historical Holy See. The secular alliances and military support
that were needed before the papacy could be securely re-​established in Rome mean that
imagery of and allusions to the Church militant were never far away, culminating in Du
Fay’s Ecclesie militantis/​Sanctorum arbitrio/​Bella canunt gentes.
 Appendix
Music for Popes John XXII(?) to Eugene IV

Composition Composer Pope Sources

Motets and mass movements

Per grama protho paret (mo)/​Valde honorandus est Anon. John XXII? Possible connection with McV, f. 26 (no. 1)
beatus Johannes (T) Pierre Roger has been suggested
Petre clemens/​Lugentium/​Non est inventus Vitry Clement VI (Pierre Roger) Aachen, f. 2r; Ivrea, ff. 37v–​38; Trém; texts in Paris3343
and Vienna4195
Gloria Clemens Deus artifex Anon. Clement VI Ivrea, no. 45, ff. 27v–​28
Kyrie Rex angelorum; motetus trope Clemens pater, Anon. Clement VI? Ivrea, no.71, ff. 53v–​54v; Apt, 1r–​2r; Barc971, f. 1r
conditor syderum
Pictagore per dogmata/​O terra sancta/​Rosa vernans Anon. Gregory XI, c. 1375 Chantilly, ff. 63v–​64
Alme pater (Tr/​T) Anon. Urban VI, 1385? Fountains, f. 14v
Gaudeat et exultet . . . Papam querentes, with Anon. Clement VII and Urban VI, 1378 or Basel71, Basel72 (contrafact?)
contrafact(?): Novum sidus orientis . . . De scintilla soon after
O Petre Christi discipule Ciconia Alexander V? Filargo, and possibly Q15 (I), ff. R259v–​260
Emiliani
Gloria Suscipe trinitas Ciconia Schism Warsaw378, ff. 25v–​27; Pad675 (PadD), f. 2v; GR224,
ff. 9v–​10v; GRss, f. 2v
Benedicta viscera/​Ave mater/​Ora pro nobis Velut Schism; Virgn birth Ox213, ff. 102v–​103
Eya dulcis/​Vale placens Tapissier Prayer to Virgin for end of Schism Ox213, ff.139v–​140
Venite adoremus/​Salve sancta Carmen Schism; God and Trinity Q15 (III, I), ff. A353v–​354 and R224v-​225; Ox213, ff. 138v–​139
Argi vices Polyphemus/​Tum Philemon rebus paucis Nicolaus/​ John XXIII Ao, ff. 4v–​7
Guillermus
. . . de qua cordis/​Trinitatem Anon. 1409–​15, threefold Schism? Houghton122
Gloria Jubilacio uni Deo Salinis end of Schism Q15 (I), ff. R62v–​64; Venice145, ff. 15v–​19
Clarus ortu/​Gloriosa mater ecclesia/​Justus non Antonio da Martin V, 1420? Ox213, ff. 117v–​118
conturbatitur* Cividale?
Te dignitas presularis* Brassart Martin V Q15 (II), ff. R266v–​267; Tr87, ff. 77v–​78
Magne Deus/​Genus regale Brassart Martin V? Q15 (I), ff. R253v–​254
Balsamus et munda cera* Du Fay Eugene IV, 7 Apr. 1431 Q15 (III), ff. R191v–​192
Ecclesie militantis/​Sanctorum arbitrio/​Bella Du Fay Eugene IV, 1431–​33? Tr87 (I), ff. 85v–​86 and 95v–​96
canunt gentes*
Supremum est mortalibus* Du Fay Eugene IV and Sigismund, 21 Q15 (III), ff. R190v–​191; BU2216, f. 28v; Tr92, ff. 32v–​34;
May 1433 MuEm, ff. 107 v–​109; ModB, ff. 66v–​67; Cop17a, f. 17
Nuper rosarum flores Du Fay Eugene IV; Florence, 25 Mar. 1436 ModB, ff. 67v–​68; Tr92, ff. 21v–​23
Sanctus (‘papale’) Du Fay Tr92, ff. 213v–​215; Tr90, ff. 277r–​279v; Tr93, ff. 350r–​352v;
Q15 (III), ff. A134v–​135
Agnus Custos et pastor ovium Du Fay Tr92, ff. 208v–​210

Latin ballades and vernacular pieces

Inclite flos orti Gebenensis* Mayhuet de tenor ‘pro papa Clemente’ [VII] ModA, f. 15; Chantilly, f. 41
Joan
Courtois et sages* Magister Clement VII (acrostic); validity of ModA, f. 35; Reina, f. 54
Egidius election
Par les bons gedeons* Filippotto da ‘le souverayn pape qui s’appelle ModA, f. 31; Chantilly, f. 45v; Boverio, f. 5v (‘antipape’)
Caserta Clement’ [VII]
Veri almi pastoris Conradus de for a pope? ModA, f. 36v
Pistoria
Dime, Fortuna, poi che tu parlasti (ballata) A. Zacara? ‘Se Alessandro a Roma gito fosse’ Boverio, f. 2
[Alexander V]
Arte psalentes* Bartolomeus musical collegium singing for a ModA, ff. 37v–​38
de Bononia true shepherd, supreme pontiff
[Alexander V or John XXIII?]
Mirar non posso H. de Lantins Colonna: Victoria or Martin V? Ox213, f. 26
Gia per gran nobeltà (ballata)* N. Zacarie Martin V, 1420? Ox213, f. 125v

* Recorded by the Orlando Consort on ‘Popes & Antipopes’, MET CD 1008 on CD-​SAR 49.
 31
Trémoïlle Revisited

As the lone surviving bifolio from a large-​format manuscript of fourteenth-​century

music, Trém (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 23190) has attracted
scholarly attention in generous proportion to its modest extent because of the index to
the lost collection that is inscribed on its first recto.1 Many items listed can be identified
with some certainty as pieces known from other manuscripts. Trém is routinely listed
among the sources for editions of those pieces, although in nearly all cases the music
is not preserved there. With about 70 motets listed, it is the largest documented motet
collection of the century. It bears a note of ownership dated 1376 which had been taken
to provide a terminus ante quem for the composition dates of all the pieces indexed; this
interpretation will be refined here. The remainder of the bifolio contains in complete
or partial form the music of four motets corresponding to the index numbers for those
folios, giving not only a general sense of the appearance and quality of the manuscript
and a sample of the scribe’s work and procedures, but some basis for assessing how the
index related to the lost volume. The intact parchment bifolio is of large format, meas-
uring 50 × 32.5 cm, and must have been the outer bifolio of the first gathering. This
adapted version of the earlier article includes a corrected transcription of the index with
an updated list of concordant sources (in the Appendix to this chapter), three or pos-
sibly four new motet identifications (Beatius/​Cum humanum, Plausu querulo/​Plausu
querulo, Flos vernans/​Fiat intencio and Thoma tibi), and one or two new composer
attributions to Denis le Grant.
Since the original publication (1990) I have become sensitised to the distinction be-
tween indexes and tables of contents. Indexes are in some way classified, whether alpha-
betically, by genre or some other criterion. A table of contents lists works in the order in
which they appear in the manuscript or, in the case of a prescriptive table, the order in
which they were intended to appear. I diagnosed the Chantilly ‘index’ as a case of the
latter type: the pieces are listed in the order in which they appear, and the folio numbers
supplied later.2 Likewise prescriptive is the index of MachautA.3

An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘A Note on the Dating of the Trémoïlle Manuscript’, in
Gillingham and Merkley (eds.), Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer (Ottawa, 1990), 217–​42, a
Festschrift in honour of Luther Dittmer, acknowledging his own work not only in 14th-​c. studies but also in
making fundamental scholarship available. I am particularly grateful for more recent additions provided in
correspondence by Lawrence Earp, Michael Scott Cuthbert and Yolanda Plumley. This substantially revised
version is published with permission from the Institute of Mediaeval Music.
1 https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv1b8​4511​08d/​#. Discovered by Charles Samaran (see Machaut,

Musikalische Werke, ed. Ludwig, ii. 18* n. 2) and first described by Droz and Thibault, ‘Un chansonnier’,
followed by Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 235–​41, with a catalogue of contents in reconstructed manuscript order; then
by Ludwig, ii. 18*–​20*, who documents inventory references to Trém also used by later scholars. Most recently
before my essay, Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy. RISM B IV/​2 (1969) still listed Trém as F-​SERRANT,
though recording it as being already in Paris.
2 Bent, ‘The Absent First Gathering’.
3 Earp, ‘Scribal Practice’, 51–​82, and The Ferrell-​Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, ed. Earp et al., i. 2 n. 8. See

also McGrady, Controlling Readers, ch. 3 (‘Instructing Readers: Metatext and the Table of Contents as Sites of
Meditation in BnF, MS fr. 1584’).

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0032
642 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

The main entries in Trém are consistent in script; later additions are distinguished
by shifts in script presumably reflecting piecemeal copying order. Trém’s minimal clas-
sification barely qualifies it as an index, though it is conveniently so referred to. It has
just two categories: ‘Motez ordenez et escriz ci apres’ (then, erased: ‘selon le nombre’,
with an illegible continuation) and ‘Balades et rondeaus ci apres par le nombre’. The
motet listing is in strict numerical order for the original corpus (disturbed thereafter
between 33 and 41), hence perhaps ‘ordenez’, to distinguish it from the songs, which are
listed ‘according to number’ but not as ‘ordenez’. This confirms the likely scenario that
longer pieces were copied first, one or two on an opening, and were listed in the order in
which they appear; and that shorter songs, evidently entirely page-​fillers, were entered
as space permitted. They were listed in order of copying, which was not necessarily the
order they appear in the manuscript, as the non-​consecutive numbers indicate. This is
especially true for those page-​filler songs, whose numbers are far from being ‘ordered’.
The motet list also includes at least three chaces and four mass ordinary movements (a
Gloria and three Credos; five if Kyri sponse at 31 was a troped Kyrie). Did the canonic
technique of chaces perhaps bring them closer to the qualifying length and complexity
of the motet?4 The list of ballades and rondeaux also includes at least one virelai and a
hymn, and thus contained other short pieces that could be fitted in below the motets as
space permitted. For neither column should we assume that the compiler considered
these outliers to be classified respectively as motets, ballades or rondeaux. The partial
classification probably had a practical rather than a generic basis: ‘motets’ include other
long pieces which could not serve as page-​fillers (though, given the large format, two
motets could often be accommodated on an opening).5 Although some manuscripts
are arranged by composer (notably Sq), indexes at this time are never classified by com-
poser, and rarely name composers. Those that do (including Tr92, Ao, Q15) do so only
(or mainly) to distinguish different settings of the same text, usually Mass ordinaries;
two instances in Trém will be given below.6
An original foliation presumably existed to correspond to the index numeration, but
it is no longer present on the extant bifolio; the upper margin has been closely trimmed.
Made known in 1926, it was used in 1512 as a cover for an account book of Georges de la
Trémoïlle, to whom much of Charles the Bold’s property was given by Louis XI in 1477,
evidently including the musical manuscript, on which he can have set so little value that
it was used for scrap. The bifolio remained in the Trémoïlle family until its acquisition
by the Bibliothèque nationale de France around 1970.
Droz and Thibault identified many of the titles, the dated heading, and the manu-
script as recorded in inventories of the Dukes of Burgundy. It is recorded in the 1420
chapel inventory of John the Fearless as: ‘Item ung grant livre plat, noté, de plusieurs

4 The anonymous author of the Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis likened the Italian caccia to the

[Italian] motet, which in Italy it more obviously resembled by virtue of often equal-​range and imitative
top parts and similarly spaced cadences. The ‘Capitulum’ is an anonymous fourteenth-​century addition to
Antonio da Tempo’s 1332 Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis. See Ch. 26, and also Burkard and Huck,
‘Voces applicatae verbis’ and Abramov-​van Rijk, ‘Evidence for a Revised Dating’.
5 The large-​format MachautE similarly used songs as page-​fillers sharing openings with motets.
6 Guillelmus Musart, the indexer of Q15, listed only mass ordinaries, and often distinguished settings by

composer names. See Bent, Q15, i. 89–​95; Bent, ‘The Trent 92 and Aosta Indexes’ and Bent, ‘Indexes’. ModB,
however, has a wholly exceptional table of contents in manuscript order, with genre headings, and gives not
only composer names, but text and thematic incipits for all compositions.
 Trémoïlle Revisited 643

motez, virelaiz et balades qui commence: Colla jugo fidere [sic], et se fenit Bis dicitur’.7
The surviving bifolio gives on f. 1v the opening motet, Colla iugo subdere/​Bona condit.8
Bis dicitur was probably a tenor canon for the last listed (and unidentified) motet, Nova
stella.9 This might also be the larger of two motet books referred to in the 1404 chapel
inventory of Philip the Bold. Craig Wright also reports the next item in the 1420 inven-
tory, namely ‘another book of motets, patrems, virelais, ballades, and other things, from
which one sang in the chapel on the great feast days’. From this he infers that ‘the motet
books of the duke of Burgundy were used in the chapel only during the major feasts
of the liturgical year’ [my italics] and that the repertory was sung at the courts of both
Philip the Bold and John the Fearless.10
The heading of the index page now reads: ‘Iste liber motetorum pertinet capelle
illustrissimi principis Philippi ducis Burgondie et comitis Flandrie’. The last six words
(from Philippi) are not only in a later and apparently different hand, but over an era-
sure of the second half of that first line of writing. An entire second line has also been
erased. The name which Philip’s replaces, following principis, cannot be deciphered, but
the continuation can be read in part with ultraviolet light as follows: ‘. . . quem scripsit
Michael de . . . ia, ejusdem principis capellanus, millesimo trecentesimo septuagesimo
sexto’. Wright endorsed Droz and Thibault’s proposal that the scribe was Michael de
Fontaine, first chaplain to King Charles V, who would therefore have been the first
owner. Senior chaplain from 1370, Fontaine became cantor of the Sainte-​Chapelle on
the death of Charles in 1380 and remained there until his own death in 1403. Philip
became Duke of Flanders in February 1384, and in July of that year bought ‘for him-
self ’ a book of motets for 13 francs from Jean Mâçon, a priest of the Sainte-​Chapelle.
The heading was presumably changed at this time by a member of Philip’s chapel. He
purchased other service books from canons of the Sainte-​Chapelle during the 1390s.11
However, Reinhard Strohm reports that Wright now questions this identification on
the grounds that ‘ . . . ia does not seem a possible desinence for a latinised version of
“fontaine” ’. Strohm further suspects that the codex did not belong to a king, because
the heading refers to the owner as ‘illustrissimus princeps’ and the scribe as ‘ejusdem
principis capellanus’.12 The issue of the original provenance cannot be resolved without
more knowledge of the other dukes’ chapel personnel. Andrew Wathey informs me that
any of the sons of Jean II or Charles V, and perhaps even Robert of Geneva, may be
considered candidates for ownership; and that there seems to be no Michael de . . .in the
chapel of Louis, Duke of Anjou, in the early 1370s.

7 Doutrepont, Inventaire, p. 28 No. 64.

8 As Trém was also a royal manuscript, the identification is likely, though it may not have been the only
manuscript to start with this widely circulated motet.
9 It is tempting to propose a possible match with the triplum Novum sidus orientis in Basel72; see Ch. 30.

However, it is not clear that bis dicitur applies to that tenor.

10 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 140, 147, 149. Kirkman, The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic

Mass, 151–​57, draws attention to polyphonic books (probably including Trém) recorded in the 1420
Burgundian chapel inventory, others of which also contained songs and motets specifically reported as being
sung in the chapel; he applies this also to Trém, which contains only four mass movements. This is admittedly
a conundrum, given its large format and formal presentation. Early 15th-​c. Italian mixed-​repertory quarto
manuscripts such as Q15 (libri de cantu) may be a different matter. While their mass movements and some
motets may have been used at Mass, I believe these personal compilations are more likely to have served
mainly for highbrow chamber music in the sacristy or the bishop’s palace.
11 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 148.
12 Strohm, ‘The Ars Nova Fragments’, 125.
644 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

An amalgamated inventory of books that belonged to Charles V and Charles VI was

published by Léopold Delisle (and drawn on selectively by Droz, Thibault, Ludwig and
Wright) from inventories compiled in 1373 (rev. 1380), 1411, 1413, and 1424. Passage
of our manuscript to the Sainte-​Chapelle, and its subsequent acquisition by the dukes
of Burgundy, would have disqualified it for all but the later recension of the first of these
inventories. In all but one case, the inventories record the beginning and end of the text;
none is Bona condit. The exception (inv. 1231) appears only in ‘another copy’ of the 1373
(1380) inventory and is listed simply as ‘Motez notés en françois et latin’. Four other
entries combine motets with chançons, lais and even a bestiary.13
The present argument proceeds from the observation that the index is not written
in a consistent script, even though most of the entries may well be by the same scribe.
The first column, now visibly headed ‘Motez ordenez et escriz ci apres’ but formerly
followed by the continuation, now erased: ‘selon le nombre [ . . . ]’, contains the pieces
numbered for ff. 1–​33, in a fairly consistent hand and probably at a single sitting. The
heading of this column, now confined above column 1, originally extended over column
2, which contains entries for motets from f. 34 onwards. These are in varying script and
ink colours, in groups of one to four pieces entered at the same time. Column 1 was evi­
dently a retrospective listing in manuscript order of the original nucleus of thirty-​two
folios, presumably arranged in four quaternions. The numbers actually run to 33; I shall
suggest that they mostly refer to openings rather than to folios.14 Column 2 contains
additions made to that nucleus in two further quaternions.
The heading of the third column, ‘Balades et rondeaus ci apres escriz par le nombre’,
does not claim that they are ordenez, and has not suffered erasure. The entries have no
numbers lower than for f. 10; songs were therefore added not in the first gathering but
only in the second through fourth gatherings of the original compilation. The first set
of entries and folio numbers for the songs is in the same script as the first column of
motets, and likewise appears to have been written at the same sitting, no doubt listing
items already copied. However, after the first thirteen items (ending with the two for
f. 27), the given folio numbers remain in what is evidently the same hand, while the
additions of items to those folios show enough differences to reflect successive stages of
writing.
Another decisive break in the ballade list comes after f. 32, when a series of distin-
guishable hands made groups of additions, starting with ff. 25 and 23 within the existing
gatherings, which could evidently still accommodate further additions, before going
on to folio numbers after 33. It seems that at this stage a few available spaces in the ex-
isting collection were finally filled, followed by spaces beneath the primary motets in an
added fifth and then a sixth gathering. While the corpus of the motet index proceeds
in folio order (with anomalies only at the end of the first four gatherings, in changed
folio numbers affecting ff. 32 and 33), the ballades and rondeaux, evidently added in
most or all cases to folios already containing one or more motets, have entries for ff.

13 Delisle, Recherches, inventory nos. 1229, 1230 (which may be the same book as 1231 despite the different

description), 1232, and 793. Other collections of chans royaulx, laiz, pastourelles couronnées, chançons (mostly
‘notées’), all with identifying text, are nos. 1226, 1227, 1228 and 1233–​39. For more on the Delisle references,
see Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 184 n. 4 and ‘Studien II’, 187 and Baltzer, ‘Notre Dame Manuscripts’, 396. On 1233, see
Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide, 105 [29].
14 See Bent, ‘The Trent 92 and Aosta Indexes’.
 Trémoïlle Revisited 645

18–​22, and then for ff. 10–​16, then ff. 27–​32. In other words, the ballades of gathering
III were listed—​and therefore perhaps copied—​before those of gathering II, whereas
the motet gatherings are listed in order. It looks as though the index was made before
the gatherings were bound, and supports the obvious inference that they were listed
after copying. It seems more than likely that all the entries after that initial retrospec-
tive indexing were recorded as the piece was copied, and therefore reflect the order of
copying.15 This offers the best explanation for the striking change in the motet index, for
gathering V, to a non-​consecutive order that could reflect the actual order of copying of
an unbound gathering. The scribe may have anticipated such problems in indexing page
fillers; the ballades are indeed less ‘ordenez’ than the motets.
The original heading, with the date 1376, was copied before, and probably at the same
sitting as, the earliest form of the index, a retrospective listing of the contents of the
first thirty-​two folios. Scholars have accepted 1376 as the terminus ante quem for all the
compositions listed. In fact, this terminus can probably only be applied to most of the
music copied on the first thirty-​two folios. Two gatherings, i.e. the contents of openings
designated 34 through 49 (viz., ff. 33–​48), were added, probably singly, at some time
thereafter. As Craig Wright has shown, the continuing use of Trém is documented,
at least obliquely, as one of two books of motets in the 1420 inventory. Demonstrable
additions, the presumed extension of the indexed compilation into the time beyond
1376, and a continuing record of use into the fifteenth century, all make it possible
that the book continued to receive additions during that period.16 Fontaine lived until
October 1403. If he was the scribe, and had no further access to the book after its sale to
Duke Philip in 1384, that would be the terminal date of the indexed additions, if indeed
their varying script can be shown still to include his hand. Also, in the autumn of 1403,
Wright notes a payment to the composer Jean Carmen for adding ‘hymns, Glorias and
Patrems newly made’ to the book of motets of the Duke’s chapel.17 It cannot be known
whether this refers to either of the two inventoried books, and whether it was to this
manuscript that Carmen made additions that do not appear in our index.
The index is in a stylish French secretary hand with some personal or self-​conscious
variation, some features of which connect, in turn, with the heading. The additions are
in similar scripts which I believe to be all or mostly by the same scribe—​some of them
tend to the larger and more ornamental style of the heading to the index page. It is
hard to find any points of secure identification with the Gothic book-​hand used for the
texts of the motets surviving on the bifolio. If, however, the index is mostly by the same
scribe and was compiled over a period of time, it is likely that both index and contents
are nonetheless the work of the man identified in the heading as the scribe of the book
of motets.
All identified motets are listed by the text of the motetus voice. Certainly the in-
dexer needed musical knowledge to select that incipit and to assign pieces to the correct

15 Droz and Thibault assumed that the list reflected the order of copying, but without going on to consider

its scribal layering.

16 It may already have become detached before being used to cover a family account book in 1512; the last

verso of the surviving bifolio has the text of a rondeau Incessament (with deletions, and neither the text set by
Josquin nor that by Pierre de la Rue) upside down in a cursive hand of the period around 1500. It is not clear
whether the rondeau was written while the musical status of the manuscript was still undisturbed, or whether
it is coincidence that the rondeau text was written on a leaf that had earlier had a musical life of its own.
17 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 158.
646 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

column. Some motets copied across an opening reverse the normal assignation of
triplum to verso, motetus to recto, in order to balance the space for the second motet
on an opening, as can be seen on the last recto of the surviving bifolio, which contains
the shorter motetus (Faux samblans) and tenor of one Machaut motet (M15), and the
longer triplum (Qui es promesses) and tenor of another (M8).18 The facing verso must
have started with the triplum of the first motet, followed by the motetus of the other.
When there are two motets on an opening, such a complementary arrangement allows
the space to be used efficiently by reversing the order of the shorter and longer (motetus
and triplum) voices for the second piece on the opening, but in no case does this seem
to have resulted in other than motetus parts being indexed. Identification by motetus
part is standard in the fourteenth century, as here. Some Italian treatises, however, used
triplum citations earlier in the century, perhaps thereby disclosing their different ap-
proach to the genre, and even central French sources at the end of the fourteenth century
(such as the table of contents of MachautE) began to follow the general fifteenth-​century
practice of treating the triplum as primary. Several otherwise unknown motets cited by
triplum in central and eastern European treatises cannot therefore be checked against
Trém. Two Trém listings that appeared to be tripla can now be accepted as motetus
parts; both have to do with concordances in Stras. One is Ida capillorum, often cited
as the triplum voice, so presented in Ivrea and Chantilly, and so published by Frank
Ll. Harrison in PMFC 5. Ursula Günther pointed out that Stras began with the longer
and more triplum-​like Portio nature, and convincingly presents it with Ida capillorum
as the motetus, consistent with its listing in Trém.19 The other is Organizanter, of which
Coussemaker transcribed a verso incipit Organizanter contine; the matching and higher
triplum, Luceat laudis, was on the recto. In this case, the evidence from Stras works in
the other direction, and Organizanter was the motetus, as in Trém.
The motet Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis, cited by its triplum in two treatises, is not listed
in Trém. Günther has shown that ‘Rex Karole’ must be Charles V (1364–​80) and argued
for dating it to c. 1375; Carolann Buff has proposed 1378.20 This absence of the one
surviving piece that was written for the king who is supposed to have patronised the
manuscript, even as an addition after 1376, is therefore surprising, and adds some
weight to Strohm’s suggestion (see above) that it may instead have belonged originally
to any of the dukes of Anjou, Berry or Burgundy. The possibility that Trém was neither
compiled for the king, nor that the Michael who copied it was his chaplain Fontaine,
opens up many questions, and perhaps places its Sainte-​Chapelle sojourn in ques-
tion. While too much cannot be built on the absence of Rex Karole from our index, it is

18 The minor variants reported for M15 in Machaut, The Motets, ed. Boogaart, are mostly unique to Trém,

whereas most of those for M8 are shared with Ivrea and/​or Ca1328, suggesting that that motet at least had
more in common with a version circulating with the so-​called repertory manuscripts than the complete-​
works manuscripts. Apart from M19, which is also in Ivrea, Trém’s six other Machaut motets are shared oth-
erwise only with the complete-​works manuscripts.
19 CMM 39, p. lix. Contemporaries were confused about the status of these voices. Ars cantus mensurabilis

(ed. Balensuela), normally refers to motets by their triplum voice, as in Rex Karole, but for this work ‘in tenore
Portio nature vel Ida capillorum’ (256). Perhaps specifically for the motetus: ‘in motecto Ida capillorum talem
sincopam’ (212). On this motet, see Zazulia, ‘‘A Motet Ahead of its Time?’. Earp has reviewed the practices
of listing by motetus or triplum in indexes and treatises in ‘Scribal Practice’, 65–​66. Besseler, ‘Studien II’, 236,
cites Du Fay’s citation in his will of 1474 of his own motet O proles/​O sydus as a late instance of citation by
motetus incipit.
20 Günther in CMM 39, pp. xxix–​xxxi. Buff, ‘Ciconia’s Equal-​Cantus Motets’, 142–​151 and Ch. 30.
 Trémoïlle Revisited 647

possible that the indexed additions were indeed in place by the date of its composition.
Was the collection already copied too early to include Rex Karole, or was that motet
preserved in one of the several other motet books (attested by the royal inventories)
to which this collection was complementary? Another conspicuously absent piece that
has been dated to the early 1370s is Sub Arturo/​Fons; its absence from Trém therefore
does not rule out my proposed later dating of that motet: see Chapter 20. Twenty-​eight
of the Trém motets are in Ivrea, but only four are in the later Chantilly, all of which are
in the original Trém compilation and can thus be dated before 1376: Degentis vita/​Cum
vix artidici; Portio nature/​Ida capillorum; Apta caro/​Flos virginum; L’ardure qu’endure/​
Tresdouz espoir.
Droz and Thibault listed the contents of the index alphabetically. Craig Wright
followed Heinrich Besseler by cataloguing pieces in manuscript order, blending motets
and songs into a single sequence, and adding further concordances.21 Appended to this
chapter is a simple transcription of the index, this time in index order, preserving the
two separate listings headed respectively as motets and songs. It gives the number of
each piece as in the index, without translating it as referring to folio, opening, or recto/​
verso occupancy. It provides the text incipit of the other (triplum) motet voice where
known, and an updated listing of concordant manuscripts. The groups of additions, dis-
tinguished by script appearance, are separated by dotted lines.
I have estimated that the manuscript contained six quaternions, four original and
two added, and that the index numbers generally refer to the opening on which that
number would be visible; in the case of O dira nacio/​Mens in nequicia, the whole piece
is contained on f. 8v but is designated 9. Both the Machaut motets on f. 8r are listed as
8. Hence, a piece at the end of a gathering, whether or not it uses the new recto, and
whether or not the next folio was already present, will carry the new number. This
would explain why 33 (for 32v) is the last listed number of the original four gatherings,
and 49 (for 48v) the last of the indexed manuscript. Only f. 1 is then anomalous. If the
index was on f. 1r, then Bona condit, listed as ‘i’, is on its verso, not its opening. Was the
index itself inconsistent in labelling by folio or by opening? If not, then we must posit
that the ‘foliation’ started on the first opening of music, and that an extra, ninth folio was
placed somewhere in the first gathering; this seems unlikely. Since we have the last leaf
of the first gathering, which must have been numbered 8, all the following gatherings
can be treated as multiples of eight and are not affected by any structural anomaly, if that
is what it is.22
The first gathering was not only self-​contained, it was the only one lacking additions
of ballades and rondeaux. The motets seem always to have been primary, and there were
often two on an opening. For some openings, one motet and a ballade are recorded.
The index, however, shows some anomalies. The well-​filled fifteen staves of f. 8r, and
the minimal amount of unused space on ff. 1v and 8v, make it hard to take at face value
index entries that seem to list two motets and two ballades under a single number and

21 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 149–​57.

22 If, however, the index numbers refer to folios and not openings, we would have to consider the surviving
bifolio as representing ff. 1 and 9, with, again, an additional folio somewhere in between. That would leave
Bona condit on f. 1v then requiring no explanation, likewise O dira nacio/​Mens in nequicia on f. 9v, but it would
then become harder to explain the two Machaut motets listed as 8, one of which would have had its motetus
and tenor, the other its triplum and tenor, on f. 9.
648 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

apparently for a single opening, as for ff. 13 and 25, or, for f. 27, two motets, two rondeaux
and a ballade. Except in gathering IV, where ff. 25, 27 and 31 each have at least four
pieces, the other openings with four pieces would all have been the middle bifolio of their
quaternions, assuming the numbers to refer to openings: 17, 21, 37, 45. If gathering IV
had been, rather, two binions (i.e. two pairs of nested bifolios), its overfilled openings 27
and 31 would have been at the centre of each, but this seems unlikely. On the other hand,
only a single motet is recorded for f. 38, a single ballade for f. 48. Later gatherings of the
large-​format pages may have been ruled in a much more compressed way to receive addi-
tional staves. Alternatively, but less likely, some pieces were perhaps not presented com-
plete but as single voice parts, or else the numeration is misleading or wrong.
As can be seen in the Gallica images, and marked on the present transcription of the
index in the Appendix to this chapter, the additions after f. 32 for both motets and songs
fall into scribally compatible groups of, again, one to four titles. The folio numbers at-
tached to these added motets, however, fall into two clear groups, each corresponding
to a gathering (V, VI), and added after the titles. The motets of gathering V are listed
in non-​consecutive folio order, with numbers up to 41 (presumably for f. 40v, the last
page of gathering V). Folio numbers for gathering VI starting from 41 form a distinct
and differently indented sequence, this time with few deviations from folio order. The
Gloria, Credo and motet listed for 36, 37 and 41 form a scribally consistent trio of titles
that bridges the junction of the gathering change, as seen in the folio numbers. After 27,
from Dame de qui, the song entries appear to be added in groups of four, three and three,
but the consistency of the folio numbers up to 32 suggests that this group still forms part
of the original corpus, though perhaps the last additions within it. Song additions after
32 (from En ma dolour) show two for 25 (spanning gatherings III–​IV?), another for 27
(gathering IV), one for 41 (spanning gatherings V–​VI), two for 37 (V),23 then six in
gathering VI. Apart from the few numbers whose openings bridge two gatherings, each
group of entries is confined to a single gathering. Even the numbers of openings that
bridge joins may refer to pieces copied wholly in the gathering within which the other
additions of that group occur. Gathering I was self-​contained; others may have been too.
Gathering I began with five Latin motets, followed by nine with French texts (in-
cluding five by Machaut); the gathering ends with the complete unicum O dira nacio/​
Mens in nequicia on f. 8v.24 There were two motets per opening, either interlocked (as
on ff. 7v–​8) or one on a side (as f. 8v). Gathering II seems to have two motets on most
openings, with added songs. Gathering II must have opened with the chace Se je chant
on f. 9r; in addition to French and Latin motets this gathering also filled unused space
with ballades. Gathering III features a consecutive run of nine Latin motets (listed
from 19 to 24); most of its added songs were indexed ahead of gathering II, perhaps
further testimony that the gatherings were (at least originally) self-​contained, and un-
bound when indexed. Three further songs added to this gathering (for ff. 25 and 23) are

23 Droz, Thibault and Wright list Quicunques vuet as being on f. 37. Apart from further overloading

an opening for which two motets had been listed, and to which two other songs further down the list are
assigned, there is a problem about this number. Both previous inventories read it as xxxvii. However, the first
two x’s, if that is what they are, are graphically distinct from the third, which belongs together with the vii.
It could even read Quicunques vuet &c xvii. At the very least, the number has been changed; it is uncertain
where the rondeau was originally located.
24 Published in PMFC 17, no. 55, as a possibly English motet. Its status remains uncertain.
 Trémoïlle Revisited 649

listed after those for gathering IV; the script change places them with the subsequent
additions. Gathering IV itself is again mixed.
Of the Machaut works, six motets but only two ballades and the rondeau are not
otherwise recorded outside the Machaut manuscripts. The Machaut ballades 18, 23, 31,
41, 42 and the rondeau 9 all belong to that rather small group of Machaut works that
survive with a triplum as well as (or as alternative to) a contratenor. The main corpus
of Trém, gatherings I–​IV, contained some of the most widely circulated motets and
ballades of the fourteenth century. Particularly well represented are pieces that have
come down to us (whether or not they were so presented in Trém) in versions with
additional or alternative voices, partly but not wholly a function of wide circulation.
Motets indexed in Trém known to have had additional voices, solus tenors, or alterna-
tive versions (none by Machaut) include Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis,25 Portio
nature/​Ida capillorum, Vos quid/​Gratissima, Post missarum/​Post misse, Degentis vita/​
Cum vix, Se paour/​Diex tant desir. The useful statistics by which Günther contrasts
Machaut’s preference for French motet texts with the decisive preponderance of Latin-​
texted motets in Chantilly and Ivrea are tempered somewhat by the balance in Trém,
which lists (excluding a Gloria, Credos and chaces) 44 Latin and 27 French motetus
parts (of which 13 Latin and 8 French are among the additions, a similar proportion).26
Of the 79 items listed in the motet columns (including a few mass movements and
chaces), 53 works pre-​date the 1376 inscription. Of these, 39 are known from outside Trém
and 14 are otherwise unknown. Of the 26 added ‘motet’ items, on the other hand, only 13
are known and 13 are new.27 Of the 35 items listed in the songs column, 21 date from the
first stage, of which fully 20 have identifications (some questionable), not counting the du-
plication of Phiton. The 13 subsequent additions show the very different balance of 7 known
and 6 unknown songs. Five rondeaux precede f. 33, and only one is later. Nine Machaut
motets were included, of which only M9 was copied later than 1376, by far the greatest
number outside the Machaut manuscripts. Machaut’s secular songs had a wider circulation
than the motets outside the Machaut manuscripts; seven Machaut ballades (plus one dupli-
cate) and one rondeau were copied before 1376, one ballade (B4) afterwards.
Especially given the possibly later date of these additions, the overall shortage of
concordances with the large song repertory of Chantilly is striking: there are only four
in the main corpus (two of those by Machaut) and one among the additions. Only two
works by Machaut were added after the main corpus, one motet (M9) and one ballade
(B4), and both were early among those additions. The additions in both categories thus
contain a much lower proportion of identified works than those in the original compila-
tion. The observation that the index of Trém is temporally layered bears mainly on those
unidentified pieces for which concordances may yet materialise, and which must now
be considered exempt from the 1376 cut-​off point for dating. It serves as a reminder that
accidents of source preservation may distort conclusions based on surviving repertory.
The sharply different concordance profile of the corpus and the additions may reflect,
as often happens in manuscripts that were added to, a continuing pattern of collection

25 See Ch. 16 for the voices added to Apollinis.

26 Günther, ‘The 14th-​Century Motet’. Four mass movements bring the added ‘motet’ listing up to 26.
27 These include titles known from the lost manuscript Stras and treatise citations. However, lost motets
known to us only by citation of the triplum voice may include pieces listed here by their motetus, and hence
inaccessible to identification.
650 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

closer to the patron’s immediate circle than was the ‘standard’ repertory that makes up
a substantial portion of the nucleus. Despite the books inventoried for Charles V, and
those surviving manuscripts that affirm a tradition of mixed repertory manuscripts in-
cluding motets and fixed-​form songs (Ivrea, Ca1328, Chantilly),28 the low proportion
of identified pieces among the later additions to Trém may mean that the royal and ducal
repertories up to 1376 included more widely known pieces than it did after that date.
Finally, we turn to the new identifications that have been made in recent years. Named
in Apollinis, direct testimony to Denis le Grant as a composer was elusive until Karl Kügle
convincingly attributed to him the chace Se je chant mains.29 It occurs anonymously in
Ivrea and Pic, and is listed under motets as no. 9 in Trém. Further testimony to Denis as
a composer may be the name ‘denis’ (previously misread as ‘decus’) preceding the Patrem
omnipotentem at no. 37, in a different hand.30 Similarly placed, ‘Sortes’ precedes the
Patrem omnipotentem at 45; a Credo ascribed to Sortes survives in many sources, a prece­
dent for treating ‘denis’ also as a composer attribution, presumably here to distinguish
like-​texted entries, as often happens with mass movements in indexes. The ‘Denis’ Credo
is immediately preceded by a Gloria, which therefore might possibly also be his. Both the
Credos distinguished by composer are among the later additions. Besseler (‘Studien II’,
241) thought the two words, both misread, might be trope texts.
New motet identifications have been made on the basis of newly discovered sources:

1. Beatius/​Cum humanum (f. 39, among the later additions) has been expertly
reconstructed by Anna Zayaruznaya (‘Quotation, Perfection’), from the three
sources listed in the Appendix under ‘39’, Cum humanum.31
2. Flos vernans has long been known from the intabulation in Robertsbridge, but
only more recently have sources of the vocal original come to light. Fragments
were identified in binding strips in OxAS56 by Andrew Wathey.32 Cristina Alís
Raurich discovered Karlsruhe82, of which one side contains the triplum, notated
in unstemmed semibreves. After the publication of Kügle’s preliminary study of
Koblenz701 (‘Vitry in the Rhineland’) the pastedowns were lifted, revealing more
music. A series of strips used as quire-​liners turned out to contain a virtually com-
plete copy of the motet, the ars nova rhythms now made explicit with notated
stems. The hitherto missing motetus Fiat intencio enables the motet Flos vernans/​
Fiat intencio to be identified with the incipit in Trém.33

28 Motez et chançons notées, partie en latin, partie en françois; see nn. 7, 10 above.
29 In 1993 and 1997. See Ch. 17 nn. 12 and 13.
30 It was recently brought to my attention that Jason Stoessel had reported the correct reading in a blog

of 2012: https://​jjs​toes​sel.blog/​2012/​01/​11/​a-​new-​comp​osit​ion-​by-​denis-​le-​grant/​. I had noticed this inde-

pendently, but after the publication of my original article.
31 The motet still lacks tenor, or tenor and contratenor. ‘Beacius’ is also mentioned in an unpublished trea-

tise in Prague along with more commonly listed triplum titles: Horyna, ‘Ein Brünner Fragment’. Central and
eastern European sources often cite motets by triplum incipit, which in the case of otherwise unknown motets
impedes identification in Trém, and would have done in the case of Beatius/​Cum humanum but for its musical
sources. See also Chs. 15 and 16.
32 Wathey, Manuscripts . . . Supplement 1 to RISM. More recently, see Kügle, ‘Die Fragmente Oxford, All

Souls 56’.
33 Kügle made images of the strips available to Cristina Alís Raurich, who has joined them up digitally to

reveal the complete motet, enabling identification of the motetus text as that in Trém. See Alís Raurich, ‘The
Flores of Flos vernalis’ (forthcoming), on which she presented in the All Souls College seminar series on 4 Mar.
2021. I am grateful to her for sharing these materials with me.
 Trémoïlle Revisited 651

3. The two sources containing Plausu querulo have been known about for some time,
but are not easily accessible or legible. Cortona1 was described as long ago as 1981
by Agostino Ziino. It contains a complete texted voice and the tenor. Ziino pro-
vided a partial transcription of the text, in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury.34
Its motetus status is confirmed by the presence of the triplum of Almifonis on the
other side of the leaf. In 1998 Giuliano Di Bacco and John Nádas reported further
on this fragment, with an improved transcription of the text of Plausu querulo,
and an improved reproduction of the offset that complements the very damaged
recto.35 They note that three out of the four pieces in Cortona1, and all five of
the motets in Paris2444, were also in Trém. A voice starting Plausu querulo in
Paris22069, f. 158r, led to expectation of another copy of the motetus.36 But apart
from the opening words, the music and text are different. The motetus of Flos/​Celsa
on the other side of that leaf (with up and down semibreve stems, and a unique
contratenor) confirms the status of this voice as the (nearly) complete triplum of
Plausu querulo, as does its higher range.37 Both sources are very hard to read, and
have not to my knowledge been deciphered meanwhile. Thanks to new photo-
graphic access, determination and ingenious manipulation, Richard Dudas has
produced the accompanying provisional transcription of Plausu querulo which he
has graciously allowed me to append to this chapter as Example 31.1. He has
exercised digital magic on the two complementary sources, and achieved good
musical sense. The verbal texts are much harder to decipher, and even Leofranc
Holford-​Strevens could only make slight improvements in the version presented
here. The final cadence notes of the three parts are gs–​a, cs–​d, e–​d. It is in per-
fect modus and tempus perfectum, with unstemmed semibreves, imperfected
breves, semibreve hockets and semibreve rests. Both sources have the tenor of
this nearly complete new motet (lacking the last few notes in Paris22069). The
tenor is unlabelled, but the jaunty rhythm suggests a tune of secular origin. With
tenor values reduced as in Example 31.2, it is comparable to the secular tenors of

Ex. 31.2 Tenor of Plausu querulo

34 Ziino, ‘Precisazioni’, with faint reproductions of the leaf and the offset on the binding. Ziino was fol-

lowing an indication by Ghisi, ‘Inno-​lauda polifonica’.

35 Di Bacco and Nádas, ‘Papal Chapels’, 84–​86 and pl. 9. Their suggestion that the text might celebrate the

fourth (fifty-​year) jubilee of Thomas’s martyrdom in 1370 is too late for a composition that can now be placed
more appropriately in the 1320s. It could date as early as the third jubilee in 1320. Peter Lefferts had informed
them of the Trém concordance. I am very grateful to John Nádas, who with characteristic generosity shared
his wonderfully legible images of the offset.
36 Paris22069 was first announced in 2009 by Everist, ‘A New Source’, with reproduction and discussion

of the two song folios. He reports on the history and the other musical contents of this disparate collection.
The two sources of the motet, known to Cuthbert and Nádas, were reported by Stoessel, ‘Revisiting “Aÿ,
mare” ’, 467 n. 8.
37 Cuthbert, ‘Monks, Manuscripts’, 122–​ 23, reports that it was independently identified by himself,
Giuliano Di Bacco and me.
652 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Examples 24.2–​24.4. There are three statements of this color, which consists of two
taleae, without diminution.
4. Thoma tibi (f. 20) is cited in ars nova treatises for simultaneous use of per-
fect and imperfect tempus in the upper parts, and for the tenors (sic, plural) to
have black notes in perfect modus and imperfect tempus, red notes conversely.
Lawrence Earp has shown that the four-​part motet on f. 79v of Paris934 meets
these criteria, and goes on to argue that this could be the lost motet. My hesitancy
about accepting this tempting suggestion rests on the absence of any reference
to Thomas (either the apostle or Thomas of Canterbury) in what survives of the
Latin motetus, the amorous French triplum (for which Richard Dudas has now
found a concordance with the incipit, Bien doit amours), and the choice of an Ave
Maria rather than a Thomas tenor; but it certainly does, mensurally, what Thoma
tibi is purported to do.38 Pending further confirmation, this might be treated as a
less secure identification.

In any case, Trém included at least two extant motets for St Thomas of Canterbury, O
dira nacio/​Mens in nequicia and Plausu querulo. I know of none for the apostle from this
period. The widespread cult in France of Thomas Becket reduces the pressure to assume
that those motets are of English origin.39 They may be, but that case needs to be argued
separately on stylistic grounds. Whether Thoma tibi was for Becket or the apostle is
unknown in the absence of more text. If the identification with the motet in Paris934
stands, it is not helped by the fragmentary texts there.
It is tempting to look for signs of grouping or ordering. There is no clear composer
ordering, though there is some bunching of Machaut motets near the beginning, three
plus two, interrupted by two non-​Machaut motets. This may not be surprising if they
were copied from one of the complete-​works manuscripts, given how relatively few of
Machaut’s motets were in circulation outside those manuscripts. If that were the case,
one could ask on what basis this scribe made his selection. Thoma tibi is tucked into a
sequence of motets (ff. 18–​23). It shared a manuscript opening with Vitry’s Rex quem
metrorum/​O canenda/​Rex regum, so it must have been short enough to fit alongside
that fairly long motet. If indeed Thoma tibi is the four-​part motet in Paris934, it shares
an Ave Maria tenor (albeit a different one) with the preceding motet, and Rex quem
metrorum shares a Rex regum tenor with the following motet. Most of the motets in
this group have at some time or other been attributed to Vitry, with varying degrees
of authority. All this may be suggestive, but there is not a sufficiently consistent pat-
tern of groupings in Trém that we should assume such groupings as there are to be
deliberate. A case can be made for suspecting Vitry’s authorship of at least some of the
motets cited in the ars nova treatises; the case for his authorship of Thoma tibi might be
strengthened by its context in this apparent or possible Vitry grouping, together with
‘similar’ pieces.
The Appendix provides an updated transcription of the listing on the first recto of
Trém. The state of completeness of concordant sources is not usually given.

38 Dudas and Earp, Four Early Ars nova Motets; presented in their seminar at All Souls College, 22

Oct. 2020.
39 See Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket.
 Appendix
Transcription of Incipits as Listed in the Trém Index, with Identifications and Sources

Because of the uncertainty about numbering by folio or by opening, marked gathering boundaries may differ by one piece or unit. Dotted lines separate scribally distinct
entries between the later additions in gatherings V and VI.
Motez -​ordenez et escriz ci apres (then, erased: selon le nombre . . . [illegible]).

Trém Incipit as in Trém Triplum Tenor Concordances Composer

no.

Gathering I
1 Bona condit40 Colla iugo Libera me Ivrea, Apt, Ca1328, Stras, Arras983, Wrocław411, Vitry?
Tarragona1, Tarragona2
text-​only MSS: Ber49, Jena105, Kremsmünster149,
Vienna3244
1 Zodiacum Apollinis In omnem terram Barc853, Barc971, Leiden2515, LoTNA, Ivrea, B. de Cluni
Pad658, SL2211, Stras, OxAS56, Tarragona2,
Vienna5094, Vienna922, Leipzig223, Brno
2 Yda capillorum Portio nature Ante thronum Chantilly, Ivrea, Leiden342A, Stras Henricus (Egidius de Pusiex
also named in Stras)
2 Hugo princeps Cum statua Magister invidie (?) Ivrea, Ca1328, Leipzig431, Jena105 (motetus text only) Vitry
3 Rosa sine culpe spina Almifonis [Tenor] Ivrea, Cortona1
3 Trop est la dolour Dame plaisans Neuma Würz41
4 Helas ou sera pris Hareu! Hareu! Obediens usque MachautA, B, C, E, G, Machaut M10
Ferrell(Vg)
4 De ma dolour Maugré mon cuer Quia amore MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg) Machaut M14
5 Se j’aim mon loyal Lasse! comment Pour quoy me bat MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg) Machaut M16

40 The complete motet is preserved on f. 1v. For further sources with text for a lost contratenor Egregius labor, see Wathey, ‘The Motets of Vitry’, 123 and 138, and Ch. 3, n. 4.
41 See Lerch-​Kalavrytinos, ‘Ars Nova-​Fragmente in Würzburg’ for three strong identifications in Würz and one doubtful suggestion (see n. 58 below).
(continued)
Trém Incipit as in Trém Triplum Tenor Concordances Composer
no.
6 Puisque pites
7 Dame d’onnour
7 Durement au cuer Amer amours Dolour meus Durham20, Ivrea, Pic
8 Ha fortune42 Qui es promesses Et non est qui MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Ivrea, Ca1328 Machaut M8
8 Faux samblans43 Amours qui ha Vidi Dominum MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Ivrea Machaut M15
9 Mens in nequicia44 O dira nacio [Tenor] unicum surviving in Trém

Gathering II
9 Se je chant mains45 [chace] Ivrea, Pic (Denis le Grant)
10 Organizanter46 Luceat laudis Stras
11 J’ai le chapelet47
11 Hareu, hareu, je la [chace] Stras
12 Post misse Post missarum [Tenor] Ivrea, Aachen
modulami[na]48
12 Biauté paree Trop plus est belle Je ne sui mie MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg) Machaut M20
13 Lugencium Petre clemens [Tenor] Ivrea, Aachen, Paris3343 (tr text), Vienna4195 Vitry
(texts only)
13 Vos leonis
14 Diex tant desir Se paour d’umble49 Concupisco Ca1328, Ivrea, Ox7 (Latin contrafactum)

42 F. 8 (9) recto contains the triplum and tenor of this motet in second position on the opening.
43 F. 8 (9) recto contains this motetus and tenor at the top of the opening.
44 Complete, and unique, f. 8v (9v).
45 Attributed by Kügle; see Ch. 17, nn. 12 and 13.
46 Although evidently on f. 14[v], Organizanter contine has a C2 clef in Coussemaker’s index of Stras, whereas Luceat laudis on f. 15r has the higher C1 and was probably the triplum. The

incipits are compatible.

47 Yoland Plumley points out (email of 19.2.2021) that several of the unidentified French incipits in the motet section are reminiscent of 13th-​c. refrains. The refrain J’ai un chapelet d’argent

et bele amie a mon talent (Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 985) appears as an inserted song or carole in La Court d’amours and in a 13th-​c. motet enté from Paris844, f. 4v.
48 The motet on this text in Ivrea is the obvious candidate because of the date and the large number of concordances between Ivrea and Trém. For the motet on the same pair of texts in OH/​

RC see Ch. 24.

49 The triplum and motetus of the English contrafactum are De veri cordis, Domine quis habitabit.
Trém Incipit as in Trém Triplum Tenor Concordances Composer
no.
14 Cum venerint Se grace n’est Ite missa est Ivrea, Tourn27, Wrocław411
15 Plausu querulo Plausu querulo Cortona1, Paris22069
15 Plains sui d’amere Helas j’ay Infelix50 Ca1328
lonetamps
16 En l’estat d’amere L’amoreuse flour [Sicut fenum arui] Durham20, Ivrea
17 [ . . . ]reo gencium

Gathering III
17 Se j’ai par la vostre
18 Garison selon Douce playsance Neuma quinti toni Ivrea Vitry
19 Nazarea que decora Zolomina zelus Ave Maria Barc853, Ivrea, Paris 2444 (catchword only)
20 Thoma tibi Paris934?
20 Rex quem metrorum O canenda vulgo Rex regum Ivrea, Fribourg260, Paris2444, Durham20 Vitry?
21 O Philippe51 Servant regem Rex regum Paris146, Paris571
21 Petre petre
22 Flos virginum52 Apta caro Alma redemptoris Ca1328, Chantilly, Durham20, Ivrea, ModA,
SL2211
23 Gratissima Vos quid Gaude gloriosa Ivrea, Ca1328, Durham20, Brussels758, Vitry
admiramini Brussels5170, Aachen, Esc10
24 Diligenter Martyrum gemma A Christo MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Ivrea Machaut M19
24 O que purificacio
25 L’autre jour53

50 Michael Scott Cuthbert reports (email of 26.2.2021) that the Infelix tenor is from within the Responsory Amicus meus. See http://​can​tus.sk/​image/​6481.
51 Usually identified, and with Besseler’s blessing, as the Fauvel motet of which O Philippe is the motetus (as ‘Ludowice’ in Paris571) and Servant regem the triplum. O Philippe Franci qui/​
O bone dux/​[Solus tenor] (Ivrea, ff. 1v–​2) would be another eligible candidate only if motetus and triplum have been reversed for this entry. Moreover, if there really were four pieces on this
opening, some must have been shorter or incompletely presented.
52 This is surely the widely disseminated motet whose triplum is Apta caro. It is a lost codex listed as item 84 in a 1426 inventory of the former ducal library in Pavia: Milan, Biblioteca

Nazionale Braidense, MS AD XV 18.4, item 84. RISM BIV2 lists another motet in Ca1328 with these words for its motetus incipit, but this is in fact the motet Floret cum vana/​Florens vigor in
Br19606 whose triplum an adapted prose is also in Paris146. See Ch. 6.
53 Yolanda Plumley (email of 19.2.2021) wonders if this could be a 13th-​c. motet, either L’autre jour par un matin in Bamberg, f. 7r–​v, or L’autre jour me chevauchoie in Mo, no. 313.

(continued)
Trém Incipit as in Trém Triplum Tenor Concordances Composer
no.

Gathering IV
25 Fiat intencio Flos vernalis Koblenz701, Karlsruhe82, OxAS56, Robertsbridge
26 Cum vix Degentis vita Vera pudicitia Barc971, Brussels758, Chantilly, Nuremberg9,
Stras, Yox
26 Prosapie
27 Ve constat
28 De tous les biens Li enseignement Ecce tu pulchra Fribourg260, Ivrea wrongly ascribed to
Machaut in Fribourg260
28 Jure quod in opere Scariotis geniture Supreme matris Paris146
(recte, opera)
29 Quant la pree
31 Kyri sponse54
32 Inviolant [=​ Felix virgo Ad te suspiramus MachautA, B, G, Ferrell(Vg) Machaut M23
Inviolata?]55
31 O livor Inter amenitatis Revertenti Paris146, YorkN3 (both without motetus), Tr87
30 O admirabile
3356 Ma dolour Fortune, mere à Tenor Ca1328, Ivrea, Pic57

54 This could be a troped Kyrie; but it lies within the original compilation, and the four other Mass movements are all among the later additions.
55 Number changed from 31. Schrade argues that this reference is not to the Machaut motet.
56 Number changed from 32.
57 A lost copy from a 1487 inventory of the dukes of Burgundy is reported by Kirkman, The Cultural Life, 245.
Trém Incipit as in Trém Triplum Tenor Concordances Composer
no.
motets, column 2
Gatherings V and VI
34 O livoris Fons tocius Fera pessima MachautA, B, C, E, G, Machaut M9
Ferrell(Vg)
35 Et se je serai li secons Je comence Soulés viex Ivrea, McV, Ca1328
35 Adieu ma dame58
36 Pater ave

39 Cum humanum Beatius se servans [Tenor] Paris2444, Würz, Vienna123a

38 Karissimi59
39 Decens carmen In virtute Clamor meus Ivrea, Paris2444

34 In arboris Tuba sacre fidei Virgo sum Ivrea Vitry?

40 Humblement [chace] Ivrea; texted O pia Maria, Mu716, Vienna5094; texted
Ju ich iag Vienna2856, Michaelbeuren10, Vat1260
(text only)
41 Celsa cedrus Flos ortus Quam magnus Ca1328, Ivrea, Paris2444, Paris22069, SL2211,
Würz, Darmstadt521 (texts only)

33 O crux preciosa

36 Et in terra60
37 Patrem (Denis le Grant?)
omnipotentem ‘denis’ precedes ‘Patrem’ in a
different hand

58 Lerch-​Kalavrytinos, ‘Ars Nova-​Fragmente in Würzburg’, offers this as a possible motetus of Par maintes fois/​Ave Maria in Würz and Ca1328, but solely on grounds of the subject matter,

parting from the lady. See also Ch. 15 n. 40.

59 A remote candidate not hitherto proposed is Zacar’s Latin ballade Summite carissimi, which can hardly be so early.
60 This item and the two following are in a script more different than most, but they could still be by the same scribe. Note the low top and long descender of ‘f ’.

(continued)
Trém Incipit as in Trém Triplum Tenor Concordances Composer
no.
41 Deo per
confidenciam
42 Tresdouz espoir L’ardure qu’endure Ego rogavi Deum Chantilly
43 Qui dolereux61 Mon chant en Tristis est anima Durham20, Ivrea

44 Parfondement Pura, placens [Tenor] Ox762

44 Patrem
omnipotentem
45 Patrem Apt, Barc971, Civ98, Ivrea, Ca1328, Leiden2515, Steve Sort
omnipotentem Utrecht37, Fleischer, Toul94, Pad14, Solsona109, ‘sortes’ precedes ‘Patrem’ in a
Vienna123a different hand

46 Loyelon loielete
46 Ja couars n’ara63
47 Rex beatus Se cuers ioians Ave Br19606, McV, Paris146

46 Dessus une fontenelle

48 Pastoribus
47 Mulierum

49 Nova stella

61 A number of compositions quote texts composed in 1339 by Jehan de Le Mote, of which this is the only motet; this suggests it dates from after c. 1340. Plumley, Grafted Song, 231–​39 and

table 6.2. See her table 6.5 for quotations from Le Mote shared between this triplum and the ballade Ne celle amour in Ca1328. The motet is cited as an example of tempus perfectum, major
prolation in the Compendium totius artis motetorum in Paris14741, in Wolf, ‘Ein anonymer Musiktraktat’, and also in Wrocław16.
62 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 184, 222 n. 1: this piece was the first in a now-​lost manuscript.
63 Cited as a refrain (Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 898) in the Tournai de Chauvency and other texts from before c. 1300.
Balades et rondeaus ci apres escriz par le nombre64

Trém f. no. Title as in Trém Song type65 Concordances Composers

18 Dame sans per B Reina
19 Iste confessor66 hymn Apt, Ber190, Ca29, Civ57, Paris196, Tr87
19 Phiton le merveilleux B MachautA, E, G Machaut B38
21 De petit peu B MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Chantilly, Ca1328, Ghent3360, Machaut B1867
Fp26, Paris568, ModA, Pra9, SL2211, Nuremberg9a, Brescia5
21 De fortune B MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Morgan396, Reina, Chantilly, Machaut B23
Stras, SL2211
22 De narcisus B Autun152, Chantilly, Paris568, Reina, SL2211, Bergamo589, Franciscus
Bud298
10 Amis dont ton vis R GR219, Ivrea, Paris568, Pra9, Stras (a second version not copied by Molins
Coussemaker), Cortona1 (with a unique contratenor)
10 De tous les biens68 B? Ox213 (?)
13 De ce que fol B Ca1328, Chantilly, Faenza, Gent3360, Fp26, McV, Mu15611, Molins
Paris568, Reina, Stras,69 Faenza
13 De toutes flours B MachautA, B, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Morgan396, Reina, Paris568, Machaut B31
Fp26, ModA, Stras, Faenza
16 En amer B MachautA, B, C, E, G, K, Ferrell(Vg), Pepys1594, Reina, Paris568, Machaut B41
Fp26, Kassel1
27 Revien espoir R Ca1328, Stras, Utrecht37; text in Philadelphia15
Espoir me fuit70

64 Wright lists all unidentified works from the Ballades and rondeaux column as ballades.
65 B(allade), R(ondeau), V(irelai).
66 It may be premature to assume that this must be the hymn, rather than a rondeau with a liturgical text or incipit; cf. Quicunques vuet. The hymn Iste confessor is, however, very widely disseminated.
Its presence in Ca1328, a motet manuscript with many Trém concordances, a few added ballades, some Mass Ordinary movements, and no other hymns, encourages the present identification.
67 B18, B23 and B31 are all named within the treatise in Philadelphia614, f. 207r.
68 David Fallows (A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs) believes that the ballade of this name in Ox213 must remain a strong candidate despite the later date of that manuscript, where it appears

in fascicle VII in company with some of the oldest pieces in the manuscript, including pieces concordant with Ca1328.
69 ‘De ce que fol pense’ is presented on a scroll in an early 15th-​c. tapestry from Arras in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Reproduced in Wangermée, Flemish Music, pl. 38. I thank

Lawrence Earp for reminding me of this.

70 Both incipits are listed, bracketed together as 27.

(continued)
Trém f. no. Title as in Trém Song type65 Concordances Composers
27 Dame de qui B MachautA, B, C, E, F, J, K, Ferrell(Vg), Reina, Pepys1594 Machaut B42
28 A maint biau jeu
29 Merci ou mort B Reina, Utrecht37
29 Phiton le merveilleux71 B (duplicate: see above, Trém index number 19) Machaut
30 He doux regars V Ca1328
30 Honte paour B MachautA, B, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Fp26, Faenza, SL2211 Machaut B25
31 Jour a jour la vie R Faenza (twice), Fp26, Lo36, Paris586, contrafacta in MuEm,
Reina, Stras, WolkA and WolkB
31 Celle dont ma joye B Stras
32 Tant doucement R MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Morgan396, Pepys1594. An Machaut R9
apparently different virelai starting with these words is in Ca1328
32 J’ai grant desespoir B Reina, Faenza, SL2211, Stras

25 En ma dolour
25 Danger refus
23 Se Lancelot B Gent3360
37 Quicunques vuet R Ca1328, Fp26, Ivrea, Paris568
41 Biaute qui toutes B MachautA, B, C, E, G, Ferrell(Vg), Utrecht37 Machaut B4
37 Cuers qui se sent
37 Laissiez parler Turin1072 (text only)
43 A celui dont sui ser[viteur]
45 Caveus
45 Comme le cerf B Reina
48 Cuer gai
37 Ma dame m’a conge B Chantilly
45 Fuiez de moi B Reina, Pra9, Stras, Civ98, Melk391; contrafacta in Todi, WolkA and WolkB Alain

71 This is also listed under 19. It is either the only repeated item, or it reflects an indexing error confusing the numerals xix and xxix.
72 Laissiés parler chascun en son droit is listed in the text manuscript Turin10, together with other Machaut song identifications in Trém: Honte paour, De petit peu, Merci ou mort. Identified
in Plumley, ‘Crossing Borderlines’, 18.
 32
Some Aspects of the Cyprus Manuscript
and its Motets

Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria J.II.9 (here, Cyprus) is a luxuriously produced

and illuminated parchment manuscript of monumental scope, containing monophonic
plainsong Offices followed by no fewer than 228 polyphonic compositions—​mass
settings, thirty-​three Latin and eight French double-​texted motets, and French ballades,
rondeaux and virelais.1 Although its 158 folios were separated and distorted in the
Turin library fire of 1904, the musical contents survive more or less intact. With original
dimensions of 390 × 283 mm, its large format is comparable to Chantilly. An inventory
of the contents was first published by Heinrich Besseler, followed by an excellent com-
plete edition of the polyphony and contextual studies by Richard Hoppin.2 The man-
uscript has always held an isolated and puzzling position in that it bears no composer
attributions. Its most remarkable feature is a complete lack of musical concordances
with the mainland repertories in which its stylistic roots can be detected. Its music
seems to have developed in isolation, with no interchange in either direction.
The plainsong Offices for St Hilarion and St Anne, together with several of the
motet texts, led Besseler to infer the repertory’s indisputable connections to Cyprus,
and to conclude that the manuscript was produced there for the (Bourbon–​)Lusignan
court and brought to Chambéry in Savoy in preparation for the marriage in 1434 of
Anne (1419?–​1462), daughter of King Janus and Queen Charlotte, to Louis, Count of
Geneva and son of Amadeus VIII of Savoy, whence it eventually came to Turin, along
with other contents of the Savoy ducal library.3 It has been widely accepted that the
manuscript can be positively identified with an entry in a Chambéry inventory of 1498,
which cites the opening words on the verso of the front flyleaf: ‘ung livre de parchemin
à grant volume, escript à la main en prose, et glosé en latin à une histoire, commençant
Johannes episcopus servus servorum Dei etc.’.4 Thus begins the 1413 authorisation from
Pope John XXIII for the rhymed office for St Hilarion. But at a conference in Turin 30
September–​1 October 2021, Alessandro Vitale-​Brovarone argued convincingly against
this identification, on grounds that this opening formula was common to numerous
papal documents, that the contents of the manuscript neither are in prose nor have

1 Available in facsimile as Il codice J.II.9 della Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino. In this chapter,

the Cyprus motets will be referred to by number as M1, M7, etc. Elsewhere in this book (especially Part III), M
numbers are used to refer to motets by Machaut. The present adaptation of Bent, ‘Some Aspects of the Motets
in the Cyprus Manuscript’, is published with permission from the American Institute of Musicology.
2 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 209–​17; CMM 21 (The Cypriot-​French Repertory, ed. Hoppin); published in fac-

simile as Il codice J.II.9. I have been unable to consult Richard H. Hoppin, ‘The Motets of the Early Fifteenth-​
Century Manuscript J.II.9. in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952), but
see Hoppin, ‘The Cypriot-​French Repertory’.
3 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 210–​11; on Anne, see below, n. 10.
4 Giaccaria, ‘Il codice franco-​cipriota’, 12.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages. Margaret Bent, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/so/9780190063771.003.0033
662 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

Latin glosses, and that music, its dominant feature, is not mentioned. Besseler’s own
description of the codex had suggested a scribal link to Italy,5 but Hoppin continued to
defend not only the repertory’s strong roots in French musical culture before and after
1400, but its compilation in Cyprus between c. 1413 and 1420.6 He suggested that the
likeliest time for completion was before the death of Charlotte in 1422, rather than in
the troubled times which followed; in a Muslim invasion of 1426, Janus was captured
and his palace destroyed.7
King Janus of Cyprus (1375–​1432) was born in Genoa in 1375 and was named after
the mythical founder of that city, whose two faces, in this case, look one towards the
sea, the other towards the land. The child was left there as a hostage from 1382 to 1392
when his father King James I returned to Cyprus. Janus’s first wife, Anglesia, was a
daughter of Bernabò Visconti of Milan; she had not provided him with heirs, and the
marriage was annulled between 1407 and 1409. In 1409 he married his second wife, by
proxy: Charlotte of Bourbon (1388–​1422),8 Anne’s mother. She arrived in Cyprus in
1411, two years before the 1413 terminus post quem for work on the manuscript. The
royal pair are portrayed in frescoes in the exquisite little Lusignan royal chapel of Ayia
Ekaterina at Pyrga, built for them in 1421, the year before Charlotte’s death.

Queen Charlotte’s Musicians and Anne’s Savoy Wedding

The contemporary chronicle of Leontios Makhairas reports some of the names of those
who accompanied Charlotte in 1411 when she sailed from Venice to Cyprus.9 Both
sources of the chronicle have a lacuna; only nineteen names of her sixty-​strong entou-
rage survive. These include Jean Canel and Gillet Veliout.10 Hoppin and subsequent
scholars assume that Gillet Veliout was indeed Gilet Velut, composer of four songs, two
mass movements and two motets in the Veneto manuscripts Ox213 and Q15.11 None of
those compositions is in Cyprus. Karl Kügle further identified Jean Canel (or Kanelle)
as Jean Hanelle who, like Velut, was a petit vicaire at Cambrai during the year 24 June
1410–​24 June 1411: both had overlapped there with Du Fay’s service as a choirboy,
1409–​12.12 Hanelle would meet Du Fay again in Savoy in 1434, when documents

5 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 211.

6 One of very few hints of Cypriot musical activity apart from Cyprus is a Kyrie in Apt (f. 4v) headed
‘Chipre’ in the position where a composer’s name might be expected.
7 Hoppin, ‘The Cypriot-​French Repertory’, 93.
8 Charlotte was a daughter of John I, Count of La Marche and Catherine de Vendôme.
9 Makhairas, Recital concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus. Wikipedia’s claim that ‘Charlotte’s lavish ret-

inue . . . included many musicians’ seems to be based on supposition rather than documentation.
10 It continues by reporting that he (presumably Verniet) committed some offence and was

excommunicated; that he went to the pope and was released from the excommunication and came back to
her company. It is not clear whether a reference to Gillet the secretary is a different person from Velliout.
The chronicle does not mention Anglesia. It ends with the death of Janus and a brief section on King John.
Makhairas, Recital, 625. The date of Anne’s birth is given as 24 Sept. 1415 or 1418—​the two manuscripts
disagree—​but it makes no mention of her marriage. Collenberg, ‘Les Lusignan’, reports that Anne was
younger than Jean, therefore that she must have been born in 1419 rather than 1418, when John’s birth is re-
corded. In any case, they were both minors at the time, respectively, of her marriage and his succession.
11 Summe/​Summa is also in Tr87. Velut’s surviving works are in CMM 11/​2.
12 Kügle, ‘Repertory’. For a comprehensive listing of Cambrai musical personnel at this period, see

Planchart, Du Fay, appendices 1 and 2. For Hanelle see pp. 737–​38, where he was documented in Cambrai as
from Tournai, whereas Collenberg, ‘Le Royaume et l’église de Chypre’, cites him from Vatican documents as a
cleric from Thérouanne.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 663

describe him as singer (cantor) of the king of Cyprus, and in 1436 as ‘mestre de chappelle
du Roy de chippres’.13 Jean Hanelle’s brother was the better-​known Mathieu Hanelle, a
slightly older contemporary of Du Fay at Cambrai, likewise multiply beneficed, and a
papal singer.14 Charlotte’s chapel thus appears to have been recruited at least in part
from Cambrai; ten per cent of the surviving names are Cambrai musicians. In any case,
it is clear that she had fostered a flowering of French culture at the Lusignan court until
her death in 1422, and was evidently a patron of the musicians and musical culture she
brought with her. The absent forty-​one names may well have included more musicians
and other clues that might help to explain the balance of French and Italian influences
discernible in the manuscript.
A further document attests the continuing presence of Jean Hanelle in Cyprus: a
papal letter of 4 August 1428 from Martin V appoints him to the scribendaria of Nicosia
cathedral. He is there described as a ‘clericus coniugatus’.15 This attestation of his scribal
as well as musical ability invites speculation as to whether he was one of the scribes of
the manuscript, particularly the northern text scribe who was also the music scribe who
copied all the polyphony.16
Velut is no longer documented in the 1430s, indeed not after 1411. Kügle interprets
this silence to suggest that he returned to mainland Europe after a few years, in time to
contribute a few songs and motets to Veneto manuscripts; however, he did not need to
return to Europe to do so, as all his music in those sources, like that of Carmen, Cesaris
and Tapissier (not documented after 1417), could have been written in the first decade
of the fifteenth century, and transmitted to Italy from the north during the Council
of Constance, or even in Venice before Charlotte’s entourage set sail. Velut may have
died before the 1430s.17 Jean Hanelle, however, retained an attachment to the Lusignan
court, and although by then in Savoy, is described as ‘cantor regis chippri’ in 1434 and
as the king’s mestre de chappelle in 1436. By then the new king was John II, Anne’s
brother. Documented continuity over twenty-​five years in the career of this musician

13 Kügle, ‘Glorious Sounds’, appendix B. Planchart (Du Fay, 737–​38) gives the sources of the payment for

16 Aug. 1434 as TAS (=​Turin, Archivio di Stato), Inventario 16, Reg. 79, f. 473v: [16 August 1434, Thonon]
‘Libravit dicta die Hannelle cantori regis chippri donato per dominum sibi facto videlicet . . .. . . x ducatos auri
ad xx’; and for November 1436 (usually cited as 16/​17th, by Planchart as the 14th) as TAS, Inventario 16, Reg.
81, f. 207v. They were first reported by Bradley, ‘Musical Life and Culture at Savoy’, 535.
14 Both Jehan and Mathieu Hanelle have multiple entries in Planchart, Du Fay, including pp. 16–​17, 58–​59,

and appendices 1 and 2. See also Kügle, ‘Repertory’ and Kügle, ‘Glorious Sounds’.
15 AAV Reg. Lat. 278, ff. 299v–​300. Collenberg, ‘Le Royaume et l’église de Chypre’, 697 (139). Planchart,

‘Early Career’, 357, citing the same AAV document, just says he is ‘listed as a scribe’. Planchart, Du Fay, 737–​
38, reports (AAV, RS 228, f. 101r) that Jean Hanelle was married and in the service of the king of Cyprus.
Likewise married were Renaud Liebert and Richard de Loqueville, also petits vicaires at Cambrai, who each
served as magister puerorum. Widaman, Wathey and Leech-​Wilkinson (‘The Structure’) identify two ex-
pert text scribes; one Italian, one French, and a third scribe with Italian and French features who is also the
main music scribe. Kügle’s view of the scribes (set out in Il codice J.II.9, 21–​39) differs from that of Widaman,
Wathey and Leech-​Wilkinson; his analysis makes it easier to suggest that the music scribe and the text scribe
at least of the vernacular works was a northerner, possibly Hanelle.
16 Kügle, ‘Glorious Sounds’, 643: ‘Small corrections and amendments throughout the manuscript in what

appears to be a single corrector’s hand suggest that the Italians were working under the supervision of one
principal scribe whose main contributions include all text and music of Fascicle V and much of Fascicle IV
as well as, above all, the musical notation of all the polyphony. This hand was clearly northern-​trained, as is
visible from its angular ductus, its extended serifs, and the comparatively narrow and compressed spacing of
the letters within a given word along the vertical axis.’ The added mass cycle (ff. 139v–​141v), without Agnus,
is in a different hand, identified as probably Savoyard by both Strohm (‘European Politics’) and Kügle (‘Some
Notes’).
17 The surviving works of Carmen, Cesaris and Tapissier are in CMM 11/​1.
664 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

is significant. Hoppin suggested that the repertory may have been largely the work of
musicians Charlotte had brought with her to Cyprus: Velut is the only such musician
who may be identifiable with a known composer, though neither of his two known
motets, despite some similarities, closely fits the template of most of the Cyprus motets.
Velut’s eight ascribed works (rondeaux, mass movements and motets, all but one unique
to Ox213 or Q15) show considerable variety, so while it is not inconceivable that he
went on to cultivate different styles, it is perhaps puzzling that his earlier works are not
included in the new compilation. Kügle adds the candidacy of Jean Hanelle as a pos-
sible composer. Indeed it is very likely that he was also a composer, though no music is
ascribed to him, and that either or both of Velut and Hanelle may be hidden amongst
the entirely anonymous composers, whose musical style within each genre is more ho-
mogeneous than the known works by Cesaris, Carmen, Tapissier and Velut. In any case,
it is clear that Charlotte fostered a flowering of French culture at the Lusignan court
until her death in 1422. While there is no documentation of an Italian ingredient in the
largely French culture she took with her, the internal evidence of this manuscript may
attest it.

A Cypriot Repertory: A Manuscript for Anne

All considerations point to a repertory composed in and for Cyprus, in isolation from
mainland developments, by highly skilled composers formed or active in the first
decade of the fifteenth century. The repertory could certainly represent a continua-
tion of Velut’s and Hanelle’s (otherwise undocumented) composing careers in isolation
on Cyprus, and perhaps that of other unknown composers in Charlotte’s retinue. The
marriage of her daughter Anne to a prince of Savoy had been planned from 9 August
1431, by which time she had attained the twelve years necessary for such arrangements
to be made. The first intended consort was Amadeus, son and heir of Amadeus VIII,
the future antipope Felix V, but he died in August 1431 aged 19, and was replaced by
his brother Louis. As his duchess, in addition to bearing nineteen (or eighteen) chil-
dren, Anne was culturally active, nostalgic for her homeland of Cyprus, and a lavish
entertainer of Cypriot visitors. Her father King Janus had died in 1432, when plans for
Anne’s Savoy wedding were already in place. He was succeeded by her brother John
(born 16 May 1418), who may have cared less about music than Anne; it seems that
John II retained (at least nominally) the chapel personnel of his parents, and allowed
Hanelle to leave with Anne. He had, however, declined to pay the full dowry agreed for
her.18 If she had brought with her, together with Hanelle, an expensive and explicitly
Cypriot music manuscript, this could well have been part of the show the teenage bride
provided, along with other luxury goods. The period preceding her wedding seems the
likeliest time for the compilation of a splendid manuscript containing the accumulated
compositions of the Cypriot court composers from the 1410s onwards. It also contained
specifically Cypriot chant, notably for St Hilarion, a Cypriot saint and St Anne, the

18 Kügle, ‘Glorious Sounds’, 645 n. 24. Collenberg, ‘Le Royaume et l’église de Chypre’, reports of John II

(1418–​58) that he was obese, suffered from elephantism, was weak-​minded and effeminate; that his first wife
Medea died 1440, and that his second wife Helene Palaeologue was a daughter of Cleophe Malatesta, a cousin
of Martin V known to us from Du Fay’s motet in her honour.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 665

namesake of the bride, both of whose offices are headed by miniatures of those saints,
the only historiated initials in the manuscript. Although the period preceding her wed-
ding seems a likely time for the compilation, repeated severe Ottoman attacks from the
mid-​1420s must have curtailed cultural enterprises in Cyprus.
A conference in Paphos in 1992 afforded an opportunity to reassess this large but iso-
lated and under-​studied repertory.19 There was general agreement that the repertory was
composed and gradually accumulated in Cyprus from the 1410s until it accompanied
Anne on her marriage journey in late 1433, arriving in Savoy on 1 January 1434,20 but
less consensus among contributors to the volume resulting from that conference as to
when and where the manuscript itself was prepared. Hoppin had declared the repertory
to be entirely French. Kügle agreed, calling it ‘the only source of the early fifteenth cen-
tury housing an exclusively French or French-​derived repertory’.21 However, he raised
the possibility that the unique manuscript containing this repertory was copied not in
Cyprus but in Savoy or northern Italy as late as the mid-​1430s; Giulio Cattin’s essay in
the same volume confirmed Besseler’s observation that the main scripts are all Italian
rotunda, while the French vernacular texts of section IV and the final six French motets
are in the hands of professional French scribes.22 However, the presence of an Italian
scribe need not force the conclusion that the manuscript was copied and illuminated in
Italy: Cyprus had constant contact with Venice through trade and pilgrimage, and the
court was quite cosmopolitan. King Janus, as noted above, spent his childhood and ado-
lescence in Genoa, and his first wife was a Visconti; this provides a ready explanation for
continuing Italian as well as French contacts.23
Despite Kügle’s proposed copying date as late as the mid-​1430s, his cited art-​
historical authorities suggested an earlier dating of the decoration, in the years around
1425, by Italian artists, and that the miniature of St Hilarion on f. 1 was more archaic
in style, which could in principle have placed the manuscript in Charlotte’s lifetime.24
There seems to be little trace of Cypriot book illumination at this period, though, again,
foreigners were present at the Lusignan court. What is at stake is where and when the
music was assembled and copied in the manuscript that has come down to us.

The Motets: Subjects and Groupings

The forty-​one motets in the Cyprus manuscript, as outliers, have often been omitted
from stylistic and statistical surveys of motets in general, although they constitute

19 Günther and Finscher (eds.), The Cypriot-​French Repertory.

20 Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 175; ‘Glorious Sounds’, 641.
21 Hoppin, ‘The Cypriot-​French Repertory’; Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 151.
22 Cattin, ‘The Texts of the Offices’, 268–​89, also raises the possibility of Italian compilation; see also
Widaman, Wathey, Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Structure’.
23 Clément et al., Poésie et musique, includes valuable chapters on the historical context at the court of

Cyprus, which reached me too late to be taken into account here. Especially relevant to Italian contacts are
Gilles Grivaud, ‘Résonances humanistes à la cour de Nicosie (1411–​1423)’, 27–​39 and Clémence Revest,
‘La rhétorique humaniste au service des élites chypriotes dans l’Italie septentrionale de la première moitié
du XVe siècle’, 41–​50. Interesting insights on some motets are in Fañch Thoraval, ‘Dévotion, liturgie,
performativité: “religion royale” et “géographie religieuse” dans les motets du manuscrit Turin J.II.9 et les
offices du Saint-​Sépulcre’, 145–​66.
24 Il codice J.II.9, 33.
666 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

a significant proportion of the surviving motets of the period. The total absence of
composers’ names and of links through concordances with other repertories have
conspired to leave them with the appearance of a self-​contained repertory, perhaps
influenced by but not seminal to other European collections. The Paphos conference
provided a welcome opportunity to redress in this case a general neglect of such isolated
and anonymous repertories; other conferences have occurred meanwhile. Here follows
an outline of the motet corpus, both its stylistic and technical features and the scripts in
which it was copied. Observations and emphases are added to Hoppin’s published ac-
count and editorial commentary; subsequent observations by Kügle are incorporated,
some of which overlap with my own.25
The motets comprise section III, made up of quinternions VII–​X. The thirty-​three
Latin motets are M1–​18, M20–​34, the eight French motets are M19, M35–​41. M8 and
M15 are dedicated to St John the Baptist, M14 and M32 to St Katherine, a saint much
honoured in Cyprus. There are other direct references to Cyprus in the motet texts. In
M7 the word Engadi appears at the end of cantus II; Hoppin’s critical commentary re-
ported that a medieval tradition wrongly placed the biblical Engaddi in Cyprus, based
on Song of Songs 1: 13: ‘Botrus Cypri dilectus meus mihi in vineis Engaddi’; ‘botrus
cypri’ refers to a cluster of cypresses, and Engaddi is a valley in Israel near the Dead Sea,
with several biblical references. In addition to John the Baptist, M8 refers to Janus as
King of Jerusalem, Armenia and Cyprus, coinciding with a melisma on Janum in cantus
II.26 Hoppin’s commentary reported that the Macarius of cantus I may be a synonym for
St Denis, and refer to a Greek or Hellenised Denis (Dionysius Ionicus) ‘qui appellatur
Macarius’. Kügle earlier argued that this further supports an association with Paris and
the French royal family.27 M17 is for the Cypriot saint Hilarion, and may celebrate the
inauguration of his rhymed office, copied at the beginning of the manuscript, probably
datable to St Hilarion’s day, 21 October 1414; Janus and Cyprus are named in the texts.
Hoppin enumerated these Cypriot references; none is precisely datable, though the two
John the Baptist motets, M8 Gemma florens/​Hec est dies and M15, Hunc/​Precursoris,
could celebrate the birth of Janus’s son John, the future king.
None of the motets can be described as doctrinal or ceremonial. Over half the texts
celebrate Christ or feasts of the Christian year, or the Virgin Mary, to whom seven Latin
and six French motets are dedicated. The only motets on entirely secular themes, M39
and M40, both contained on ff. 95v–​96, have cantus I texts about courtly love that have
been partly erased, perhaps in preparation for sacred contrafaction.28 All other French
texts honour the Virgin Mary; M3 and M4 form an Ave Maria pair. M4 has both an
acrostic and rhyme. M3 also has acrostics, not noted by Hoppin; the first letter(s) of
each verse yield in cantus I Ave Maria and in cantus II Gratia plena. M18 is a Sanctus

25 Hoppin, ‘Cypriot-​French Repertory’, and CMM 21/​2. See also Kügle, ‘Repertory’ and Kügle, ‘Glorious

Sounds’.
26 Given the equality or near-​equality in text, range and activity of the upper parts, they are here referred to

as cantus I and II rather than triplum and motetus.

27 Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 162–​ 67, offers further amplification to some of these associations and possible
datings.
28 Anne Walters Robertson presented a paper at the Turin conference, 2021, to be published as ‘Two French

Secular Motets in the Cyprus Codex and a New Composer from Cyprus’. I am grateful to her for sharing
her findings in advance of publication, which also include the discovery of ‘Johannes Gallioctus’ from the
kingdom of Cyprus as the composer of a ‘new mass’ in 1453. This could add his candidacy to that of Velut and
Hanelle as composers in the service of Charlotte and/​or Anne and potential contributors to Cyprus.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 667

substitute, and M33 and M34 are Deo gratias substitutes, each with an acrostic of Deo
gratias in both texts (in the case of M34, Deo gratias Amen).29 They close the sequence of
Latin motets M1–​34, which is interrupted only by the French motet M19.
Some approximate groupings by texts or subject can be detected, though the
boundaries are not consistent.30 The first and largest group is built mainly around some
feasts of the Temporale (mostly M1–​7), the Virgin Mary and other saints (mostly M8–​
21, ending with M22 for the Transfiguration); these are not in strict liturgical order,
and include the isolated French-​texted M19.31 The clearest grouping consists of M23–​
30, which form a cycle of the eight Advent ‘O’ antiphons (within Kügle’s second cycle
de tempore), followed by M31 for the Nativity, M32 for St Katherine, and closing with
the last two Latin motets, the two Deo gratias settings M33–​34. These are followed by
French-​texted motets for the Virgin and the two secular motets just mentioned.
Each section of the manuscript shows some script differences unique to that section;
these have been analysed in a co-​authored study.32 The texts of the Latin motets and
two of the French motets are assigned to the main text scribe E, but the last six French
motets (from f. 92v) are adjudged additions by scribe F, who together with scribe D is
responsible for later additions which incorporate more French elements. The authors
believe that, despite some superficial differences, the text hands identified as A, B, C, E
are the work of a single scribe writing an Italian rotunda script, and working under dif-
ferent constraints of spacing. Sections IV and V, containing vernacular French formes
fixes, are texted by two hands, the first a professional French scribe (G), the other (later)
possibly Savoyard (H), writing a script which combines French and Italian elements,
which could support Reinhard Strohm’s suggestion that later additions (especially the
mass cycle) were made in Savoy.33 Text scribe H is also proposed as the single music
scribe, responsible for sections I–​V; he may also be the composer of some of the addi-
tional pieces.34

Musical Features

The motets are listed in the Appendix. All are a4, for two texted cantus parts, tenor
and contratenor, except M11, M12, M14, M16, which are a3 without contratenor. In all
cases, the trio of two cantus parts and tenor makes self-​contained grammatical sense,
and is therefore primary.35 Without exception, the contratenors are contrapuntally

29 Deo gratias motets in the French tradition are Se grace/​Cum venerint, the Ite missa est motet of the Mass

of Tournai, and Post missarum/​Post misse in Ivrea. A pair of adjacent Deo gratias motets conclude both the
Old Hall manuscript and its younger sibling, a fragmentary Royal Choirbook. See EECM 62, introduction,
and Chs. 24 and 25. These two motets have less strict end-​rhyme.
30 Also tabulated by Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 158–​59. There is some overlap of statements about the motets with

mine. For new observations see ibid., 161–​68.

31 Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 158, table I, divides this cycle into feasts de tempore, a cycle de Sanctis and a second

cycle de tempore. However, there are feasts of the BVM in both the first two series.
32 Widaman, Wathey, Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Structure’; also Kügle, ‘Some Notes’.
33 Strohm, ‘European Politics’, 317. Strohm presented a new paper on the mass cycle at the Turin confer-

ence, 2021, to be published as ‘The earliest cantus firmus Mass? A challenge to historiography in the Turin
Manuscript J.II.9’.
34 Il codice J.II.9, ed. Kügle, 29–​31, offers correctives to Hoppin’s scribal designations, but apparently
without taking Wathey, Widaman, Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Structure’ into account.
35 I have made the case in Ch. 29 that such three-​part conceptions are still dyadically based.
668 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

inessential, often causing dissonance; they are consequently expendable, their function
secondary, even when they go below the tenor. There are no solus tenor parts; those
known elsewhere are confined to cases where the contratenor contributes with the tenor
to essential contrapuntal underpinnings. That is not the case here, so it is not surprising
that solus tenors are absent from this largely four-​part repertory.36
More than half of the motets follow a simple formal template. Motets 1–​5, 19–​30,
32–​39 and 41 all have a single tenor color statement, divided into two or three taleae,
complete isorhythm in the upper parts, and no tenor diminution. The cycle M6–​
18 includes all the exceptions: motets that have no isorhythm (M9), no upper-​part
isorhythm (M12 and M16), or only partial upper-​part isorhythm (the remainder), the
four three-​part motets (M11, M12, M14, M16), and all but two of the musical forms
that do not conform to the above template. Those non-​standard forms are M7, with
two (undiminished) color statements, and motets 8, 12, 14 and 18 with various kinds
of tenor reduction. Only two motets outside this group (M31 and M40) have tenor
diminution. It may be significant that the only French-​texted motet that interrupts
the Latin sequence is M19, immediately following the M6–​18 group. M31 is a Nativity
motet following the Advent cycle, and M40 may have ended the originally planned
motet group. So at least two considerations may have been in balance here, on one
hand the creation of loose liturgical groupings, and on the other, considerations of
musical technique, with pieces distinct by language or technique set at the boundaries
of these groups.
Both the tenor melody and the upper-​voice texts of M1 are based on the sequence
Victime paschali laudes. M1 was apparently copied later than the texts of M2–​35 (though
by the same scribe), and may have been added as a short motet to fill the otherwise
blank recto at the beginning of the motet section, gatherings VII–​X. (In all other cases
of short motets, two are copied across the same opening rather than occupying a single
page each: M33 and 34, M39 and 40.) Only two other motets, M12 and M16 (two of
the four three-​part motets), have tenors labelled for chant, both as Alleluyas. The M16
Alleluya tenor is closer to the version of GR than that of M12. Other tenor incipits (all
unlabelled) could be chant-​related, but none has been identified. Indeed, it seems that
Hoppin was right to declare that the remaining tenors were free accompaniments—​
composed expressly for their motets. They were added to the paired upper parts, which
anticipate the provision of tenor support by leaving some unsupported fourths for it to
underpin, as in the Italian motets of Ciconia.
Most motets have one statement of a single color melody; only M7 has two color
statements without reduction. Only six other motets have any repetition of the tenor
color, M8, M12, M14, M18, M31 and M40, all with some kind of reduction for the re-
peated tenor colores. In M8 and M18 the repeat is written out, with red notation for
the diminution in M8. In M12, M14, M31, M40 the tenor is accompanied by a verbal
instruction, and (except for M31) by repeat signs. The term diminution is not used; the

36 On the Solus tenor, see Bent, Counterpoint, 38–​46 and Chs. 1 and 8 above. The motets of Carmen,

Cesaris, Tapissier and Velut all have extensive rhythmic replication in all parts between three or more sections
or between pairs of taleae. Two of Carmen’s three motets (with solus tenor parts) and one of Velut’s have es-
sential contratenors; none of these motets applies diminution or halving, but they achieve difference between
sections by purely mensural means, as in many of the Cyprus motets. Most have equal or nearly equal top
parts, and (especially Carmen’s quite complex Venite) use a range of mensurations.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 669

reduction is expressed mensurally (by combinations of modus and tempus) or as by

halving (per semi). Of the motets with color repetition, only M7, M31 and M40 follow a
familiar French pattern whereby each of two statements of the tenor color comprises two
taleae. The second tenor color statement is not written out; repeat signs are provided for
M7 and M40 but not for M31. In those three cases the contratenor and upper parts do
not repeat melodically and are necessarily fully written out. The second tenor statement
is diminished in M31 and M40, and the tenor colores each also contain two taleae. The
colores are to be repeated as instructed: M31: ‘Tenor primo dicitur perfecte, secundo per
semi de primo’ (without repeat sign); M40: ‘Tenor bis dicitur, primo ut jacet, secundo
per semi’ (with repeat sign). Although specified as a proportion rather than as diminu-
tion, the mensurations in both cases are such that the result is the same. In both motets,
the contratenor and upper parts have two isorhythmic taleae within each tenor color
for the undiminished first section, and two different isorhythmic taleae for the tenor’s
reduced section. However in M7, the color is repeated without diminution and is there-
fore identical in pitch and rhythm, so I would classify this as an identical repeat, not lim-
iting the description to (iso)rhythm.37 Each tenor color contains two isorhythmic taleae
but the contratenor talea repeats only once, with the repeat of the tenor color. The upper
parts of M7 are not wholly isorhythmic, but repeat the same rhythm over longs 7–​8 of
each of the four tenor taleae.
The single tenor colores of M8 and M18 are divided into two taleae of equal length
and identical rhythm; each talea is stated and repeated immediately in diminution, at
note-​values down one level, before the same procedure is applied to the second talea.38
In both cases, the tenor parts are written out in full, spelling out the diminution. In
M8 all voices are written in red notation for the diminution section, as stated, but an
overlap makes it clear that the coloration causes neither imperfection nor proportional
change. Reading the notes down a level (the historically authorised definition of dim-
inution) is not necessarily the same as halving values (per semi, or 2:1 proportion), be-
cause different combinations of modus and tempus may apply at the different levels.39
The tenor of M18 is in imperfect modus and tempus, major prolation; when the breve
is read as semibreve, it becomes imperfect tempus, major prolation, with divisions by
2 and 3 in both cases, and resulting in an overall proportion of 2:1. But M8’s tenor is in
perfect modus, imperfect tempus and major prolation; in diminution it becomes per-
fect tempus, minor prolation, therefore asymmetrically with 2 and 3, 3 and 2 divisions,
and resulting in an overall proportion of 3:1. M12 (exceptional in many ways) presents
its perfect-​modus color of two taleae three times, the second in diminution (breve is
read as semibreve), the third reverting to original values, resulting in overall sectional
proportions 2:1:2.

37 See Ch. 2.
38 Ciconia’s Petrum Marcello applies diminution to a color before restating it. Like nearly all the Cyprus
motets, Petrum Marcello is in perfect modus and tempus, so a perfect long in diminution becomes a perfect
breve in perfect tempus and minor prolation, resulting in a 3:1 proportion (PMFC 24, no. 18). The tenor
of the Fountains motet Humane lingua/​Supplicum voces/​Deo gratias is likewise in perfect modus with per-
fect tempus. Its diminution section with perfect tempus and minor prolation likewise results in a relation-
ship of 3:1 (C–​W O246); Bent, The Fountains Fragments, f. 14. Editions: PMFC 15, no. 36; The Fountains
Fragments, ed. Kershaw and Sandon, no. 17. Alma polis (Ch. 19) has a written-​out diminution within each
color statement.
39 See Bent, ‘The Myth’.
670 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

The unusual qualities of M14 are further discussed in the Excursus to this chapter.
Its tenor, exceptionally, has five color statements that are varied mensurally; they are
therefore not isorhythmic. The color is notated once with a five-​stroke repetition sign,
and the instruction: ‘Primo dicitur de tempore et modo perfectis. 2o de modo perfecto
et tempore imperfecto. 3o semi de 2o. 4o ut 2o. 5o ut prius’. Only the central third itera-
tion is marked for a proportional interpretation, by half (semi), but because of the men-
sural configuration, the result is the same (2:1) as reading it in diminution at the next
note-​level down, as just shown for M18. The upper parts are in tempus imperfectum
throughout, though lend themselves to irregular barring in sections 1 and 5 to coincide
with the perfect tempus of the tenor. The overall palindromic structure, perhaps re-
flecting St Katherine’s wheel, lends itself to substantial sections of upper-​part isorhythm
between sections 1 and 5, and 2 and 4, a fascinating and unprecedented structure.
Hoppin counted forty out of the forty-​one motets as isorhythmic; even with the more
restrictive definition of isorhythm which I have proposed, it is still true that all except
M9 have some full or partial isorhythmic patterning in the tenor and/​or the upper parts.
The seven exceptions with color repetition apart (M7, M8, M12, M14, M18, M31 and
M40), the remaining thirty-​four motets all have a single tenor color statement which
is divided into either two or three taleae, with no mensural or proportional manip-
ulation, and with varying degrees of isorhythmic correspondence in the upper parts
and contratenor; rhythmic replication without diminution meets the stricter criteria
for isorhythm (Ch. 2). Most of the contratenors are indeed ‘contra’ the tenor, of similar
length and activity. Some are longer, with notably more short values; strikingly long and
active ones include those for M28, M30, M31.
All but one motet have equal range and activity of the two cantus parts. In M12 with
tenor Alleluia, exceptional in this as in other respects, the upper parts share the range
a′–​c″ but the tessitura of cantus II is, in this motet alone, distinctly lower than cantus
I. All but one of the motets have final cadences made by the cantus and tenor intervals
10/​6–​12/​8; M12 has the unusual final cadence 8/​5–​12/​8.
The motets are presented as essays in various mensurations, with examples of all four
ç
combinations of tempus and prolation. There is a predominance of (18 motets) and
o (14), mensurations respectively very common and quite rare in the French repertory.
ç o
M8 uses and , both unsigned; the shift of mensuration is shown (as mentioned) by a
change to red coloration but without proportional significance. Four motets are entirely
ø
in the rare mensuration, compared to four in PMFC 5 and two by Machaut. Five are
c
in . All but three (M11, M18, M40) are in perfect modus, and the tenors mostly follow
the upper parts without setting up counter-​patterns, except in M14, and in the dimi-
nution section of M31, where the perfect tempus of the tenor is pitted against the con-
tinuing imperfect tempus of the contratenor and upper parts. The maxima appears in
only two motets (M18, M36). M36 is the only motet with perfect maximodus as well as
perfect modus. There are no mensuration signs throughout the motets, except in M36,
ço c
which has frequent changes between , and in both upper parts, with almost con-
stant juxtaposition of different mensurations at the same time, a veritable essay in men-
sural combinations.
The motets are also presented as essays in various tonalities, but within a very narrow
band of choice, and with a predominance of finals on f (‘major’) and d (‘minor’). Three
motets cadence on g (M16, M29, M30) and only one, M14, on c. About two-​thirds of the
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 671

motets open with the same sonority as the final. All pieces with f final have a bb signa-
ture in the tenor, except M27, M28, M32, M35, M40, which have none; only pieces with
f final have a flat signature. M41 in addition (and alone) has a signature of two flats in
the contratenor. M14, exceptional in many ways, has a tenor signature of eb only, with
corresponding ebs in the other voices, partly at staff beginnings, partly as accidentals.
M2 illustrates the standard pattern as well as any of the twenty-​eight perfectly regular
motets. It has two taleae of 60 breves each, or twenty perfect longs, and a single color of
120 breves. The second talea is a literal isorhythmic replication of the first. Modus and
tempus are perfect, prolation minor. The tonality and final cadence (10/​6–​12/​8) are on
f; the tenor starts on c but is underpinned by contratenor f. The contratenor is nonethe-
less inessential, and causes a ‘bifocal’ sonority at bar 88 (fifths both above and below the
tenor).40

French or Italian?

Hoppin considered the repertory to be entirely French. Indeed, not only the use of ver-
nacular texts but many aspects of the notation encourage this view. There is extensive
use of advanced applications of alteration and imperfection and of displacement color-
ation to create syncopation. This is carried through in an entirely literate French way,
but as is well known, this notation was also mastered by composers active in Lombardy
and the Veneto around and after 1400, such as Philipoctus de Caserta and Ciconia. But
this is not the whole story. In addition to features usually associated with French nota-
tion and motet technique, there are many instances of the features I have identified as
characterising the distinctive Italian motet style of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, heard at its finest in the motets of Ciconia.41 These features were much cul-
tivated by Du Fay (in his case truly blended with his early French training) and post-​
Ciconian composers from the north, and are not commonly found in French motets of
the period up to 1400. This observation bears on the styles and techniques of composi-
tion, not on the compilation, and is therefore independent of the judgement that most
of the manuscript’s verbal text was copied by an Italian scribe. I now list those features of
the Italian motet which are also conspicuous in the Cyprus motets:

1. Two high cantus parts that are equal or nearly equal in range and tessitura, activity
and number of notes.
2. Two texts that are equal or nearly equal in amount of text, and often in metrical,
stanza or rhyme scheme. In the Cypriot repertory the two cantus parts always have
different texts, as in French motets; Italian motets are sometimes monotextual.
3. The predominant tonalities and finals are f ‘major’ (24 Cyprus motets) and d
‘minor’ (13).
4. Use of unison hocket, rhythmic sequence, conspicuous declamatory passages and
close imitations between equal voices, as in the motets of Ciconia.

40 For ‘bifocal’ see Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early Music’ and ‘Naming of Parts’.
41 See Chs. 26 and 28.
672 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

5. Mostly non-​chant, freely composed, accompanying tenor parts, often with leaps
of fourths and fifths.
6. Contratenor parts, where present, are contrapuntally inessential and are proce-
durally later, if not actually separated in intent or in time of composition.
7. Final cadences are formed of the intervals 10/​6–​12/​8 between the essential
three voices, the two cantus parts and tenor. This applies to all except M12,
which parodies the texts of a motet by Vitry, and whose unusual cadence is
8/​5–​12/​8 on d.
8. Limited use of tenor diminution. As noted above, only seven of the Cyprus
motets have color repetition. Of these, M7 has no diminution, two (M31 and
M40) repeat the color in halved values (per semi), two (M12, M14) re-​augment
after diminution. M8 and M18 diminish the first half of the color (in M8 written
out using coloration) before presenting the second, which is then also dimin-
ished.42 In the remaining single-​color motets, the upper parts simply repeat
isorhythmically at each new talea. M9 has no isorhythm; in M12 only the tenor is
isorhythmic, and in M16 tenor and contratenor are isorhythmic.
9. Upper-​voice rhythmic replication in the second half of a motet.
10. Senaria perfecta (.p.), equivalent to French perfect tempus with minor prolation
o
( ), is one of the most characteristic mensurations of the Italian motet. While
this mensuration does not prevail in the Cyprus motets, it is used for fully one-​
third of them (14), many more examples than in the fourteenth-​century French
repertory, where it is uncommon. Of the motets in PMFC 5, apart from two
older-​generation motets (nos. 14, Les l’ormeile and 22, Clap, clap, par un matin),
it is used only in Rex Karole and Trop ay dure/​Par sauvage (Ivrea, 57v–​58; PMFC
5, no. 20), and in Machaut only in motets 11 (a rhythmically conservative piece),
19 and the inauthentic no. 24 (Li enseignement/​De touz les biens).

Only M15 and M17 have an introduction (or introitus) before the tenor entry, a common
but not universal feature of the early fifteenth-​century Italian motet. That for M15 has a
grandly wide-​spaced imitation in the Ciconian manner; that for M17 is textless.43
Having said that, let us turn our attention to motets by French composers dating
from the first decade of the fifteenth century. Here we find some features not so marked
in the slightly older fourteenth-​century repertory as transmitted in Ivrea. In fact, some
of these features are present in a French motet dated c. 1375 or 1378, Rex Karole by
Philippe Royllart (PMFC 5, no. 26). It stands out as almost the only French motet datable
before 1400 to incorporate many of the features favoured by Italian motet composers: as
just mentioned, exceptionally, among French motets, it is in triple time, but also has
an echo opening (as does Vitry’s Petre/​Lugentium), equal range top parts with hock-
eting and 10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence.44 (It differs from the Italian model in other respects,
having a chant tenor and essential contratenor. There are changes of signature, but no

42 This also happens in Ciconia’s motet Petrum Marcello. See PMFC 24, no. 18. The Chantilly motet

Alpha vibrans presents each of four color segments first as written, then in retrograde and diminution, then
recte and in diminution. See PMFC 5, no. 25.
43 Such introductions are usually referred to as introitus; on this term see Ch. 1.
44 A small majority of Machaut’s motets have 6/​3–​8/​5 cadences, but his motets 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 15, 19 have

10/​6–​12/​8 final cadence, and motets 5, 11, 16, 20, 23 have irregular cadence forms.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 673

diminution, and there is no upper-​part isorhythm.) This widely distributed motet could
have been a conduit for some of these features adopted in northern motets of the first
decade of the fifteenth century.
Some of this may be explained by tendencies in the few motets by northern composers
dating from the first decade of the fifteenth century. These include some of the above
Italianate features, notably upper texted parts of equal range and activity, talea pairs iso-
rhythmic in all parts, use of a range of mensurations, some chant and some free tenors,
some essential and some inessential contratenors, single color or replication without
diminution.

Roots of the Repertory

Without detracting from the obvious French connections of the repertory, the links with
the Italian motet, and especially the Veneto, are strengthened by the case made here for
affinities between the Cyprus motets and the specifically Italian motet genre known mostly
from the Veneto. Remembering Janus’s Italian origins, trade and communications con-
tinued strongly between Cyprus and Venice, presumably including some cultural ex-
change, though evidently not of actual musical compositions in either direction.
Hoppin noted a ‘similarity of textual construction’ between motets in Cyprus
and Ox213.45 He also rightly pointed out connections, in the use of musical clichés,
with works by Cesaris, Velut and others, including suggestive similarities between
M4 and Velut’s Benedicta viscera/​Ave mater gratie.46 Velut’s motet, however, is unlike
the majority of Cyprus motets in that it has a single color chant tenor and an essen-
tial contratenor as well as adapting each color statement to mensural changes in the
upper parts. The other motet ascribed to Velut, Summe summy in Q15, is an equal-​
cantus motet with inessential contratenor, imitative introduction, d tonality and time, o
but with a single text and no isorhythmic repeat. The differences between these two
ascribed Velut motets provide an inconclusive basis for further attributions to him of
the Cyprus motets, though they are not to be excluded as models. The compositions of
the generation of Velut, Cesaris and Carmen must lie close to the point at which both
French and Italian ingredients of the Cyprus techniques were borrowed and exported.47
If Velut was responsible for taking them to Cyprus, why did he not take these existing
compositions and build them into the repertory? His departure in 1411 is earlier
than has hitherto been suggested for the exportation of this repertory to the Veneto
manuscripts in which they were copied in the 1420s and 1430s, but now seems the like-
liest terminus ante quem, since he had left the mainland, not apparently to return. To the
influences of Velut and his contemporaries documented in that first decade, Carmen,
Cesaris, Tapissier, we should add Ciconia as a probable source of many of the clichés
identified by Hoppin as ‘a common stock of melodic formulae’, features also adopted by
his subsequent Veneto imitators.48 Ciconia’s motets date from before his death in 1412,

45 Hoppin, ‘Cypriot-​French Repertory’, 99.

46 CMM 11/​2, no. 7. Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Cyprus Songs’, has gone considerably further in establishing
common material and musical language between pieces of various genres within French vernacular song.
47 Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 164, underlines the close connection of the Cyprus motets to these composers.
48 Hoppin, ‘Cypriot-​French Repertory’, 103.
674 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

and thus could have been known to the musicians who sailed to Cyprus from Venice
in 1411, along with other northern repertory. The Cyprus composers have learned all
the tricks and apply them with skill; they do not, however, except in a few cases, seem
to pack the compositions with innovative devices to achieve truly individual works. If
they did, then they are different enough from what we now know to look for that we
have yet to find them. It is certainly possible that these are the works of Velut and his
colleagues and apprentices who had absorbed by 1410 some of the clearest techniques
of the French and Italian traditions that were beginning to merge around that time. My
own sense of the style of the Cyprus motets is quite consistent with a composition date
in the 1410s or early 1420s.

Texts

All the Latin texts are in verse of a fluent, competent but relatively conventional kind. No
classical quotations have been identified. Much of the textual substance is patchworked
from vocabulary and phrases familiar from well-​known hymns, sequences and other
liturgical items, but also from other known motets. Besseler and Hoppin pointed out
direct textual paraphrasing in M12 (Incessanter/​Virtutibus) of Impudenter/​Virtutibus,
a motet probably by Vitry. The poet of M12 knew Vitry’s motet, though there is no ap-
parent musical relationship.49 The word virtutibus also occurs in the cantus II parts
of M8, M9, M20.50 Lugentibus, recalling his Petre Clemens/​Lugentium, occurs in M13
cantus II; altisonis in M14 cantus II recalls the Ivrea motets Altissonis/Hin [sic] principes
(no. 2) or Almifonis/​Rosa (no. 21).51 Kügle also notes textual paraphrasing in the cantus
I parts of M39 (Mon mal/​Toustens) of Mon chant/​Qui doloreus—​a weaker but possible
candidate for Vitry’s authorship.52 Some of the texts, for example, M5, fall into regular
sequence form, with double stanzas aabccb, 887, 887. Others, such as the triplum of
M6, are not stanzaic, and quite irregular in line length and rhyme scheme. While Velut’s
motet Benedicta viscera/​Ave mater has at least an approximate correspondence between
stanza and talea, this is not always true of the Cyprus motets. In M5, for example, the
thirty lines of both upper voices are very approximately allocated to the three taleae,
close to ten lines each, but with no respect to the divisions between the five six-​line
stanzas in each part. The incipits of M5, Iubar solis universa/​Fulgor solis non vilescit, on
the Eucharist, recall the text of Du Fay’s motet on the Virgin, Fulgens iubar ecclesie dei/​
Puerpera, pura parens, written for Cambrai, and dated by Fallows to 1442, and to 1445

49 Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 213; Hoppin, ‘Cypriot-​French Repertory’, 98–​99. The relationship between the two

motets has also been studied by Welker, Musik am Oberrhein, 113–​17.

50 Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 163. Pp. 161–​62 also list some verbal resonances with the French repertory. He drew

attention to the sharing of stock Latin phrases, and to the feature, shared with both French and Italian motets,
of concluding a motet with a prayer for intercession.
51 PMFC V, 46–​49.
52 Hoppin, ‘The Cypriot-​ French Repertory’, 98, and see also Widaman, Wathey, Leech-​ Wilkinson,
‘Structure’ and Kügle, ‘Repertory’, who tabulates textual resonances with other 14th-​c. motets on pp. 162–​63,
suggesting a strong association with French royal court culture. As Yolanda Plumley has shown, the anony-
mous motet Mon chant/​Qui doloreus (Ivrea no. 39, also in Durham20, and Trém no. 43: see Ch. 31, Appendix,
n. 61) cites in both voices a ballade written by Jehan de Le Mote in 1339 upon the death in 1337 of Guillaume
I, count of Hainaut: Qui dolereuse onques n’a conneü, with the refrain Mon cant em plaing, ma cançon en
clamour’ (Plumley, Grafted Song, ch. 6). Also reported in Ch. 15 n. 39.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 675

or 1447 by Planchart, all on the strength of the cantus II acrostic ‘Petrus de Castello
canta’.53 There is no apparent further connection between the compositions, and the
date of Du Fay’s motet is by any standards too late to have served as a model for M5.
Many of the locutions are almost school exercises in ingenious acrostics, internal,
crossed and chained rhymes, alliteration and other devices. Variety of metrical and
rhyme schemes is actively cultivated, though many of the individual texts are in standard
metrical and stanzaic patterns, regular, paired rhymes, octosyllables or alternating lines
of seven and eight syllables rhyming abab, stanzas rhyming ababcc, or sequence-​like
double stanzas of 887 syllables. As for rhyme, nearly all the Latin rhymes are of at least
double syllables. Occasionally the poet managed only a single-​syllable rhyme. But else-
where he sometimes contrives triple or even quadruple rhymes. There are many intri-
cate schemes of internal rhyme.
All the motet texts are in syllabic verse except two, M14 and M18, which are in quan-
titative hexameters, for which their irregular syllable count is therefore irrelevant. Both
of those motets have internal rhyme within each line, sometimes with neighbouring
lines, either direct or obliquely crossed. Kügle overlooked M18 (Sanctus in eternis/​
Sanctus et ingenitus) in reporting that M14 (Personet armonia/​Consonat) shares its use
of hexameters with internal rhyme only with the motet Portio nature/​Ida capillorum (in
Ivrea and elsewhere); both celebrate a female saint, Katherine and Ida respectively; M32
is also on St Katherine. Other texts in hexameters include Dunstaple’s Albanus roseo
rutilat/​Quoque ferendus (John Dunstable, Complete Works, no. 23), the motetus of Inter
densas/​Imbribus irriguis (Chantilly), the fragmentary Arta/​Musicus est ille (Ch. 21) and
Padu . . . serenans (Ch. 28).
The texts of cantus I and II are rarely exactly the same in stanza or metrical make-​up.
Indeed, the most surprising aspect of the texts is the frequent and quite deliberate cul-
tivation of difference—​in length and other respects—​between texts that are set to mu-
sically equal and twinned cantus parts. Only six motets (all Latin-​texted: M1, 5, 9, 13,
32, 33) have absolutely twinned texts with respect to line and syllable count and rhyme
scheme. M3 and M20 have the same number of eight-​syllable lines in each part, but
with different rhyme schemes in the two voices.
All the other thirty-​two text pairs are in some way unequal in length, as if the poet
anticipated that they would be composed with a hierarchy between the status of cantus
I and II, or triplum and motetus, as in most French motets. M6 has twenty-​four lines in
each part, but differently arranged; cantus I has the so-​called Sapphic arrangement in
lines of 11 11 11 5 syllables. (Cantus I of M8 is 8 8 8 4.) Where the same metre is used
in both parts, cantus I often has one more stanza than cantus II. This leads to simple
proportional ratios between the text syllables in both parts. In M7 the proportion is 4:3
(24:18); in M21, 6:5 (24:20); in M23, 5:4 (20:16), also in M 25 (25:20). Such numbers are
also achieved by varying the line length or metrical structure between them. Thus, of
the Latin motets:

equal in line/​syllable and rhyme scheme are nos. 1, 5, 9, 13, 32, 33

equal in line/​syllable but with variant rhyme are nos. 3, 16, 20

53 Holford-​Strevens, ‘Du Fay the Poet?’, 145–​50.

676 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

equal in syllable and rhyme (=​stanza structure?) but with more lines in cantus I than
cantus II are nos. 7, 21, 23, 25:

motet Lines proportion

7 24:18 4:3
21 24:20 6:5
23 20:16 5:4
25 25:20 5:4

This tendency to proportioned inequality sets these pairs apart from most equal-​
cantus Italian motets, which tend to have perfectly equal, twinned texts (and in some
cases a single text). Of the two motets written in hexameters (M14, M18), the texts of
M18 have twenty lines each, while M14 has 24:20. Each of these pairs of texts employs
intense and purposefully varied strategies of chained and internal rhymes in a com-
plete lattice—​as we shall soon see. An elaborate pair of Sanctus tropes in M18 works in
the words of the Sanctus text in a most ingenious way that stitches the texts together at
many points.

Stanza to talea Relationship

Stanza to talea correspondence such as has been demonstrated for Machaut would be
expected in motets that conform as strongly as these to archetypes. Such correspond-
ence, however, is rather infrequent, and quite rarely follows a tidy pattern in both cantus
parts. It is somewhat more common in cantus I than cantus II, but full correspondence
is prevented when the second texts of such pieces are not equal but otherwise propor-
tioned to the first. Relationships between texts of different motets offer another striking
aspect. They are not only related outside but within this repertory. The texts of the ‘O’
antiphon cycle, for example, are related proportionally.
In writing about the grand cycle of eight Advent ‘O’ antiphons, M23–​30, Hoppin
noted that it was primarily the tripla that expand and paraphrase the antiphon texts.
M27 omits the first words of the antiphon (O oriens, splendor) deliberately, as to restore
them would break the alternation of 7-​and 9-​syllable lines.54 None of these antiphons
has truly twinned pairs of texts, but two other observations proved intriguing. First,
all the cantus I texts of this group are constructed with 200-​syllable patterns, either 25
octosyllabic lines (M25–​30) or 20 decasyllables (M23, M24). All the texts with 25 oc-
tosyllabic lines are identical in rhyme scheme. Second, the second texts are all different
from the first, but the cantus I:II relationship by syllable count is in most cases 5:4. See
Table 32.1
Correspondence between stanza and musical structure (talea) is achieved for cantus
I but not cantus II. The musical lengths and relationships between the motets of this
group show no such clear cyclic goal, though their tonal and mensural plan is clearly

54 Hoppin’s editorial commentary notes that ‘the omission of “Oriens” destroys the retrograde acrostic Ero

cras that is formed by the first words of the antiphons (after the initial “O”)’.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 677

Table 32.1 The ‘O’ Antiphons

No. Title, final, Clefs/​flat Breves Cantus I Cantus II Total

mensuration lines/​syllables lines/​syllables syllables

23 O Sapientia (d),ø C2, C4 117 20 × 10 16 × 10 200:160

24 O Adonay (d), o C2, C4 135 20 × 10 20 × 8 200:160
25 O Radix (f), ç C1, C3, ♭ [138] 25 × 8 20 × 8 200:160
26 O clavis (f), c C1, C3, ♭ 171 25 × 8 18 × 8 200:144
27 [O oriens splendor] C2, C4 144 25 (× 7, 8, 9) tr 20 × 8 199 [sic]:160
Lucis eterne (f), ø stanza 1: 47 49;
2: 88; 3: 88 17
28 O Rex (f), o C2, C4 153 25 × 8 20 × 8 200:160
29 O Emanuel (g), ç C1, C4 108 25 × 8 20 × 8 200:160
30 O sacra virgo (g), c C1, C4 [192] 25 × 8 20 × 8 200:160

cyclic. The eight motets make four pairs with respect to tonal types if not indeed modes;
and they rotate the four mensurations twice, in the same order. All eight have perfect
modus; all have three taleae except M30, which has four, and a differently constructed
contratenor.
Was there a plan to the collection? On evidence of arrangement, it appears so, but the
motets seem to have been through-​copied in gatherings VII–​X (ff. 59–​97), with none of
the articulation points of the collection corresponding to a gathering or scribal break.
All four motet gatherings (about a quarter of the manuscript) are quinternions, but a
blank-​staved folio has been removed from the end of gathering X following f. 97.
As stated above, it has been judged that one music scribe is responsible for the entire
manuscript. Two scribes copied the motet texts, of whom the principal is the main text
scribe of the preceding sections of the manuscript. The second text scribe copied the
last six French motets.55 Widaman, Wathey and Leech-​Wilkinson identify him with the
music scribe, on the evidence of a marginal correction on f. 76r in which this scribe adds
music and text for a passage omitted by the main text scribe. Motets 36–​41, however,
are preceded by one French motet (M35) in the main hand, immediately following the
two Deo gratias motets. The scribal break therefore comes one piece later than would be
expected, after M35. The first motet, on Victime paschali, appears to be a later addition
by the same scribes to the first recto of gathering VII and, as stated above, may have
been designed precisely to occupy the first recto of the motet section. The fact that the
parts are copied below each other in the order cantus I, tenor, cantus II, contratenor,
suggests that it was copied from a source laid out across facing pages like all the other
Cyprus motets, with the tenor below cantus I on the left, the contratenor below cantus II
on the right. Thus the cycle of whole-​opening motets may be said to begin with M2 (ff.
59v–​60r). As the same authors observed, this would have brought the planned number
of motets to the round number of forty.

55 Widaman, Wathey, Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Structure’. On the round number of forty motets, see their discus-

sion on pp. 95–​116.

678 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

The question of quality also arises. It is unlikely to be coincidence that the most in-
teresting and diverse pieces seem to be those in the group M6–​18 that show greatest
variety of technical means and experiment, rather than the more numerous pieces
that conform to a standard template and present a homogeneous impression. This
homogeneity has been remarked on in all the genres in the manuscript.56 That there
seem to be so few individual creations in both text and music, so few that avoid signs
of mass production, argues in favour either of a relatively short time-​span for their
composition, or of a close circle of composers, if not a single one, over a longer pe-
riod. This judgement stands in sharp contrast to the individuality identified in most
motets discussed in this book. In drawing attention to some technical aspects of text
and music, I hope to have balanced French and Italian views of the repertory that may
contribute to the continuing discussion of its origins and the date and provenance of
the manuscript.

Excursus: M14 Personet armonia/​Consonat

This motet stands out as exceptional in many ways, some of which have been noted
above. Like the nearly contemporary Lusignan chappelle royale in Pyrga, Cyprus, it is
dedicated to St Katherine. The motet shares the number of sections (five) and some ro-
tary cyclic structuring with the—​also exceptionally long—​English St Katherine motet
Rota versatilis of the early fourteenth century.57 These musical features are the motet’s
most remarkable aspect, but they are underpinned by texts which also have striking
symmetries and numerical correspondences.

Texts

This is one of only two of the Cyprus motets with texts in hexameters; these are coupled
with unusual internal rhymes as shown in the Appendix. Cantus I has 140 words (122
minus 4) and cantus II 121 (112). The total duration of 396 semibreves, resolved to 132
perfect breves, is 12 × 11. Note the caesural rhyme in cantus I, with only -​orum repeated;
alliteration (f in lines 10–​11, 1 in 12, d in 12–​13), with extended play on lux and dux;
and in cantus II the crossed double rhymes in different groupings. Speculum in cantus
I marks the end of the first ‘mirrored’ passage (i.e. mirrored in color 5: see below), span-
ning from color 1 to color 2. In cantus II Converti gaudet ‘turns’ the text at the musical
chiasm at the centre of the whole motet (as we shall see below); gaudet is the middle
word. (Cantus I has gaudia in line 13, the first of the second half of the text.) The mid-
point of the music is flanked on either side by the middle text words of each texted part.
In cantus I the midpoint of words falls between duxque and ducis. Other links between
the texts include: cantus I, lines 1–​2: Personet . . . cantus . . . laudis . . . Katerine; cantus II,
lines 1–​2 Consonet . . . laudes . . . Katerine. The final lines of both cantus parts each con-
tain the words fac nos twice, and share (in cantus I) virgo . . . Katerina . . . grata . . . beatis

56 For example Leech-​Wilkinson, ‘Cyprus Songs’.

57 See Bent, ‘Rota versatilis’ and its revision in Bent, Hartt and Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus, ch. 5.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 679

and (in cantus II) Katerine . . . virgo . . . gratos . . . beatos. Her wheel is invoked by radius,
radians, radiavit in cantus II, line 8.

Music

This is one of only three motets without a contratenor, one of only two in hexameters
and, with 396 major semibreves, it is one of the longest, exceeded only by M27 with 432
major semibreves (144 perfect breves). It is the only motet with a c final, and it cadences
with the tenor rhythm ssd(3 2 1) at the end of each of the five color statements, all of
which start on g and end on c. The tenor has a signature of eb only, and several e flats are
notated in the upper parts, confirming the intent and implying more.
Five color statements are disposed chiastically in the proportions 3 2 1 2 3. The
mensurations are alternately and : ø ç øçøçø , with tenor diminution in the central
color, where the perfect breve becomes a perfect semibreve, a reduction of 3:1. In breves,
the lengths of sections are 363 362 123 362 363, altogether 84 perfect and 72 imperfect
breves. In major semibreves, this yields 108, 72, 36, 72, 108, a total of 396. Sections 1 and
5 of the tenor are in major modus, perfect tempus; sections and 4 are major modus, im-
perfect tempus. Section 3 is marked ‘3o semi de 2o’.
The corresponding sections in the upper parts (colores 1 and 5, 2 and 4) have substan-
tial isorhythmic correspondences, passages which are mostly occupied with extended
and skilful rhythmic canon.58 In color 1 the rhythm of bars 29–​44 =​color 5, 157–​72;
ø
the 13-​limbed rhythmic canon occupies 39 semibreves of . In color 2 the rhythm of
bars 54–​69 =​ color 4, 102–​17; here there are two rhythmic canons, one of 14 semibreves
ç
followed by one of 12 semibreves, occupying 26 semibreves of . The division between
the two canons falls at the midpoint of the color (bb. 62–​63), which also divides the
words radium and rota in the motetus in color 2, just before Katerine magna rotarum
following the parallel place in color 4. In the short central color 3 (bb. 81–​92) a new
hocketed rhythmic canon at one minim’s distance (with units of only ©gg
) starts just
after the midpoint of the color, also the centre of the whole motet, flanked by the cen-
tral text words, and announced by the motetus words Converti gaudet which, as noted
above, ‘turns’ the musical chiasm.
Each tenor color is perfectly chiastic in rhythmic result but not in notation (1 2 3, with
second breve altered, 3 2 1 with second long imperfected: dbsdbsdbs ssdssdssd
| ).
That means that the entire tenor rhythm of the five colores is chiastic overall as well as
within each color. The remarkable design of the whole motet, text and music, can there-
fore be seen as a vivid representation of the Katherine wheel.

Postscript: Where was the Manuscript Produced?

Until Kügle’s article of 2012, the majority consensus was that the manuscript was copied
in Cyprus and came to Savoy with Anne’s retinue in 1434. Questions were raised about

58 Cf. the rhythmic canons in motets by Salinis, Ch. 27 and Exx. 27.1, 27.2, 27.3, and similar passages in

Carmen.
680 Popes, Trémoïlle AND CYPRUS

the Italian script of parts of the collection but, given the apparently cosmopolitan nature
of the Cypriot court, those scribes could have worked in Cyprus. More challenging was
the opinion of Italian art historians that the miniatures, initials and decoration were
Italian. Given that there was little evidence of insular illumination, whether or not by
Italian artists, this led to suggestions by art historians that the illumination was prob-
ably done in Italy, by Venetian or more probably Bolognese artists, leaving open the
possibility that the manuscript could have been brought to Savoy unilluminated and
probably unbound, and decorated there or in northern Italy. Kügle went further and,
on the basis of the previously unidentified coat of arms in the border of f. 1, made the
case that the entire manuscript was created in Italy in the 1430s for a Brescian aristo-
crat, Pietro Avogadro, using exemplars brought from Cyprus by Hanelle, who probably
made the majority of the copies, both interim and final, some or many of them even his
own compositions.
The original draft of the revision to this chapter expressed scepticism about Kügle’s
surprising hypothesis. If Avogadro was prepared to pay for an expensive new manu­
script, why would he have wanted to take over a readymade and then rather old-​
fashioned repertory, rather than to commission a new manuscript that reflected local
saints, tastes, composers, and current musical styles? What evidence is there that he was
a patron of music or had the resources to perform this specialised foreign repertory,
unknown to him and to any musicians in his employ?59 The two years in which this
is supposed to have happened (1434–​36) are almost impossibly short for the copying
and decoration of such an enormous codex, let alone the associated negotiations and
organisation. The reason given by Kügle for Hanelle’s conjectured hasty return to
favour in Savoy with the completed manuscript (namely, that his status as a ‘clericus
coniugatus’ was a moral contamination which also infected the manuscript) does
not stand scrutiny.60 But at the aforementioned 2021 Turin conference Kügle drew
back from this hypothesis, as he now shared some of the misgivings I and others had
expressed meanwhile. He presented a new hypothesis for the genesis of the manuscript,
still involving Avogadro as patron, but with one of two Lusignan clerics, Lancelot, a
nephew of Janus, as recipient. Both hypotheses assume that the entire manuscript was
copied from exemplars brought from Cyprus by Hanelle, still with a probable role for
him (among others) in the compilation.
A central question is whether indeed it is the Avogadro coat of arms. Kügle rejected
Besseler’s identification as the arms of the Bagarotti family of Padua, on grounds that
the colours (blue and silver) are wrong.61 Avogadro’s arms at this time appear to have
been red and silver, but the coat of arms in Cyprus is red and gold. In both Besseler’s and
Kügle’s suggestions, one of the two colours is wrong, at least for the time period in which
the manuscript was compiled. While rejecting Besseler’s anomaly, Kügle seems to accept

59 Diego Zancani, the only scholar to have written about Antonio Cornazzano’s Vita of Pietro Avogadro in

recent years, assures me that there is nothing in this Vita, or that he knows independently, that can even re-
motely connect Avogadro to Cyprus, or indeed to Savoy. Zancani, ‘Un recupero Quattrocentesco’, and email
correspondence of Feb. 2020.
60 For other instances of married clerics see n. 15 above; this was a canonically legitimate status for clerics

in minor orders.
61 Il codice J.II.9, 33 n. 20. Besseler, ‘Studien I’, 211.
 The Cyprus Manuscript and its Motets 681

a similar one in his own identification.62 The best hope for solving this puzzle would be
the discovery of a better match for the coat of arms with the correct colours. Kügle was
unaware in 2012 (as was I) of the 2004 suggestion, by Luisa Gentile to Giovanna Saroni,
that the coat of arms corresponds to that of the noble Savoyard Beggiamo family of
Savigliano, as also proposed by Alessandro Vitale-​Brovarone at the Turin conference.63
With respect to colours and chronology, the match is better than for Avogadro, the loca-
tion likelier. The presence of a coat of arms belonging neither to Cyprus nor to the dukes
of Savoy remains a conundrum.
I will not take these arguments further until Kügle has finalised a case that may yet
undergo revision, but I find it impossible to believe that this isolated repertory would
have been copied at the instigation of any Italian patron in the 1430s. If Avogadro was
sufficiently interested in music to commission this manuscript, why did he not in-
clude the music he knew or which was then prestigious, for example that of Du Fay?
Meanwhile, it is hoped that technical and stylistic work on the illuminations, initials
and borders may answer some of these questions and produce a plausible explanation
for the addition of these arms. Could the border to f. 1 (to which the arms are integral)
have been added in Italy, long after the ‘archaic’ St Hilarion initial? That would allow the
bound and partly illuminated manuscript to have been prepared in Cyprus and to have
travelled to Savoy with Anne. These issues will be taken further in the proceedings of
the Turin conference.
Meanwhile, Alberto Rizzuti has further explored the connection with the Beggiamo
family, whose arms with red on gold provide a convincing match, with the correct
colours, accompanied by the initials G.B., reported before the fire of 1904, and still
faintly detectable. Moreover, Rizzuti has discovered traces of blue below the Beggiamo
arms, which correspond to the arms of Anne of Lusignan, thus supporting the original
hypothesis that the manuscript was indeed brought with Anne in 1434 and her arms
subsequently overpainted. Rizzuti’s thorough and complex argument is supported by
extensive specialist photography and detailed research.64

62 Kügle, ‘Glorious Sounds’, 651 n. 35.

63 Giovanna Saroni, La Biblioteca di Amedeo VIII, reporting a suggestion of Luisa Gentile.
64 His findings will be published as Rizzuti, ‘Four Angels and a Coat of Arms’.
 Appendix
The Cyprus Motets

The groupings are labelled as in Kügle, ‘Repertory’, 158–​59.

No. Folios Texts Comments Final Mensuration Taleae

First cycle de tempore
1 59 Victima laudum pascalis/​Victimis in pascalibus/​ Easter sequence d o 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor: Victime paschali/​Contratenor
2 59v–​60 Qui patris atris honoris/​Paraclite spiritus/​ Pentecost; Cyprus f o 1C 2T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
3 60v–​61 Assumpta gemma virginum/​Gratulandum BVM; Assumption; acrostics d ø 1C 3T; upper iso.
mente pia/​Tenor/​Contratenor
4 61v–​62 Aurora vultu pulcrior/​Ave virginum flos et vita/​ BVM; acrostics f c 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
5 62v–​63 Iubar solis universa/​Fulgor solis non vilescit/​ Eucharist d o 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
6 63v–​64 Nate regnantis super astra/​Maria, proles regina/​ BVM; Cyprus and King Janus f ç 1C 3T; partial upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
7 64v–​65 Natus in patris gremio/​Apparuit sol hodie/​ Nativity; ‘Engaddi’; Cyprus? f ç 2C × 2T; partial upper iso, × 4
Tenor/​Contratenor
Cycle de sanctis
8 65v–​66 Gemma florens militie/​Hec est dies gloriosa/​ Denis, Macarius, King Janus. f ço 1C × 2T with internal dim. Aa
Tenor/​Contratenor Cyprus; St John Baptist Bb; upper parts fully iso. × 2
9 66v–​67 Porta celi fulgentibus/​Assit deus huic domui/​ BVM; Dedication of a church f ç 1C × 1T; no iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
10 67v–​68 Reverenter veneremur/​Venerandum crucis True Cross; Cyprus? f o 1C 3T; partial upper iso.
lignum/​Tenor/​Contratenor
11 68v–​69 Mater alma clementie/​Deitatis triclinium/​Tenor BVM f o 1C 2T; partial upper iso.
12 69v–​70 Incessanter expectavi/​Virtutis ineffabilis/​ BVM; texts modelled on d ç 3C × 2T; C2 dim. (semi);
Tenor: Alleluya Vitry’s Impudenter/​Virtutibus no upper iso.
13 70v–​71 Christe qui supra sydera/​Christe nostra salvatio/​ Christe eleison tropes? f ç 1C 2T; partial upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor Ascension
14 71v–​72 Personet armonia dulcis cantus, melodia/​ St Katherine; Cyprus c ç ø see Excursus 1C 5T, mensural; partial
Consonet altisonis laudes notulis Katerine/​ above upper iso.
Tenor
15 72v–​73 Hunc diem festis celebremus hymnis/​ St John Baptist; canonic f o 1C 3T; partial upper iso.
Precursoris verbi solennia/​Tenor/​Contratenor introduction before T entry
(precursor!)
16 73v–​74 Alma parens, nata nati/​O Maria, stella maris/​ BVM; Nativity g ç 1C 2T; no upper iso.
Tenor Alleluya
17 74v–​75 Magni patris magna mira/​Ovent Cyprus, St Hilarion; Cyprus. d c 1C 3T; partial upper iso.
Palestina/​Tenor/​Contratenor Introduction before T entry
18 75v–​76 Sanctus in eternis regnans, pater inque supernis/​ Sanctus tropes f ç 1C × 2T with internal dim.; Aa
Sanctus et ingenitus pater atque carens genitura/​ Bb; partial upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
19 76v–​77 Certes mont fu de grant necessite/​Nous devons Rose; BVM; French texts d ç 1C 2T; upper iso.
tresfort amer/​Tenor/​Contratenor
20 77v–​78 Maria, mare gratie/​O Maria, celi porta/​Tenor/​ BVM f ç 1C 3T; upper iso.
Contratenor
21 78v–​79 Dulce melos personemus/​Matrem Christi BVM f ç 1C 3T; upper iso.
rogitemus/​Tenor/​Contratenor
Second cycle de tempore
M23–​M30 are the eight ‘O’ Antiphons: see Table 32.1
22 79v–​80 In talem transfiguratur/​Iubar lustrat radiosum/​ Transfiguration d ç 1C 2T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor

(continued)
No. Folios Texts Comments Final Mensuration Taleae
23 80v–​81 O Sapientia incarnata/​Nos demoramur, benigne Advent, 17 Dec. d ø 1C 3T; upper iso.
rector/​Tenor/​Contratenor
24 81v–​82 O Adonay, domus Israel/​Pictor eterne syderum/​ Advent, 18 Dec. d o 1C 3T; upper iso.
Contratenor/​Tenor
25 82v–​83 O Radix Yesse splendida/​Cunti fundent Advent, 19 Dec. f ç 1C 3T; upper iso.
precamina/​Tenor/​Contratenor
26 83v–​84 O clavis David aurea/​Quis igitur aperiet/​Tenor/​ Advent, 20 Dec. f c 1C 3T; upper iso.
Contratenor
27 84v–​85 Lucis eterne splendor/​Veni, splendor mirabilis Advent, 21 Dec. Based on O f ø 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor oriens, splendor lucis
28 85v–​86 O Rex virtutum, gloria/​Quis possit dign[e] Advent, 22 Dec. Based on O f o 1C 3T; upper iso.
exprimere/​Tenor/​Contratenor rex gentium
29 86v–​87 O Emanuel, rex noster/​Magne virtutum Advent, 23 Dec. g ç 1C 3T; upper iso.
conditor/​Tenor/​Contratenor
30 87v–​88 O sacra virgo virginum/​Tu, nati nata suscipe/​ Advent, 24 Dec. g c 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
31 88v–​89 Hodie puer nascitur/​Homo mortalis, firmite/​ Nativity d ç 2C × 2T; dim. AB ab; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor aa bb
Supplementary repertory (saints, deo gratias, BVM)
32 89v–​90 Flos regalis Katerina/​Maxentius rex propere/​ St Katherine; Cyprus f o 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
33 90v–​91 Da, magne pater, rector Olimpi/​Donis affatim, Deo gratias; acrostics. M33 and d ç 1C 2T; upper iso.
perfluit orbis/​Tenor/​Contratenor M34 are on the same opening
34 90v–​91 Dignum summo patri/​Dulciter hymnos/​Tenor/​ Deo gratias Amen; acrostics f c 1C 2T; upper iso.
Contratenor
35 91v–​92 Toustans que mon esprit mire/​Qui porroit amer/​ BVM f ç 1C 3T; upper iso.
Tenor/​Contratenor
36 92v–​93 Coume le serf a la clere fontainne/​Lunne plainne BVM d signed o and
ç 1C 2T; upper iso.
d’umilite/​Tenor/​Contratenor c; upper parts
juxtapose different
mensurations;
frequent change
37 93v–​94 Pour ce que point fui de la amere espine/​A toi, BVM f o 1C 3T; upper iso.
vierge, me represente/​Tenor/​Contratenor
38 94v–​95 Par grant soif, clere fontainne/​Dame de tout BVM f o 1C 3T; upper iso.
pris/​Tenor/​Contratenor
39 95v–​96 Mon mal en bien, en plaisir ma dolour/​Toustens secular texts partially erased; d ø 1C 2T; upper iso.
je la serviray/​Tenor/​Contratenor M39 and M40 are on the same
opening
40 95v–​96 Amour trestout fort me point/​La douce art secular texts partially erased f ç 2C × 2T; dim. AB ab; upper iso.
m’estuet aprendre/​Tenor/​Contratenor aa bb
41 96v–​97 Se je di qu’en elle tire/​Tres fort m’abrasa/​Tenor/​ cantus II: BVM f o 1C 3T; upper iso.
Contratenor
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 Index of Compositions

Most incidental mentions are not indexed. The distinction between composer assignations with and without
‘?’ is not a firm one. Principal discussions are in boldface. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that
span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may appear on only one of those pages. Where an item appears in a table, only
the first page of that table is indexed (t). Where a figure or example extends over more than one page, only the
first page is indexed (f).

. . . de qua cordis/​Trinitatem, 506, 513, 516–​17, 638 Amours qui a le pouoir/​Faus Samblant m’a deceü/​
/​[ . . . ]reo gencium, 655 Vidi dominum (Machaut, M15), 193, 197–​208,
278, 646, 654
A celui dont sui ser[viteur], 660 puns, 207–​8
A maint biau jeu, 660 relation to Machaut, M10, 242–​44
A maistre Jehan Lardier, 283–​84 word-​painting, 197, 205–​6
A solis ortus cardine Et usque terre limitem, 356 Apollinis eclipsatur/​Zodiacum signis/​In omnem
Adieu ma dame, 657 terram (B. de Cluni), 20–​21, 50–​51, 283–​99,
Adieu plaisir (Hubertus de Salinis), 546t Ex. 16.1, Ex. 16.2, Ex. 16.3, Ex.
Agnus Custos et pastor ovium (Du Fay), 639 16.4, 325–​41, 347, 348, 350–​52, 353, 355–​58,
Albane misse celitus/​Albane doctor maxime 364, 367, 372, 373, 375–​76, 377–​83, 389, 390,
(Ciconia), 55, 504t, 513n.43, 553, 554t, 560, 392–​95, 396, 397, 533–​36, 653
564, 565, 567, 568 citations in treatises, 294–​97
Albanus roseo rutilat/​Quoque ferendus/​Albanus date, 328
(Dunstaple), 485, 490t, 675 named musicians, 333–​41
Aler m’en veus (Ciconia), 553, 564, 571 related motets, 286–​87
Alma parens, nata nati/​O Maria, stella maris/​ relation to Musicalis, 330
Alleluya, 683 relation to Musicorum collegio, 350–​52
Alma polis religio/​Axe poli cum artica/​[Et] in ore sources, 293–​94
eorum, Ex. 19.1, 21, 53, 285, 287–​88, taleae, 329, 331
304–​5, 306–​8, 347, 353–​67, 373, 376, 378, Apostolo glorioso (Du Fay), 628, 632
380–​81, 391–​94 Apta caro/​Flos virginum/​Alma redemptoris (Vitry?),
Alma proles regia/​Christi miles (Cooke), 307n.11, 10, 29, 97, 352, 532f, 533, 534t, 537, 632,
356n.5, 387, 469–​71, 473, 474–​75, 477, 479–​80 647, 655
Alme pater, 621–​23, 638 Are post libamina/​Nunc surgunt in populo
Almifonis/​Rosa sine culpe spina (Vitry?), 29, (Mayshuet), 307n.11, 445–​48, 458–​60, 459f,
653, 674–​75 462–​64, 466, 467
Alpha vibrans/​Cetus venit, 359n.10, 412n.20, Argi vices Poliphemus/​Tum Philemon rebus (Nicolas/​
421n.37 Guillermus), 355n.1, 502, 504t, 510, 621, 627,
Altissonis/​Hin [sic] principes, 674 629, 638
Aman novi/​Heu Fortuna/​Heu me, tristis est anima Arta/​Musicus est ille qui perpensa racione,
mea (Vitry), Table 5.1, 67–​81, 83–​84, 111–​ Ex. 21.1, Fig. 21.1, 287, 288, 299, 359,
29, 133–​35, 144–​48, 278 362, 381, 389–​92, 675
dating and relationship to Garrit and Arte psallentes (Bartolomeus de Bononia), 396, 639
Tribum, 67–​81 Ascendenti sonet geminacio/​Viri Galilei, quid vos
Amer amours/​Durement/​Dolor meus (Vitry?), 20, admiramini?, 161
331, 333, 654 Assumpta gemma virginum/​Gratulandum mente
Amis dont ton vis (Molins), 659 pia/​T/​Ct, 682
Amor vincens omnia/​Maria preconio/​Aptatur, 46 Aucune gent m’ont demandé/​Qui plus aimme plus
Amour dont tele est la puissance, 141–​42 endure/​Fiat voluntas tua/​Ct (Machaut, M5),
Amour trestout fort me point/​La douce art m’estuet 33, 70n.15
aprendre/​T/​Ct, 685 Aurea flammigeri (Antonius Romanus), 561–​62
716 Index of Compositions

Aurora vultu pulcrior/​Ave virginum flos et vita/​T/​ Comes Flandrie/​Rector creatorum/​In cimbalis, 339,
Ct, 682 499n.8
Ave [rex gentis] anglorum, 474–​75 Comme le cerf, 660
Ave coronata, 294–​97 Con plus (Hubertus de Salinis), 546t, 547
Ave corpus sanctum/​Protomartiris/​Gloriose Stefani, Coume le serf a la clere fontainne/​Lunne plainne
20, 504t, 509, 511, 512 d’umilite/​T/​Ct, 685
Ave Maria gracia plena/​O Maria gracia plena Coument se poet/​Se je chante/​Qui prendroit, 332
(Johannes Brassart), 632 Courtois et sages (Magister Egidius Augustinus),
Ave miles triumphalis, 483 364, 621, 639
Ave regina/​Ave mater/​Ave mundi (Dunstaple), 490t Credo (Pennard), 437n.13
Ave regina/​Mater innocencie (Marchetto da Padova), Credo, a3 (Hugo de Lantins), Q15, no. 68), 562
20, 288, 503–​9, 504t, 511 Credo, a3 (Hubertus de Salinis) Q15, no. 55), 540t
Ave sancta mundi/​Agnus Dei (Matteo da Perugia), Credo, a3 (Hubertus de Salinis) (Q15, no. 64), 540t
462n.36, 499–​500, 502, 504t, 508–​11 Credo Anglicanum (attr. Dunstaple), 486–​87
Ave vergene, 553n.11 Credo Omni tempore, Ex. 23.1, Fig.23.1, 12,
Avete (tenor of Musicorum collegio), 348 54, 378, 402, 418, 421, 431–​44
Credo Opem nobis (Leonel), 468
Balsamus et munda cera (Du Fay), 639 Credo, see also Patrem omnipotentem
Beatius se servans/​Cum humanum (Vitry?), 102–​4, Credos in Yox, 402
296–​97, 312, 641, 650, 657 Cristi morte nato mundo, 483
Belle com loiaus, 257, 257f [Cristina] (Ciconia?), 504t, 511–​12, 517–​20, 518f,
Benedicta viscera/​Ave mater/​Ora pro nobis (Gilet 552–​53, 554t
Velut), 35, 638, 673–​75 Cuer gai, 660
Biaute qui toutes (Machaut), 660 Cuers qui se sent, 660
Bone pastor Guillerme/​Bone pastor, qui pastores/​ Cum statua/​Hugo princeps/​Magister invidie (Vitry),
Bone pastor (Machaut, M18), Ex. 13.1, 44, 106, 151, 157, 258, 289, 653
245–​59
dating, 251–​57 Da, magne pater, rector Olimpi/​Donis affatim,
hocket section, 248–​51 perfluit orbis/​T/​Ct, 684
proposed revision, 258–​59 Dame de qui (Machaut), 660
texts, 245–​48 Dame d’onnour, 654
Bonté de corps (Hubertus de Salinis), 544 Dame plaisans/​Trop est la dolour/​Neuma, 653
Dame sans per, 659
[Cacciando per gustar]/​Ay cinci ay toppi (Antonio Danger refus, 660
Zacara da Teramo), 526 D’ardant desir/​Se fus d’amer, 20
Caligo terre/​Virgo mater, 458n.19 De bon espoir/​Puis que/​Speravi (Machaut, M4),
Cantano gl’angiol lieti, 502, 504t, 514 Ex.14.1, 178, 178f, 263–​72
Carbunculus ignitus lilie, 245, 387, 420, 466, 468–​ De ce que fol (Molins), 659
71, 470f De dimmi tu (Landini), 405
Carminibus festos (Antonius Romanus), 509n.30 De fortune (Machaut), 659
Carnalitas, luxuria, 133–​37, 146 De narcisus (Franciscus), 659
texts, 134t De petit peu (Machaut), 659
Caveus, 660 De terre en grec Gaulle appelle (Vitry), 346
Ce est la bele flour (Ugolino of Orvieto), 547 De toutes flours (Machaut), 659
Celice rex regum/​Ingentem gentem, 499n.8 De ventre matris, 403–​4
Celle dont ma joye, 660 Degentis vita/​Cum vix artidici/​Vera pudicitia,
Certes mont fu de grant necessite/​Nous devons 20, 286–​87, 294 –​97, 402, 418, 420–​21, 647,
tresfort amer/​T/​Ct, 683 649, 656
Cetus inseraphici/​Cetus apostolici/​Salve regina, 504t, 511 Demonis astuto, 295
Christe, qui lux es et dies/​Veni creator spiritus Deo gracias conclamemus, 295
(Machaut, M21), 28–​29, 184t, 278 Deo gracias papales/​Deo gracias fidelis/​Deo gracias
Christe qui supra sydera/​Christe nostra salvatio/​T/​ salvator, 295, 499n.8, 631
Ct, 683 Deo gratias, 666–​67
Christe sanctorum/​Tibi Christe/​Tibi Christe Deo gratias motets in Old Hall, 445–​63
(Dunstaple), 490t Deo per confidenciam, 653
Clarus ortu/​Gloriosa mater (Antonius de Civitate; Descendi in ortum meum (Dunstaple),
Antonio da Cividale), 35, 629–​34, 639 Ex. 25.1, 486
Colla iugo/​Bona condit/​Libera me (Vitry), 40, 68n.4, Desolata mater/​Que nutritos/​Filios enutrivi, 68
123, 643, 653 Dessus une fontenelle, 658
 Index of Compositions 717

Detractor est nequissima/​Qui secuntur castra/​ Floret cum Vana Gloria/​Florens vigor/​Neuma
Verbum iniquum, 68, 77n.29, 79–​80, 139–​ (Vitry?), 72, 131–​37
40, 142 texts, 131–​35, 134t
Deus creator omnium/​Rex genitor/​Doucement mi Flos mundi, 474–​75
reconfort, 458n.19 Flos ortus/​Celsa cedrus/​Quam magnus pontifex
Deus compaignouns de Cleremunde, 397 (Vitry), 251–​52, 532f, 533–​36, 609–​13, 657
Deus in adiutorium, 140, 141t Flos regalis Katerina/​Maxentius rex propere/​T/​Ct,
Dies dignus decorari/​Demon dolens/​Iste confessor 684
(Dunstaple), 54, 485, 490t Flos vernalis/​Fiat intencio, 20, 135, 656
Dies sanctificatus, 329, 349 Fons citharizancium (motetus of Sub Arturo),
Dignum summo patri/​Dulciter hymnos/​T/​Ct, 684 380–​81, 382, 395
Dime, Fortuna, poi che tu parlasti (Antonio Zacara Fons origo musicorum, 299, 380–​82, 395
da Teramo?), 624, 625, 628–​29, 639 Fons tocius superbie/​O livoris feritas/​Fera pessima
Doctorum principem/​Melodia suavissima/​T Vir mitis (Machaut, M9), Ex. 9.1, 24, 51,
(Ciconia), 55, 61, 63, 504t, 510, 513, 553–​56, 171–​95, 653
554t, 560, 562–​63, 562f, 565–​66, 569 alliteration, 188–​90
Domine quis habitabit/​De veri cordis adipe/​ hockets, 180–​81, 185
Concupisco (contrafact of Se päour d’umble ranges and cadences 181–​84
astinance), 259n.48, 447n.5, 458n.19 rhymes, 187–​88
Douce playsence/​Garison selon nature/​Neuma quinti rhythmic groupings, 190
toni (Vitry), 52, 72, 94, 131, 145, 155, 241, talea, 177–​78
412, 655 tenor melody, color, 175–​76
relation to Machaut, M10, 241–​42 texts, 173, 186t
tenor, 131 triplum and motetus, 179–​80
Ducalis sedes (Antonius Romanus), 509n.30, 561 Fortune, mere à/​Ma dolour/​T, 653
Dulce melos personemus/​Matrem Christi Franchois sunt nobles (Magister Egidius
rogitemus/​T/​Ct, 68 Augustinus), 364
Fuiez de moi (Alain), 660
Ecclesie militantis (Du Fay), 634–​35, 637, 639 Fulgens iubar ecclesie dei/​Puerpera, pura parens
En amer (Machaut), 659 (Du Fay), 674–​75
En chantant, 257, 610 Furnos reliquisti quare? (Egardus), 396, 397
En Katerine solennia/​Virginalis concio (Byttering),
466, 467–​68, 467f, 479 Garrit gallus/​In nova fert/​Neuma (Vitry), Ex. 4.5,
En la saison (Hubertus de Salinis? Cunelier/​ 67–​81, 97–​109, 136–​37, 140–​42, 144–​46,
Cuvelier, Jo.?), 542n.30, 544–​47, 546t, 626 147–​48, 149–​50, 303–​4, 331–​33, 609–​10
En ma dolour, 648, 660 dating and relationship to Aman and Tribum,
Entre Adan et Hanikel, 283 67–​81, 118, 124–​27
Entre Copin et Bourgeois, 283 interplay with Tribum/​Quoniam, 104–​9, 108f
Entre Jehan et Philippet, 283 quotations from Ovid, 99, 127–​28
Espoir me fuit, 659 Gaude felix/​Gaude mater/​Anna parens (Dunstaple),
Et in terra, 653 490t
Excelsa civitas Vincencia (Bertrand Feragut), 633, 636 Gaude felix parens Yspania nove prolis, 528
Eya dulcis/​Vale placens (Tapissier), 638 Gaude flore virginali (Dunstaple), Ex. 25.2, 486
Gaude virgo salutata/​Gaude virgo singularis/​Virgo
Fa fa mi fa (Johannes Leodiensi[s]‌), 257n.40, 289n.20 mater/​[Ave gemma] (Dunstaple), 490t
Febus mundo oriens/​Lanista vipereus/​Cornibus Gaudeat et exultet . . . Papam querentes (see also
equivocis, 350n.17, 396 Novum sidus), 5, 499, 619–​20, 638
Felix virgo/​Inviolata/​Ad te suspiramus (Machaut, Gemma florens militie/​Hec est dies gloriosa/​T/​Ct,
M23), 656 666, 682
Fenix arabie, 295 Già per gran nobeltà (Nicolaus Zacarie),
Ferre solet/​Anatheos de gracia/​Ave Maria 628–​29, 639
(Johannes Vavassoris), 5, 104n.45, 289n.20, Gloria (Loqueville), 437
387, 412, 618 Gloria (Queldryk), 437–​38
Firmissime fidem teneamus /​Adesto sancta trinitas/​ Gloria Q15 no. 76 (Antonius Romanus), 561–​62
Alleluya (Vitry), 51–​52, 83, 94, 102n.42, 117, Gloria, a3 (Hubertus de Salinis), 540t
125, 141t, 142, 144–​45, 147–​50, 155, 609 Gloria Ad Thome (Leonel Power), 469–​71
Florentia mundi speculum/​Marce pater pietatis, 504t, Gloria Clemens Deus artifex, 617–​18, 638
511–​12, 520–​27, 521f, 533, 532f, 533n.6, 534t, Gloria Clementie pax, 621
536, 537 Gloria in canon (Dunstaple), Ex. 25.3
718 Index of Compositions

Gloria Jubilacio uni Deo (Hubertus de Salinis), 540t, Iste confessor, 659
545–​48, 626, 638 Isti sunt viri sancti, 394
Gloria Suscipe Trinitas (Ciconia), 548n.53, 626, 638 Iubar solis universa/​Fulgor solis non vilescit/​T/​Ct,
Gloria, see also Et in terra 674–​75, 682
Gracieus temps est (Jehannot de Lescurel), 115, 142
Gratiosus fervidus/​Magnanimus opere (Gratiosus de J’ai . . . Imbertus/​Hubertus de Salinis(?), 546t, 547
Padua?), 20, 289, 499n.8, 504t, 510–​11 J’ai grant desespoir, 660
Gratulemur Christicole (Johannes Brassart), 633–​34 J’ai le chapelet, 654
Ja couars n’ara, 658
Han Diex! ou pourai je trouver, 140–​42 Je comence/​Et se je serai li secons/​Soulés viex, 657
Hareu! hareu! le feu/​Helas! ou sera pris confors/​ Je languis, 296
Obediens usque ad mortem (Machaut, M10), Je voi douleur/​Fauvel nous a fait/​Autant, 79
Ex. 12.1, 231–​44, 653 Jour a jour la vie, 660
choice of tenor, 231–​33 Jure quod in opere [recte opera]/​Scariotis geniture/​
relation to other motets, 241–​44 Supreme matris, 66, 656
tenor disposition, 235–​37
tenor motives in upper voices, 237–​40 Karissimi, 657
texts, 233t, 234–​35 Katerina pia virgo purissima, 528
Hareu, hareu, je la [chace], 654 Kyri sponse, 656
He compaignons (Du Fay), 283 Kyrie Clemens pater, conditor syderum, 617–​18, 638
He doux regars, 660
Hé! Mors com tu/​Fine Amour/​Quare non sum Laissiez parler, 660
mortuus (Machaut, M3), 45–​46 L’amoreuse flour/​En l’estat d’amere/​[Sicut fenum
Helas j’ay lonetamps/​Plains sui d’amere/​Infelix, 656 arui], 655
Helas! pour quoy virent/​Corde mesto cantando/​ L’ardure qu’endure/​Tresdouz espoir/​Ego rogavi Deum,
Libera me (Machaut, M12), 245 647, 658
Herodis in pretorio/​Herodis in atrio/​Hey, hure lure, L’autre jour, 655
458–​59, 459n.21 Las . . . (Hubertus de Salinis?), 546t
Hic est precursor, 504t, 529 Lasse! comment/​Se j’aim mon loyal/​Pour quoy me bat
Hic est vere martir, 7, 570 (Machaut, M16), 653
Hodie puer nascitur/​Homo mortalis, firmite/​T/​ Laudibus dignis merito (Jacopo da Bologna?), 504t,
Ct, 684 509n.26, 570
Honte paour (Machaut), 660 Laurea martiri/​Conlaudanda est/​Proba me domine
Hostis Herodes, 2 (Matteo da Perugia?), 502, 504t, 511, 512
Humblement [chace], 657 Lay de Plour (Machaut), 269
Hunc diem festis celebremus hymnis /​Precursoris Le ray au soleyl (Ciconia), 551, 625
verbi solennia/​T/​Ct, 666, 683 Leonarde, pater inclite, 504t, 526, 533n.6
Letetur plebs fidelis/​Pastor qui revelavit (Nicolaus
Ihesu salvator seculi/​Quo vulneratus scelere Zacarie), 628
(Hubertus de Salinis), 532f, 534t, 536, 537, Letificans tristantes, 396
540t, 546–​47, 548, 549f, 625–​26 Li enseignement/​De tous les biens/​Ecce tu pulchra,
Impudenter circumivi/​Virtutibus laudibilis (Vitry), 656, 672
29, 34, 140, 141t, 162–​63, 286, 532f, 533, 534t, Linor aula, 296
536, 537, 674 Los prijs honeur, 461n.29
In dedicatione templi decantabat populus Loyelon loielete, 658
laudem, 358 Luce clarus, 298
In omnem terram, (tenor of Apollinis and Sub Arturo), Luceat laudis/​Organizanter, 645, 654
319, 329, 347, 349, 358, 375–​76, 380, 381 Lucis eterne splendor/​Veni, splendor
In talem transfiguratur/​Iubar lustrat radiosum/​T/​ mirabilis/​T/​Ct, 684
Ct, 683 Lux purpurata/​Diligite (Jacopo da Bologna), 504t,
In virtute/​Decens carmen/​Clamor meus (Vitry), 653 509n.26, 511–​14, 532–​33, 532f, 534t, 536, 537
Incessanter expectavi/​Virtutis ineffabilis/​Alleluya,
674–​75, 683 Ma dame m’a conge, 657
Inclite flos orti Gebenensis (Matheus de Sancto Magne Deus potencie/​Genus regale esperie (Johannes
Johanne), 460, 620, 639 Brassart), 35, 632–​34, 639
Inter amenitatis/​O livor/​Revertenti, 143–​44, 656 Magni patris magna mira/​Ovent Cyprus, Palestina/​
Inter densas/​Imbribus irriguis, 35–​37, 53–​55, 61–​63, T/​Ct, 683
415, 438, 472, 675 Marce Marcum, 504t, 511–​14, 526, 533n.6
 Index of Compositions 719

Maria, mare gratie/​O Maria, celi porta/​T/​Ct, 683 O admirabile, 656

Martine sancte pontifex, 296n.42, 631 O Adonay, domus Israel /​Pictor eterne
Martyrum gemma/​Diligenter/​A Christo (Machaut, syderum/​Ct/​T, 677t, 684
M19), 655 O amicus sponsi primus/​Precursoris preconia
Mass (Machaut), 209–​29, 216f (Johannes?), 26–​28, 401–​29, 423f, 432, 448, 492
analysis of Gloria, 222–​26 O Antoni expulsor demonum, Ex. 26.3, 527–​28
contratenor, 223–​24, 225–​27 O beatum incendium (Ciconia), 553, 554t, 564, 571
Mater alma clementie/​Deitatis triclinium/​T, 682 O canenda/​Rex quem metrorum (Vitry?), 37–​38,
Mater digna Dei, 499n.8 286–​87, 338–​39, 614, 652, 655
Mater formosa/​Gaude virgo, 140–​41 O clavis David aurea /​Quis igitur aperiet/​T/​Ct, 684
Mater munda/​Mater sancta Dei, 466, 471–​72 O crux preciosa, 657
Maugré mon cuer/​De ma dolour/​Quia amore O dira nacio/​Mens in nequicia/​T, 20, 647, 654
(Machaut, M14), 653 O Emanuel, rex noster/​Magne virtutum conditor/​T/​
Merci ou mort, 660 Ct, 684
Miles Christi, 473–​77 O felix templum jubila (Ciconia), 504t, 512, 513n.43,
Mirar non posso (Hugo de Lantins), 628, 639 520, 547, 552–​53, 554t, 556–​68, 557f, 590–​94,
Missa Alma redemptoris (Leonel Power), 59 591f, 592f, 595f, 628–​29
Missa Da gaudiorum premia (Dunstaple), 59 O flos fragrans (Johannes Brassart), 633–​34
Missa Jesu Christe Fili Dei (Dunstaple) 59 O gloriosa domina, 356
Missa Rex seculorum (Dunstaple or Leonel Power) 59 O Maria virgo davitica/​O Maria maris stella, 27–​28,
Missa Sub tuum praesidium (Obrecht), 58–​59 27f, 295, 296–​97, 504t, 510–​11, 512, 558, 568
Misse Caput, 58–​59 O Padua sidus preclarum (Ciconia), 504t, 513n.43,
Mon chant en/​Qui dolereux/​Tristis est anima, 554t, 563, 565, 587f, 595–​601
295n.39, 653, 674–​75, 658 O Petre Christi discipule (Ciconia), 504t, 554t, 558,
Mon mal en bien, en plaisir ma dolour/​Toustens je la 564, 571–​74, 623–25, 638
serviray/​T/​C, 674–​75, 685 O Philippe/​O bone dux, 258, 655
Monachant de morte wilhelmi (=​Mon chant), 295 O proles Hispanie/​O sidus Hispanie (Du Fay), 564,
Mulierum, 658 567, 570
Musicalis sciencia/​Sciencie laudabili/​[Alleluia Dies O proles Yspanie/​O proles nobile depositum
sanctificatus], Ex. 17.1, 50–​51, 298, 306–​8, (Ciconia?), 504t, 553–​56, 554t, 564, 565,
319–​20, 325–​41, 349, 351–​52, 353, 355–​58, 567–​71
363, 364, 372, 391–​92, 397 O que purificacio, 655
named musicians, 333–​41 O Radix Yesse splendida /​Cunti fundent precamina/​
taleae, 329 T/​Ct, 684
Musicorum collegio/​In templo Dei posita/​Avete, O Rex virtutum, gloria /​Quis possit dign[e]‌
Ex. 18.1, 11–​12, 26, 284–​87, 306–​8, 317, exprimere/​T/​Ct, 684
329–​31, 330f, 343–​52, 353, 355–​58, 358, 372, O sacra virgo virginum/​Tu, nati nata suscipe/​T/​Ct,
373, 377–​78, 380, 381–​82, 390, 391–​92, 397 684
calendrical aspects, 12–​13 O Sapientia incarnata/​Nos demoramur, benigne
relation to Musicalis, 329–​30, 330f rector/​T/​Ct, 684
Musicorum decus et species, 396 O virum omnimoda veneracione/​O lux et decus
Musicorum inter collegia, 294–​97, 396 tranensium/​O beate Nicholae (Ciconia), 504t,
529, 552–​53, 554t, 558–​59, 559f, 561, 564,
Nate regnantis super astra/​Maria, proles 566–​67, 590
regina/​T/​Ct, 682 O vos omnes, 346
Natus in patris gremio/​Apparuit sol hodie/​T/​Ct, 682 O/​Nostris lumen tenebris, 140, 141t, 256–​57, 610n.20
Nequicie peniteo, 296–​97 Omni habenti (probably not =​ Omnis terra/​Habenti
Neuma, as tenor, 67, 94–​95, 109, 131 dabitur), 298
Nicolai solemnia, 296n.42, 631n.98 Omni tempore (Credo), Ex. 23.1, Fig. 23.1,
Non eclipsis atra ferrugine, Fig. 21.1, 299, 392–​95 431–​44
Nova stella, 643, 658 Omnis terra/​Habenti dabitur, 358n.7
Nove cantum melodie (Gilles Binchois), 283–​84 Omnium bonorum plena (Loyset Compère), 284
Novum sidus orientis/​Gaudeat et exultet, 4–​5, 34, On parole/​A Paris/​Frese nouvele, 44
499, 619–​20, 638 Orbis orbatus/​Vos pastores (Vitry?), 72, 142,
Nulla pestis est gravior/​Plange, nostra regia/​Vergente, 147–​50
68 Ore Pandulfum modulare dulci, 396
Nuper rosarum flores (Du Fay), 636, 639 Oseletto selvaggio (Jacopo da Bologna?), 283,
Nymphes des bois (Josquin), 284 509, 514
720 Index of Compositions

Padu[a]‌. . . ex panis . . . serenans/​Tenor Pastor bonus Prosapie, 656

(Ciconia?), 504t, 514, 553–​56, 554t, 560–​61, Psallat chorus in novo carmine/​Eximine pater et regie
563–​65, 567–​71, 675 (Hubertus de Salinis), 532f, 534t, 536, 537,
Pantheon abluitur/​Apollinis eclipsatur (additional 540t, 543, 548, 550, 550f
voice for Apollinis), 293–​94, 308, 314–​17 Psallentes zinzugia (additional voice to Apollinis),
Ex. 16.3, 318–​19, 321, 323, 351, 532f, 533, Ex. 16.4, 287, 317–​19, 357, 380, 389, 536
534t, 536, 537 Puisque pites, 654
Par grant soif, clere fontainne/​Dame de tout Pura placens pulcra/​Parfundement plure Absolon,
pris/​T/​Ct, 685 155–​56, 458n.19, 658
Par les bons Gedeons (Filippotto da Caserta), 621, 639
Par maintes foys, 295 Quant en moy/​Amour et biauté/​Amara valde
Pastoribus, 658 (Machaut, M1), 248
Pater ave, 657 Quant la pree, 656
Patrem omnipotentem (Denis le Grant), 657 Quant vraie amour/​O series summe rata/​Super
Patrem omnipotentem (Steve Sort), 658 omnes speciosa (Machaut, M17), 24–​25, 24f
Patrie pacis, 419n.34 Quare fremuerunt, 77, 84, 83n.2, 610
Per grama protho paret/​Valde honorandus est beatus Qui es promesses/​Ha! Fortune/​Et non est qui adjuvat
Johannes (Vitry?), 131, 251–​52, 608–​14, 638 (Machaut, M8), Ex.14.3, 272–​79, 276f,
Personet armonia dulcis cantus, melodia/​Consonet 278f, 646, 654
altisonis laudes notulis Katerine/​T, 675, 678–​ Qui patris atris honoris/​Paraclite spiritus/​T/​Ct, 682
79, 683 Quicunques vuet, 660
Petre clemens/​Lugentium/​T (Vitry), 614–​16, 637, Quod jactatur (Ciconia), 405n.11, 625
638, 654, 672, 674 Quorum doctrina fulget ecclesia (tenor of Non
Petre petre, 655 eclipsis), 392, 394
Petrum Marcello/​O Petre antistes (Ciconia), 35, 55,
504t, 510–​11, 530, 552–​53, 554t, 560–​61, 563, Reverenter veneremur/​Venerandum crucis lignum/​
565, 567, 672n.42 T/​Ct, 682
Phi millies ad te/​O creator/​Iacet granum/​Quam Revien espoir, 659
sufflabit (Vitry), 72, 102, 289, 312, 346, 616 Rex Karole/​Leticie pacis (Philippe Royllart), 4–​5, 29,
Phiton le merveilleux (Machaut), 659 35, 37–​38, 97n.31, 286, 387, 397, 499, 528, 532f,
Pictagore per dogmata/​O terra sancta, suplica/​Rosa 533, 534t, 536, 537, 618–​20, 646–​47, 672
vernans caritatis, 393n.13, 618, 638 Rex rondellorum, 396
Pie pater (Antonius de Civitate; Antonio da Rex sancte Edwarde, 482
Cividale), 561 Rite maiorem Jacobum canamus/​Artibus summis/​
Plasmatoris humani generis/​Verbigine mater ecclesia Ora pro nobis dominum (Du Fay), 55
(Nicolas Grenon), 562 Romanorum rex (Johannes de Sarto), 283–​84
Plaude decus mundi (Christoforus de Monte), Roses et lis (Magister Egidius Augustinus), 364
509n.30 Rota versatilis, 678
Plausu querulo/​Plausu querulo, Ex. 31.1, 20, 641,
651–​52, 651f, 655 S’il estoit nulz qui pleindre/​S’Amours tous amans
Plures errores, 412 joïr/​Et gaudebit cor vestrum (Machaut, M6),
Porta celi fulgentibus/​Assit deus huic domui/​T/​Ct, 682 53, 261
Portio nature/​Ida capillorum/​Ante thronum S’il m’est des d[ . . . ], 532f
(Henricus, or Egidius de Pusiex), 35, 338, Salvatoris mater pia/​O Georgi Deo care/​Benedictus
646–​47, 653, 675 Marie Filius qui ve-​(Damett), 473, 475–​78
Post missarum solennia/​Post misse (Ivrea), 37–​38, Salve cleri speculum, 2
296–​97, 421n.37, 448–52, 453f, 457–​60, 654 Salve mater Domini/​Salve templum gratie/​-​in
Post missarum solennia/​Post misse (Mayshuet?, OH nomine Domini (Sturgeon), 473, 475, 477,
and RC), 445, 449–​52, 453f, 457–​60, 458f 478–​79
Pour ce que mes chans fais (Machaut), 332 Salve regina ‘Virgo mater ecclesie’ (Hubertus de
Pour ce que point fui de la amere espine/​A toi, vierge, Salinis), 540t, 546n.47
me represente/​T/​Ct, 685 Salve scema/​Salve salus/​textless/​Cantant celi
Povero zappator (Lorenzo da Firenze), 510, 560 (Dunstaple), 490t
Preco preheminencie/​Precursor premittitur/​textless/​ Sanctus (Pycard), 405n.10
Inter natos (Dunstaple), 482–​83, 490t Sanctus (‘papale’) (Du Fay), 639
Presulum quo fantus, 499n.8 Sanctus in eternis regnans, pater inque supernis/​
Principum nobilissime (Franciscus =​Landini?), Sanctus et ingenitus pater atque carens genitura/​
288–​89, 504t, 510, 533, 569 T/​Ct, 675, 683
 Index of Compositions 721

Sanctus itaque patriarcha Leuntius (Antonio da Tra quante regione (Hugo de Lantins), 628
Cividale), 528 Trahunt in precipitia/​An diex/​Displicebat, 140–​42
Scariotis geniture/​Jure quod/​Superne matris (Vitry?), Tribum que non abhorruit/​Quoniam secta latronum/​
68, 143, 144, 656 Merito hec patimur (Vitry), 20, 40, 67–​81,
Schag melodie, 296 83–​97, Ex. 4.1, 141–​45, 147–​48, 497
Se cuers ioans/​Rex beatus/​Ave (Vitry?), 68, 79–​81, dating and relationship to Aman and Garrit,
140–​44, 141t, 658 67–​81
Se Galaas (Jo. Cunelier/​Cuvelier), 544–​46 interplay with Garrit gallus/​In nova, 104–​9, 108f
Se grace n’est/​Cum venerint (Ite missa est of Mass of tenor, 91–​96, 179
Tournai), 20, 286–​87, 452, 511, 579–​80, 580f, texts, 88–​91
655 Trinitatem, 504t, 513–​14, 516–​17
Se j’ai par la vostre, 655 Triumphat hodie/​Trop est fol –​Si que la nuit, 458n.19
Se j’onques a mon vivant, 141–​42 Trop ay dure/​Par sauvage, 672
Se je chant mains [chace] (Denis le Grant), 332, 336, Trop plus est belle/​Biauté paree/​Je ne sui mie
650, 654 (Machaut, M20), 56, 654
Se je di qu’en elle tire/​Tres fort m’abrasa/​T/​Ct, 685 Tu qui gregem/​Plange, regni respublica!/​Apprehende
Se Lancelot, 660 arma et scutum et exurge (Machaut, M22), 29
Se päour d’umble astinance/​Diex tan desir estre amés Tu venerandus presul Amandus, 499n.8
de m’amour/​Concupisco, 447–​48n.5, 654; see Tuba sacre fidei proprie/​In arboris empiro prospere/​
also Domine quis habitabit Virgo sum (Vitry), 29, 123, 256, 286, 296n.42,
Servant regem/​O Philippe (Ludowice)/​Rex regum, 68, 411–​12, 657
79, 139–​40, 142, 144, 610, 656
Sì dolce non sonò (Landini), 510 Una panthera (Ciconia), 551
Si nichil actuleris/​In precio precium (Hubertus de unidentified ballade (Hubertus de Salinis), 546t
Salinis), 532f, 534t, 540t, 543, 548, 550 unidentified virelai (Hubertus de Salinis?), 546t
Solaris ardor Romani/​Gregorius sol seculi/​Petre tua Ut te per omnes/​Ingens alumnus Padue (Ciconia), 55,
navicula/​Mariounette douche, 458n.19 504t, 512, 554t, 564–​66, 567n.42
Specialis virgo/​Salve parens inclita (Dunstaple), 488,
490t Vasilissa ergo gaude (Du Fay), 628
Stella celi (Cooke), 471 Ve constat, 656
Ducalis sedes/​Stirps mocinigo (Antonius Romanus), 636 Venecie mundi splendor/​Michael qui Stena domus/​T
Sub Arturo plebs/​Fons citharizancium/​In omnem (Ciconia), 504t, 509–​10, 554t, 563, 565, 586, 587f
terram (Alanus), Ex. 20.1, 26, 284–​85, 287, Veni sancte spiritus et emitte/​Sancti spiritus assit
288, 297–​99, 304–​8, 328–​29, 347–​349, 355–​59, (a3, Dunstaple), 488–​89, 489t, 490t
362–​63, 369–​88, 390–​92, 393–​95, 402, 411–​13, Veni sancte spiritus et emitte/​Veni sancte spiritus et
419–​22, 436, 442, 462–​64, 469–​71, 487, 647 infunde/​Veni creator/​Mentes tuorum
Suffragiose virginis, 419n.35 (a4, Dunstaple), 35, 148, 469–​71, 482–​83, 489,
Summe summy (Gilet Velut), 673 489t, 490t
Summus secretarius (Johannes Brassart), 633–​34 Venite adoremus/​Salve sancta (Carmen), 638
Super cathedram/​Presidentes, 142–​44 Vera pudicitia, 296
Supremum est mortalibus (Du Fay), 635–​36, 639 Veri almi pastoris musicale collegium (Conradus de
Sus une fontayne (Ciconia), 551, 566–​67, 577, 625 Pistoria), 396, 639
Victima laudum pascalis/​Victimis in pascalibus/​
Tant doucement (Machaut), 660 Victime paschali/​Ct, 668, 677, 682
Te dignitas presularis (Johannes Brassart), 633–​34, Virginalis concio, 346
639 see also En Katerine (motetus)
Thalamus puerpere, thronus salomonis/​Quomodo Virginem mire pulcritudinis, 295, 631
cantabimus sub iniqua lege/​T, 101n.38 Vos leonis, 654
Thoma tibi obsequia, 411–​12, 652, 655 Vos quid admiramini/​Gratissima virginis species/​
Tous corps/​De souspirant cuer/​Suspiro Gaude gloriosa (Vitry), Ex. 8.2, 25–​26,
(Machaut, M2), 260–​62 51–​52, 151–​67, 420, 655
Toustans que mon esprit mire/​Qui porroit amer/​T/​
Ct, 685 Zodiacum signis (motetus of Apollinis eclipsatur)
Tout autresi con l’ente fet venir/​Le arrousers de l’eve Zolomina zelus/​Nazarea que decora/​Ave Maria,
qui chiet jus (Thibaut de Champagne), 269 655
 Index of Manuscripts

For these sigla see the List of Manuscripts on pp. xxvii–​xxxiv. Archival sources are mostly not indexed here.
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may appear on only one of
those pages. Where an item appears in a table, only the first page of that table is indexed (t).

Aachen, 151, 157–​59, 160–​61, 163, 448–​49, 450n.8, Ce70, 484

452–​57, 615, 616, 638, 654–​55 Ce300, 486
Ao, 502, 504t, 627 Chantilly, 3, 35, 287, 297, 353, 360, 361f, 362–​63,
Apt, 653, 658–​59 372, 376–​77, 379, 381, 393n.13, 460, 463, 499,
Arras983, 653, 659 542, 544–​46, 546t, 620, 626, 628, 638–​39, 641,
Autun152, 659 646–​47, 649–​50, 653–​60
Civ57, 659
Bamberg, 543n.32, 655 Civ98, 625, 658–​60
BarC853, 285, 293, 294, 309–​10, 313–​14, 536, 653, Columbia, Table 25.1
655, 638 Cop17a, 639
BarC971, 293, 305, 309–​10, 312, 319, 638, 653, Cortona1, 651, 653, 655, 659
656, 658 Cortona2, 295n.40
Basel71, 499, 619, 638 Cu710, 476n.24
Basel72, 34, 499, 619–​20, 638 Cu4435, 299, 395, 486 Table 25.1
Belfast, 499n.8 Cu5963, Table 25.1
Ber49, 653 Cyprus, 661–​82
Ber190, 659
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Mus.theor. 1325, Darmstadt521, 143, 534t, 657
290n.22 Darmstadt3471, 543n.32
Bergamo589, 659 Darmstadt, Hessische Landes-​und
Bern, 34n.38, 534t Hochschulbibliothek MS 705, 290n.22
Boverio, 624–​25, 639 Dor, 438
BOZ1, 296 Douai74, 5, 5n.17, 104n.45, 289n.20, 387n.45, 412
BOZ2, 296–​97 Durham20, 29, 151, 155–​59, 163–​66, 287, 297, 343,
BOZ3, 631n.98 346, 458–​59, 459n.21, 459f, 467n.5, 655, 658
Br19606, 131, 139–​50, 256–​57, 653–​59
Brescia5, 659 Egerton, Table 25.1
Brive, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1, 527–​28 Egidi, 504t, 521f, 526–​27, 533n.6, 536
Brno, 293, 309–​10, 312–​13, 319, 653 Esc10, 151–​52, 157–​59, 655
Brussels758, 655–​56
Brussels5170, 151, 160, 165–​66, 534t, 655 Faenza, 17, 659
Br19606, 34, 84, 131, 139–​143, 256, 333, 534, 658 Ferrell(Vg), 173, 261, 267, 274, 653–​60
BU2216, 554t, 558–​59, 566, 636, 639 Fleischer, 658
Bud298, 659 Florence29, 543n.34
Fountains, 379, 421, 432, 438, 621–​23, 638
Ca29, 659 Fp26, 550, 659–​660
Ca165, 143–​44 Franus, 294
Ca1328, 131, 141–​43, 151, 160, 166, 258, Fribourg2, 358n.8
650, 653–​59 Fribourg260, 289n.21, 655–​56
Canberra, Table 25.1
Cant128/​6, 474n.20, 483 Gdańsk2315, 499n.8
724 Index of Manuscripts

Ghent3360, 659 Maidstone, 486

GR219, 659 Mainz, Stadtbibliothek, MS II 375, 290n.22
GR224, 504t, 533n.6, 638 McV, 608, 612, 638, 657–​59
GRss, 638 Melk391, 660
Melk950, 296
Houghton122, 504t, 516, 540t, 546, 638 Michaelbeuren10, 657
Mo, 33, 4n.16, 46n.17, 56n.43, 96n.28, 143–​44, 283–​
Ivrea, 29, 34, 151, 156–​58, 160, 163, 164–​66, 84, 331–​32, 362, 543n.32, 655n.53
258, 274, 293, 309–​12, 319, 379, 438n.15, ModA, 396, 460n.26, 460n.27, 462n.36, 463, 499–​
448–​60, 614–​18, 638, 646–​47, 649–​50, 653–​ 500, 502, 504t, 620, 625, 639, 659
60, 672–​75 ModB, 3–​4, 483, 484, 639
Montefortino, 499n.8
Jena105, 653 Morgan396, 659–​60
Morgan978, 115
Karlsruhe82, 20, 650, 656 Mu716, 657
Kassel1, 659 Mu3223, 499n.8
Koblenz701, 20, 141–​43, 147–​48, 650, 656 Mu3224, 527
Kremsmünster149, 653 Mu15611, 659
Mu29775, 84–​85, 142
Lausanne8076, 527–​28 MuEm, 27–​28, 504t, 512, 543n.32, 639, 660
Leiden342A, 653
Leiden2515, 293, 299, 309–​10, 312, 392, 394–​ Newberry, 362–​63
95, 653–​59 Norwich6, 486n.50
Leiden2720, 678 Nuremberg9, 499n.8, 631, 656
Leipzig223, 293, 309–​10, 319, 653, 658 Nuremberg9a, 659
Leipzig431, 653
Lo4, 481n.29 OH, 379, 384–​86, 387, 405n.10, 415, 421, 431–​32,
Lo6, 17n.1 437–​38, 443, 445–​64, 465–​93
Lo12, 474n.17 dating, 465–​66
Lo13, 481n.29 Ox7, 155, 358, 447n.5, 458n.19, 482, 654, 658
Lo24, 431n.2 Table 25.1 Ox16, 504t, 517–​20, 552, 554t, 563
Lo36, 660 Ox27, 431n.2
Lo53, 474n.18 O31, Table 25.1
Lo565, 474n.17 Ox32, 445–​48, 450–​51, 458, Table 25.1
Lo763, 468 Ox42, 497n.1
Lo861, 481n.29 Ox81, 2, 148
Lo978, 3n.9 Ox112, 504t, 508
Lo1776, 481n.29 Ox213, 35, 396, 437, 503, 504t, 534t, 536, 540t, 542,
Lo4909, 17n.2, 19–​20 545–​48, 554t, 556, 563, 626, 628–​29, 633–​34,
Lo24198, 458n.19 638–​39, 659, 662–​64, 673
Lo29987, 502, 504t, 538 Ox271*, 141–​43
Lo36579, 431n.2 Table 25.1 Ox308, 332
Lo40725, 431n.2 OxAS56, 293, 650, 653, 656
Lo54324, 486 OxC118, 484n.41
Lo62132A, 101n.38 OxM267, Table 25.1
LoTNA, 285, 287, 293–​94, 299, 313, 317–​19, 389, OxNC362, 458n.19
536, 653 OxS26, 482n.33
Lwa12185, 101n.38, 161n.22, 421n.39 OxU192, Table 25.1
Lwa33327, 543n.32
Lucca184, 563 Pad14, 658
Pad658, 293, 309, 312–​13, 653
MachautA, 3, 28, 172–​73, 259, 261, 267, 641, 653–​60 Pad675, 638
MachautB, 653–​60 Pad1106, 27, 34, 289, 502, 504t, 510, 512,
MachautC, 173, 254–​55, 259, 261, 268, 514, 520, 533, 543n.32, 553–​58, 554t, 561,
272, 653–​60 567–​71, 574
MachautE, 226, 277, 646, 653–​60 Pad1115, 554t
MachautG, 653–​60 Pad1475, 504t, 534t, 621, 638
 Index of Manuscripts 725

Paris146, 2, 67–​81, 83–​109, 111–​29, 135, 139–​50, Stras, 285, 293, 294, 297, 309–​10, 312–​17, 319, 338,
257, 607–​9, 655–​58 396, 396n.16, 536, 540t, 626, 638, 646, 653–​60
Paris196, 659
Paris279, 68n.6, 376n.13 Tallinn, 487, Table 25.1
Paris568, 364, 659 Tarragona1, 534t, 653
Paris571, 68n.5, 77n.29, 84, 139–​44, 255, Tarragona2, 286, 293, 309–​10, 653
259, 655 Todi, 660
Paris837, 115n.9 Toul94, 658
Paris844, 654 Tourn27, 655
Paris934, 84, 155, 256, 412, 652, 655 Tr87, 143–​44, 632–​35, 639, 656, 659
Paris2195, 75n.27 Tr90, 639
Paris2444, 534t, 651, 655, 657 Tr92, 639
Paris3343, 615, 638, 654 Tr93, 639
Paris11411, 543n.32 Trém, 2–​3, 144, 274, 286–​87, 293, 331–​32, 336, 448–​
Paris12044, 91–​92 49, 638, 641–​60
Paris14741, 272 Troyes1397, 534t
Paris22069, 534t, 536, 651, 655, 657 Troyes1949, 257n.40
Pepys1594, 659–​60 Turin10, 660
Perugia2, 528
Perugia3065, 563 Utrecht37, 536n.11, 540t, 548, 626, 660
Philadelphia15, 659
Philadelphia614, 659 V&A, Table 25.1
Philadelphia658, 487 Vat307, 148
Pic, 287, 297, 325, 327f, 330–​32, 333, 650, 654, 656 Vat1260, 657
Pra9, 659–​60 Vat5321, 18
Pra103, 296, 396n.17 Venice24, 286–​87
Princeton103, 432, 437n.13 Venice97, 515n.44
Venice145, 540t, 626, 638
Q1, 540t Vienna123a, 657–​58
Q15, 3–​4, 26–​28, 34–​35, 297, 372, 375–​79, 388, Vienna2856, 657
487–​88, 499, 501–​3, 504t, 512, 516, 528–​30, Vienna3244 , 653
536, 542–​43, 540t, 545–​48, 550, 553–​63, 554t, Vienna4195 , 615–​16, 638, 654
557f, 562f, 567, 571, 616, 625–​26, 632, 633–​36, Vienna5094, 294, 310, 312, 653, 657
638–​39, 642, 662–​64, 673 Vienna661, 527–​28
Vienna922, 294, 309, 653
Redi71, 298n.46
Reina, 544, 639, 659–​60 W1, 7n.20
Robertsbridge, 346, 650, 656 Warsaw378, 638
Rostock, 84n.5, 142 Warsaw8054, 553
Washington1400, 397
SanGiorgio, 504t, 509 WashingtonJ6, 17n.1, 363n.17
Seville25, 17n.1, 366, 500–​1, 509 WolkA, 660
Siena30, 17n.1, 363n.17 WolkB, 660
Siena36, 528–​29, 554t, 558 Worcester160, 482
SienaRavi 3, 528 Wrocław16, 295, 296, 396n.16, 631, 638
SL2211, 286, 293–​94, 305, 314–​17, 499–​500, 504t, Wrocław411, 653, 655, 658
513, 521f, 526, 529, 531–​50, 552, 626, 638, 653, Würz, 534t, 653, 657
655, 659–​60
Solsona109, 658 YorkN3, 143–​44, 656
Speciálnik, 294 Yox, 287, 297, 372–​73, 377, 378, 379, 401–​29, 431–​
Sq, 364, 538 44, 656
 General Index

Incidental and ubiquitous mentions, and most footnote mentions, are not indexed. Principal entries are in
boldface. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may appear on only
one of those pages. Where an item appears in a table, only the first page of that table is indexed (t). Where a
figure or example extends over more than one page, only the first page is indexed (f).

accidentals, 228, 323, 348, 443 ars nova:

acrostics, 5, 115, 206, 252, 288–​89, 338–​39, 364, innovations, 143–​44, 254, 311–​12
508–​10, 544, 570, 608, 612–​14, 621, 666–​67, treatises, 272
675, 682–​84 audience for motets, 13–​14
Adam the Deacon, 369–​72 Augustinian friars, 355–​56
Agincourt motets, 472–​77 Augustinus de Florencia, 353, 355, 362–​63
Alain, see Index of Compositions: Fuiez de moi Avogadro, Pietro, 680–​81
Alanus, J., 288, 297, 304, 369–​87, 463
see also Index of Compositions: Sub Arturo plebs B. de Cluni (Cluny), 288, 302–​4, 307–​8, 328, 357,
Alanus (Aleyn), Johannes (Chapel Royal member, 373, 394–​95
canon of Windsor, d. 1373), 288, 383–​84, signature in motet, 288
386–​87, 463–​64 see also Index of Compositions: Apollinis
Alebram, brother of Gwillelmus ‘Malcharte’, 464 Bagarotti family, 680
Aleyn, W., 288 Bartolomeus de Bononia, 396; see also Index of
Alexander V, Antipope, see Filargo, Pietro Compositions: Arte psalentes
Alís Raurich, Cristina, 20, 135, 650 Bate, Henry, 336
alliteration, 135, 173, 188–​92, 277, 347, 418, 492–​93, Beck, Eleonora M., 503–​8
675, 678–​79 Becker, Ph. Aug., 115, 145
Allsen, Jon Michael, 35, 50 Becket, Thomas, 468, 652
alteration, 36, 53–​54, 101, 147, 155, 160, 259–​62, Beggiamo family, 681
266–​67, 310–​13, 316–​19, 359–​62, 374, 378–​79, Benedict XII, Pope, 340–​41, 614
421, 432, 434, 436, 467, 479, 492, 520, 561–​63 Benedict XIII, Pope (Pedro de Luna), 364–​66, 572
before or by a dot, 101–​2, 147, 261–​62 Bertrand, Pierre, Cardinal, 365
irregular, 157–​58, 260–​62 Besseler, Heinrich, 145, 147, 512, 558, 585, 635, 661–​
minim, 312–​13, 316, 319, 331–​32, 362, 379, 382, 62, 665, 674, 680
402, 421 on isorhythm, 13–​14, 39–​42, 46–​52, 55–​57, 62
Amadeus VIII of Savoy (Antipope Felix V), 661–​62 theory of Harmonieträger, 585
Amatori, Petrus, 355, 363, 366 Bichomus, Nicholaus (Nicholas Beauchamp?
analysis, relation to contemporary sources, 210–​15 Beecham?), 355, 362
Andreas de Florentia, 500 Binchois, Gilles, see Index of Compositions: Nove
Anne of Lusignan, Duchess of Savoy, 661–​62, 681 cantum melodie
and the Cyprus manuscript, 664–​65 Bixolus, Belinus, 508
Antonio da Cividale (Antonius de Civitate Blachly, Alexander, 118–​23
or Civitato), 503; see also Index of Blavot, Petrus, 325–​27, 335, 336, 340
Compositions: Aurea flammigeri, Carminibus Blithe, Richard, 369–​72, 385–​86
festos, Ducalis sedes Boen, Johannes:
Antonio da Tempo, Summa artis rithmici vulgaris Ars [musice], 97n.31, 197n.3, 286
dictaminis, 514–​15 Musica, 136n.10, 328, 579–​80, 580f
Antonio Zacara da Teramo, see Zacara Boethius, 301 –​4, 308, 309, 357, 369–​72, 373, 389,
Antonius Romanus, 503; see also Index of 390, 391–​92
Compositions: Gloria Q15 no. 76 Apel, Boniface IX, Pope, 539, 545, 566, 624–​26
Willi, 49–​50 Bonne of Luxembourg, 272
Apollo, 301–​2, 303–​4, 380–​81 Boogaart, Jacques, 24–​25, 187, 231, 233, 241–​42,
Arnulf of St Ghislain, 579–​80, 583 250, 253, 260–​61, 269, 276–​77
728 General Index

Bowers, Roger, 383–​87, 463–​66, 468, 484–​ texts, 564

86, 621–​23 see also Index of Compositions: Albane misse
Brassart, Johannes, 631–​34; see also Index of celitus, Aler m’en veus, [Cristina], Doctorum
Compositions: Ave Maria gracia plena, principem, Gloria Suscipe Trinitas, Le ray au
Gratulemur Christicole, Magne Deus potencie, soleyl, O beatum incendium, O felix templum
O flos fragrans, Summus secretarius, Te dignitas jubila, O Padua sidus preclarum, O Petre Christi
presularis discipule, O proles Yspanie, O virum omnimoda
Brownlee, Kevin, 5–​6, 128, 170, 197, 202, 204t, 206, veneracione, Padu[a]‌. . . ex panis . . . serenans,
208, 231, 233t, 263–​65, 270, 275 Petrum Marcello, Quod jactatur, Regina
Buff, Carolann, 387, 533n.8, 646 gloriosa, Sus une fontayne, Una panthera, Ut te
Bukofzer, Manfred, 58, 467, 488 per omnes, Venecie mundi splendor
Bus, Gervais du, 139–​40 Ciprianus, 353, 355
Butterfield, Ardis, 140–​42 cithara, 357, 373, 380
Byttering, see Index of Compositions: En Katerine Clark, Alice, 17, 154, 274, 278
solennia Clement VI, Pope, 340–​41, 605, 612–​18, 637
Clement VII, Antipope, 337, 364, 460–​61, 499, 526,
caccias, 500–​1, 503, 514–​16, 531–​32 606, 619–​22, 639
cadence (cadentia), 12–​13, 21–​33, 227–​29, 232, 278, Clement, Simon, 369–​72
330, 377, 415–​17, 502, 585–​88, 595–​601 Clement de Berria (Clement de Berry), 355, 363
Caldwell, John, 403–​4 Clercx, Suzanne, 330, 334–​40, 362–​67, 551, 565, 572
calendrical allusions, 12–​13, 191t, 305n.8, 347, Colonna, Oddo, 633
348, 349 Colonna, Victoria, 639
Canel, Jean (Jean Hanelle?), see Hanelle, Jean color and talea, 12, 43–​44, 61, 154f, 158f, 178f,
canon (instruction), 361f, 376–​77, 415, 477, 489, 266–​68, 266f, 298
560–​61, 562–​63, 668–​69, 670 non-​coincidence of, 63, 177–​78, 181, 319, 609–​10
within motet text, 374, 406–​10 upper-​voice, 40
canons: see also talea
at the fifth, 404–​6, 415 coloration:
mensuration, 403–​5, 415 for imperfection, 53, 304, 331, 379–​80, 421–​22,
on a chant, 405 468, 478, 528
rhythmic, 549, 549f interlocking, 155, 232
Caput masses, 58–​59 red, 101, 379, 402, 411–​13, 466–​67, 467f, 478–​
Carmen, Jean, 645; see also Index of 79, 669
Compositions: Venite adoremus reverse, 411–​14, 623
Carrara, Andrea, Abbot, 504t, 554t, 565, 567 for sesquialtera, 53, 467–​68, 479
Carrara, Stefano, Bishop, 504t, 554t, 565 for syncopation, 377–​79, 477–​78, 67
Cato, citations from, 125–​26 split, 471, 477–​78
Cattin, Giulio, 665 tenor, 379, 514, 561, 623
cauda hirundinis (swallowtail), 379, 388, 402, to change modus, 150, 331
421, 432 void, 331, 379, 402, 623
Cavalerius, Guillermus, 353, 355 Compère, Loyset, see Index of Compositions:
Charles IV, Emperor, 365 Omnium bonorum plena
Charles V, King of France, 286, 336, 499, 620, 643–​ composer signatures, motets with, 288–​89
44, 646–​47 Conradus (Coradus) de Pistorio, Frater, 396; see also
Charles de Valois, 133–​35 Index of Compositions: Veri almi pastoris
Charlotte of Bourbon, Queen of Cyprus, 661–​62 Contarini, Andrea, 504t, 533
musicians of, 662–​64 contrafacta, 259, 447, 553, 554t, 571, 619–​20
Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Machaut, 272 contratenor:
Christoforus de Monte, 503; see also Index of added, 259, 287, 317–​19, 501–​2, 556–​62
Compositions: Plaude decus mundi essential, 154–​60, 232, 353, 359–​61, 404–​17, 432,
Ciconia, Johannes, 497–​530, 551–​74, 575–​602, 452–​53, 460, 502: see also solus tenor
606, 623–​26 inessential, 221–​28, 460, 667–​68
biography, 528–​29, 551 in Italian motets, 512
cadences, 585–​88, 595–​601, 596f–​99f relation to tenor, 154–​60, 404–​17, 320–​
contratenors, 556–​62 21, 582–​83
De proportionibus, 577 Cook, Karen, 366
isorhythm in motets, 55, 563–​64 Cooke, J., 356n.5, 472–​73; see also Index of
Nova musica, 577 Compositions: Alma proles regia, Stella celi
signature in motets, 288–​89 Corner, Marco, Doge, 526
 General Index 729

Cossa, Baldassare, see John XXIII, Antipope Dolce, Brianne, 340

Council of Constance, 628–​31 dots, 101–​4, 147, 157–​59, 260–​62, 309, 394–​95, 411,
counterpoint: 421, 432, 520
florid, 581, 588 for addition, 411
and harmony, 210–​15 for alteration, 101–​2, 147, 261–​62
strict, 579–​80, 582–​83 for division, 83, 102–​4, 118–​23, 143–​44, 260–​61,
see also successive procedures 360, 362, 394–​95, 467, 503–​8, 520
Courtenay, Baudouin, Emperor of for perfection, 159, 266–​67, 359–​60
Constantinople, 336 for syncopation, 157–​350, 362, 432, 478–​79
Crawford, David, 635 double meaning, 10, 12, 70–​71, 76, 83, 116, 127,
Crocker, Richard, 211–​12 133–​37, 139, 207, 250, 406, 420, 433
Cubellus, Jacobus, 566 Du Fay, Guillaume, 628, 662–​63; see also Index of
Cumming, Julie, 634–​35 Compositions: Agnus Custos et pastor ovium,
cursiva, 418, 432, 437 Apostolo glorioso, Balsamus et munda cera,
Cuthbert, Michael Scott, 155–​56, 499n.8, 500–​1, Ecclesie militantis, Fulgens iubar ecclesie dei, He
568, 569, 570 compaignons, Nuper rosarum flores, O proles
Cuvelier, Jacquemart le, 544–​45 Hispanie, Sanctus (‘papale’), Supremum est
Cuvelier/​Cunelier, Jo., 544–​45; see also Index of mortalibus, Vasilissa ergo gaude
Compositions: Se Galaas du Guesclin, Bertrand, 544
Cyprian, 362–​63 du Guesclin, Olivier, 625–​26
Cyprus manuscript, 661–​82 du Pont, Jehan (Johannes), 325–​27, 329, 335, 340
Italian features in motets, 671–​73 Dudas, Richard, 154, 156, 393, 651
motets in, 665–​71 Duèse, Jacques, see John XXII, Pope
stanza to talea relationship, 676–​77 Dunstaple, John:
texts, 674–​76 and the duke of Bedford, 484–​86
and events of 1416, 480–​83
Damett, 472; see also Index of Compositions: motets with isorhythm, 488–​92, 490t
Salvatoris mater pia new discoveries, 486–​88
Dandolo, Francesco, Doge, 504t see also Index of Compositions: Albanus roseo
Dante, 128–​29 rutilat, Ave regina, Christe sanctorum, Credo
De modo componendi tenores motettorum, 17–​20, Anglicanum, Descendi in ortum meum, Dies
43–​44, 319–​21 dignus decorari, Gaude felix, Gaude flore
authorship by Egidius de Morino rejected, 17–​20, virginali, Gaude virgo salutata, Missa Da
337, 364, 498 gaudiorum premia, Missa Jesu Christe Fili Dei,
De Van, Guillaume, 41 Missa Rex seculorum, Preco preheminencie,
Denis le Grant (Denis Normannus?), see le Salve scema, Specialis virgo, Veni sancte Spiritus
Grant, Denis (a3), Veni sancte spiritus et emitte (a4)
Denys de Collors, 345–​46
Deo gratias motets, 445–​462, 667 Earp, Lawrence, 39–​40, 154–​55, 250–​51, 253–​54,
Desiderii (de Latines), Johannes, 353–​55, 362–​ 255, 256–​57, 272, 352, 411–​12, 652
63, 366 Easton, Adam, Cardinal, 622–​23
Desmond, Karen, 96–​97, 158–​60, 162–​63, 255–​56, echo imitation, 552
258–​59, 262, 334, 339 echo openings, 537
Di Bacco, Giuliano, 539, 543–​44, 566–​67, 572–​73, Edmund de Bury (alias Bokenham), 369–​72, 384
623–​25, 651–​52 Edmund de Miresco, 369–​72
diminution, 24–​26, 48–​54, 63–​64, 235–​36, 241, 349, Edward III, King of England, 139–​40
359–​60, 407t, 411–​12, 439–​42, 668–​70, 672 Egardus, 396
in Machaut Motet 2, 260–​62 Eger von Kalkar, Heinrich, 289–​92, 328
in Machaut Motet 18, 250, 255–​56, 258–​59 Egidius Augustinus, Magister, 339, 364; see also
Dionisius Normannus (Denis le Normand), 325–​ Index of Compositions: Courtois et sages,
27, 336 Franchois sunt nobles, Roses et lis
dissonance, 362, 579–​80, 581–​82 Egidius Belwardi de Bruges, 339
in added voices, 319 Egidius de Aurolia (Giles of Orleans), 353–​57,
in contratenors, 558–​59 364 signature in motet, 288; see also Index of
judgement of, 576–​77 Compositions: Alma polis
text-​related, 348 Egidius de Flagiaco, 337
Dit de Fauvain, 139 Egidius de Morino (Gilles de Thérouanne), 231–​
Docta sanctorum patrum, 254 32, 301–​2, 308, 325–​28, 330–​31, 333–​34,
doges, motets for, 504t, 509–​10 337, 339
730 General Index

Egidius de Morino, author of Tractatus Girardus de Colonia, 353–​55, 362–​63

figurarum?, 319–​20 Godefridus (Gaudefridus) de Barilio (Godefroy de
authorship of De modo componendi tenores Baralle), 301–​2, 325–​27, 338
motettorum rejected, 17–​20, 319–​21, 337, golden section, 207–​8, 270, 391
364, 498 Gómez, María Carmen, 313–​14, 330
Egidius de Pusiex, 338; see also Index of Gratiosus de Padua, signature in motet (?), 288–​89 see
Compositions: Portio nature also Index of Compositions: Gratiosus fervidus
Egidius des Burces (Giles de Bruges), 325–​27, Gratrus, 354–​55, 363
335, 339 Gregory the Great, Pope, 369–​72, 373
Egidius of Orleans, Magister, see Egidius de Gregory XI, Pope, 618, 637
Auriola Grenon, Nicolas, see Index of Compositions:
Egidius, Magister Frater, 339, 364 Plasmatoris humani generis
Elmham, Liber metricus, 481–​83 Grocheio, Johannes de, definition of motet, 1–​2
Emiliani, Pietro, Bishop, 504t, 554t, 572–​73, 574, Großtalea, see period
623–​25, 636 Guarin or Guerrinet de Soissons, see Garinus de
Engelbert of Admont, 579 Soissons
Eugene IV, Pope, 631–​32, 634–​39 Guido d’Arezzo, 369–​72, 379–​80
Guilielmus de Francia, 339, 364
Fallows, David, 56–​57, 553, 566–​67 Guillaume de Trie, 252–​54, 255–​56, 259
Fauvain, 139 Guillermus Cavalerii, 362–​63
Fauvel, 69, 76–​77, 134t Guinigi, Lazzaro, 551
marriage to Vain Glory, 133–​35 Guisardus de Cameraco (Guisard de Cambrai),
Fauvel notation and dating, 251–​52 325–​27, 335, 340
Feragut, Bertrand, 635; see also Index of Günther, Ursula, 46, 49–​50, 284–​85, 304–​5, 355–​56,
Compositions: Excelsa civitas Vincencia 358, 364, 366–​67, 375–​76, 460, 499–​500, 544–​
Filargo, Pietro (Antipope Alexander V), 504t, 539–​ 45, 618, 645–​47, 649
42, 545, 547–​48, 554t, 572–​74, 623–​26, 637 Gushee, Lawrence, 334
Filippotto da Caserta, see Index of Gwillelmus ‘Malcharte’, see Malcharte
Compositions: Par les bons Gedeons
Fontaine, Michael de, 643, 645 Haberl, Franz Xavier, 634–​35
Foreastarius, Johannes (John Forester), 353–​55, Hamm, Charles, 635
362–​63, 366 Hanelle, Jean, 662–​65, 679–​80
Fortuna, 85–​86, 96, 115, 272–​73, 274–​79 Hanelle, Mathieu, 662–​63
wheels of, 69, 74–​76, 276–​77 Harrison, Frank Ll., 2, 284–​85, 305, 316–​17, 343,
Foscari, Francesco, Doge, 509n.30 345–​46, 355–​56, 366, 383–​85
Franciscus, Magister, see Landini Hartt, Jared, 32–​33, 149–​50, 272
Franciscus, see Index of Compositions: De narcisus Hauboys, John (J. de Alto Bosco), 369–​72, 385–​86
Franco of Cologne, 290–​91, 369–​72, 373, 379–​80 Helene, Henricus, 301–​2, 334, 338
Fuller, Sarah, 30, 585 Henricus, see Index of Compositions: Portio nature
Furnerii, Theobaldus, 366 Henry IV, King of England, 465–​66
Henry V, Emperor, 67–​68
G. d’Orbendas, 325–​27, 329, 335, 340 Henry V, King of England, 465–​66, 467, 473–​77,
G. de Horarum Fonte, see Tideswell, William of 480, 481
Gace de la Buigne, 331–​32, 336 Herlinger, Jan, 578
Gallo, F. Alberto, 296, 503–​8, 509–​10 Hilarion, St, 661–​62, 664–​65, 666, 682
Galterius de Gardino (Walter de Gardino), 353, hockets, 179–​81, 250–​51, 258–​59, 330, 514–​15, 561
355, 363 criticised, 254, 328–​29
Garinus de Arceys, 337 not breaking words, 245, 248–​52, 249f, 250t,
Garinus de Soissons, 301–​2, 325–​27, 333–​34, 254, 374–​75
335, 337 at talea joins, 185, 233, 331, 350
Gaston Febus, 544–​45 Holford-​Strevens, Leofranc, 125, 148, 155, 392, 564,
Gaufridus de Barilio (Gaudefridus de Baralis), 571, 572–​74, 632, 651
335, 338 Hoppin, Richard, 330, 334–​40, 362–​67, 661–​64, 665,
Geoffroy de Paris, 69 666–​67, 670, 671, 673–​75, 676
Chronique metrique, 117–​18 Howlett, David, 163, 285, 301, 303, 314, 317–​18,
Gesta Henrici Quinti, 481–​83 325, 328, 343, 353, 369, 389, 390, 406, 428–​29,
Gilles de Bruges, see Egidius des Burces 448, 485
Gilles de la Thérouanne, see Egidius de Morino Hubertus (Humbertus, Imbertus) de Salinis,
Giovanni Gasparo da Castelgomberto, 573, 577 536, 539–​50, 625–​26; see also Index of
 General Index 731

Compositions: Adieu plaisir, Bonté de corps, John XXII, Pope, 252, 254, 339, 340–​41, 362–​63,
Con plus, Credo a3, En la saison, Gloria 502, 607–​14, 637
Jubilacio uni Deo, Gloria a3, Ihesu salvator John XXIII, Antipope, 355–​56n.1, 502, 504t, 624–​
seculi, J’ai . . ., Las . . ., Psallat chorus in novo 25, 626, 627, 661–​62
carmine, Salve regina ‘Virgo mater ecclesie’, John II, King of Cyprus, 663–​64
Si nichil actuleris, unidentified ballade, John II, King of France, 343, 345–​46, 349
unidentified virelai John, Duke (later king) of Aragon, 461
Hughes, Andrew, 226 John Duke of Bedford, 480, 482–​83, 484–​86, 487
Hugo, named in Musicorum collegio, 343–​45 John of Bohemia, King, 327, 333–​34, 339
Hugo de Lantins, 628; see also Index of John of Corby, 386
Compositions: Credo Q15 no. 68 John of Exeter, 369–​72, 384–​86
Humfrey Duke of Gloucester, 485 John of Gaunt, 622–​23
Hydrolanos, 362–​63 John of Ipswich (J. Episwich), 369–​72
John of Tewkesbury, 151
imperfection, 374, 378–​79, 391, 394–​95 John the Fearless, 642–​43
remote, 255–​56, 262 Joseph of Exeter, 100, 149
indexes, 2–​4, 8, 18–​19, 437, 486, 500–​1, 641–​ Josquin des Prez, see Index of Compositions:
50, 653–​59 Nymphes des bois
instructions, 359, 562–​63, 668–​69, 670 Jubal, 380–​81
description within motet text, 303–​4, 374, 406 Julian of Speyer, 570
missing, 391, 406, 415–​20, 433
see also canon Katherine, Queen of England, 467
introductions, 29 Katherine, St, 666, 678, 682
introitus, 28–​29, 177–​78, 184–​85, 672 Kügle, Karl, 20, 37, 140, 147, 252, 332, 336, 457, 650,
inversion, 275–​76 662–​67, 674–​75, 679–​81
Isabella, Queen of England, 139–​40
isomelism, 52 Landini, Francesco, 500
isorhythm, 39–​64, 177, 240, 350, 458, 459–​60, 468, signature in motet, 288–​89
488–​92, 490t, 670 see also Index of Compositions: De dimmi tu,
alternative terms for, 60–​62 Principum nobilissime, Sì dolce non sonò
15th-​c. decline, 56–​60 le Grant, Denis, 151–​52, 291, 301–​2, 331–​32, 333–​
in Italian motets, 510, 554t, 563–​64 34, 335, 336, 338, 340–​41, 650; see also Index
notated in alignment, 330–​31 of Compositions: Patrem omnipotentem, Se je
and tenor masses, 57–​60 chant mains [chace]
Leech-​Wilkinson, Daniel, 17–​18, 39, 73, 209–​29,
J. Anglicus (J. Langlois), named in Musicorum 251–​52, 609
collegio, 343–​46 Leonel Power, 390, 465–​66, 468, 485–​86, 488; see
J. de Alto Bosco, see Hauboys, John also Index of Compositions: Credo Opem
J. de Corbe (J. de Corby), 369–​72 nobis, Missa Alma redemptoris
‘Ja’, Magister, 501 Leouns, 288, 389, 390
Jacobus, Speculum musice, 304 signature in motet, 288
date of, 254–​56 Lescurel, Jehannot de, 135, 140–​42; see also Index of
on cadentia, 31–​32 Compositions: Gracieus temps est
Jacobus (Jacques) d’Arras, 325–​27, 329, 335, Levita, Adam, see Adam the Deacon
336, 340 Loqueville, see Index of Compositions: Gloria
Jacopo da Bologna, see Index of Compositions: Lorenzo da Firenze, see Index of Compositions: Povero
Laudibus dignis merito, Lux purpurata, Oseletto zappator
selvaggio Louchart, Audefrois, 340
Janke, Andreas, 531–​32, 538 Louchart, Ingelbert or Engelbert, 325–​27,
Janus, King of Cyprus, 661–​62, 664–​66 335, 339–​40
Jean, duc de Berry, 364 Louis IX, King of France, 139–​40
Jean le Bon, 336 Louis X, King of France, 67–​68, 79–​81, 139
Jeanne de Boulogne, 364 Louis I, duke of Anjou, 460–​61
Jeffroi de Barale, see Godefridus de Barilio Louis, Duke of Anjou, 345–​46
Jerome de Paris, 353–​55, 362–​63 Louis, Count of Geneva, 661, 664
Joanna I, Queen of Naples, 622 Louis of Bavaria, 613–​14
Johannes, named in Musicorum collegio, 343–​45 Louis of Bourbon, 613
Johannes de Sarto: see Index of Louis of Toulouse, 611
Compositions: Romanorum Rex Lucan, citations from, 125
732 General Index

Ludwig, Friedrich, 23 maximodus, 349

on isorhythm, 39, 44–​50 Mayshuet, 445–​64, 471–​72; see also Index of
Compositions: Are post libamina, Post missarum
Machaut, Guillaume de, 301–​2, 308, 309, 325–​27, mensural transformation, 52–​54, 58–​59, 61, 62, 236,
330, 335, 337, 340–​41 260–​61, 359, 378, 391–​92, 432, 438, 471–​72,
authorship, 288–​89 492, 563–​64
dissonances, 215–​20, 222–​26, 227–​28 mensurations, simultaneous, 255–​56
epitaph, 209 Michael de Padua, 501
and isorhythm, 47–​48 Michiel, Albano, Bishop, 504t, 554t, 565
manuscripts, 172–​73, 288–​89 minim rests, see rests
motets, 184t, 652 minim stems, 83–​84, 118–​23
non-​coincident endings, 21–​26 Mocenigo, Tommaso, Doge, 509n.30
tenors, 231–​33 Molins, see Index of Compositions: De ce que fol
see also Index of Compositions: Amours qui a le Morino, Egidius de, see Egidius de Flagiaco
pouoir, Biaute qui toutes, Bone pastor Guillerme, motets:
Christe, qui lux es et dies, Dame de qui, De classification of, 48–​51
bon espoir, De fortune, De petit peu, De toutes with composer signatures, 288–​89
flours, En amer, Felix virgo, Fons tocius superbie, dating of, 4–​5, 126–​27, 131, 133–​37, 139–​50
Hareu! hareu! le feu, Helas! pour quoy virent, five-​part, 285, 313–​14, 321, 389, 459–​60, 471
Honte paour, Lasse! comment, Lay de Plour, indexing by triplum or motetus, 2–​3, 18–​19, 259,
Martyrum gemma, Maugré mon cuer, Phiton le 272, 533, 645–​46
merveilleux, Pour ce que mes chans fais, Quant isoperiodic, 39–​40, 46
vraie amour, Qui es promesses, S’il estoit nulz, notational updating, 254–​59
Tant doucement, Tous corps, Trop plus est belle origins and definitions of, 1–​4
Mâcon, Jean, 643 for popes, 605–​39
madrigals, canonic, 514 Mugge, William (G. Muche or Mughe), 369–​72, 384
Makhairas, Leontios, 662 Muris, Johannes de, 10, 151–​52, 256-​58, 301–​4,
Malatesta, Carlo, 628 308–​9, 311, 325–​27, 334–​36, 614
Malatesta, Cleophe, 628 book loan to Vitry, 151–​52
Malatesta, Pandolfo, 628 Libellus, 311
‘Malcharte’, Alebram, 397 Notitia, 252, 255–​56, 257, 258–​59, 311, 362–​63
‘Malcharte’, Gwillelmus, 397, 464 musica ficta, 583–​85, 601–​2
Malipiero, Francesco, Bishop, 635 Musserey (Mucherye), Jacob, 463–​64; see also
manuscripts, related, 139–​44 Mayshuet
Manzari, Francesca, 544–​45 Mutuilos, 353–​55, 363
Marcello, Pietro, Bishop, 504t, 554t, 565,
572–​73 Nádas, John, 461–​62, 531–​32, 538, 539, 543–​44,
Marchetto da Padova, 283, 288, 363, 501, 508–​11 566–​67, 572–​73, 623–​25, 651–​52
Pomerium, 338–​39, 362–​63 Nevelon d’Amiens, 140–​42
signature in motet, 288 Nichasius, named in Musicorum collegio, 343–​45
use of cross sign for natural, 578 Nicholas V, Antipope, 613–​14
see also Index of Compositions: Ave regina Nicolaus/​Guillermus, see Index of Compositions:
Marconi, T. (Thomas Marcon), 369–​72, 385–​86 Argi vices Poliphemus
Marcus of Viterbo, 504t, 527, 532–​33 Nicholas de Hermondivilla, 340–​41
Marigny, Enguerrand de, 67–​81, 115–​17, 124–​ Nicholas of Hungerford (Nicholaus de Uado
25, 126–​27 Famelico), 369–​72
Marigny motets, 67–​81, 83–​109, 111–​29, 131, 133–​ Nicholas of Trani, St, 566
35, 144–​47 Nicolaus Frangens de Leodio, 355–​56n.1, 627
Martin V, Pope, 626, 628–​31, 633, 639, 663 Nicolaus Zacarie, see Index of Compositions: Già
Martin, Arnaldus, 301–​2, 335, 338 per gran nobeltà, Letetur plebs fidelis
Matheus de Luceu (Mathieu de Luxeuil), 325–​27, non-​coincident endings, 21–​28, 267–​68, 377,
329, 340 388, 415–​17
Matheus de Sancto Johanne, 460–​64, 620 Nosow, Robert, 482–​83, 543–​44, 629–​31, 634
identification with Mayshuet rejected, 460, 463–​64 notation:
see also Index of Compositions: Inclite flos orti conflicting, 310
Gebenensis indicating English origin, 352
Matteo da Perugia, 502, 624–​26; see also Index Italian, 513, 672
of Compositions: Ave sancta mundi, Laurea red, 101–​4, 331–​32
martiri void, 546–​47, 623
 General Index 733

Notitia del valore delle note del canto signature in motet, 288
misurato, 297–​98 Porta, Johannes de Annoniaco (Annonay), 365–​66
number symbolism, 303–​4, 306–​7, 309, 328–​ Power, see Leonel Power
29, 393–​94 Prosdocimus de Beldomandis, Contrapunctus,
577–​85
‘O’ antiphons, 667, 676, 677t, 682 Prosdocimus de Citadella, 508
Obrecht, Jacob, see Index of Compositions: Missa puns, 11–​12, 43–​44, 90, 149, 207–​8, 244, 250, 254,
Sub tuum praesidium 270–​71, 306–​7, 347–​48, 375–​76, 391–​92
onomatopoeia, 10, 188–​90, 260 solmisation, 348, 375
Orpheus, 357, 380–​81 Pycard, 464; see also Index of Compositions: Sanctus
Ovid, quotations from, 76–​77, 85–​91, 96, 99–​101, Pythagoras, 301–​3, 328, 370–​72, 373, 382
104–​7, 124, 125, 127–​29, 149, 303–​4
Oxwick, William (G. Oxwick), 369–​72, Quatuor principalia, 346, 411
385–​86 Queldryk, see Index of Compositions: Gloria

P. de Sancto Dionisio, see Pierre de St Denis Racine, Guillaume, 345–​46

Padua fragments, 530, 536, 550, 553–​56, 554t, 563, Rainalducci, Pietro, see Nicholas V, Antipope
567–​68, 571, 621 Raurich, see Alís Raurich
for individual items see Index of Manuscripts Reaney, Gilbert, 151, 211, 220, 460, 544, 626
Palacio, Robertus de, 301–​2, 308, 325–​27, 329, refrains, 140–​42
335, 337 Regaudus de Tiramonte (Regaud de Tirlemont),
palindromes, 12, 75–​76, 77–​78, 89, 91–​92, 94–​95, 301–​2, 325–​27, 336
101–​2, 107, 176, 192–​93, 235, 265–​66, 307, 432, Reginaldus de Bailleul, 325–​27, 340
434f, 441–​42, 443, 670 Règles de la seconde rhétorique, 544
Pallart, J., named in Musicorum collegio, 343–​45 Renard tradition, 76–​77
Pandolfo III Malatesta, 396 repeat signs, 177, 256, 261, 359, 668
panisorhythm, 49–​51 parts, added, 313–​21: see also rests, 95, 118–​23, 143–​44, 157–​59, 160, 162–​65, 260,
contratenor, added 275, 328–​29, 568
Pennard, see Index of Compositions: Credo as boundaries, 36, 39–​40, 94–​96, 104, 156, 160,
period, supertalea or Großtalea, 163–​64, 202, 206, 235–​36, 239n.28, 305–​6, 331–​32, 440
239–​40, 274–​75 coloured, 102f, 331–​32, 406, 467f, 479f
pes, 374 for displacement or syncopation, 53, 156, 157–​59,
Peter of Dacia, 338–​39 260–​61, 359–​60, 478–​79
Petrarch, 3–​4, 90n.13, 99–​100, 365–​66, 614 with dots of addition, 411, 421
Petrus, Magister, 500–​1 at endings, 21, 23, 24–​27, 35, 91
Petrus Amatori, 353, 355, 362–​63 in hockets 10, 163, 179–​80, 185
Petrus de Brugis (Pierre de Bruges), 301–​2, minim, 250–​52, 256–​57, 311–​14, 331–​32, 352,
335, 338–​39 374–​75, 378–​79, 610–​11
Petrus de Sancto Dionisio, 362–​63 not breaking words, 160, 171, 185, 245, 248, 328–​
Tractatus, 257 29, 374–​75, 419, 468–​69, 470f
Petrus dictus palma ociosa, 311, 581 semibreve, 346, 352
Philip V, King of France, 67–​68, 79, 99–​100, 139–​40, minor, or paired minim, 250–​51, 256–​57
253–​54, 340–​41 major, 331–​32, 379, 421
Philip IV, King of France, 67–​68, 70, 76–​77, 78, syllable placement in relation to, 10, 118–​23
79, 336 text during rests, 11, 162–​63, 166–​67, 513
Philip the Bold, 642–​43 undifferentiated, 251, 256–​57, 257f, 331–​32
Philipoctus or Egidius, Tractatus figurarum, 498 retrograde, 50, 53, 84, 92, 176, 190, 192–​24, 203, 276,
Philippe III, King of Navarre, 333–​34, 336 434, 442, 488–​89, 510
Philippe d’Alençon, 551, 566–​67, 621 rhythm:
Phoebus, 301–​4, 392–​94 palindromic, 237
Picquegny, Ferri de, 67–​68 restricted rhythmic vocabulary, 13, 165, 190,
Picquigny, 67–​68 191t, 440
Pierre de St Denis, 353–​55, 362–​63 upper-​voice, 240
Pierre Roger, see Clement VI, Pope Rizzuti, Alberto, 681
Pierre Roger de Beaufort, see Gregory XI, Pope Robert d’Anjou, King of Naples, 338–​39, 363, 613–​14
Pipudi, Magister Johannes, 357 Robert of Geneva, Cardinal, 461
Planchart, Alejandro, 570, 605, 628, 635, 674–​75 Robertson, Anne Walters, 209
Plumley, Yolanda, 545–​46 Robertus de Hoÿo (Robert de Huy), named in
Porta, J. de, 288, 353–​56, 364–​66 Musicorum collegio, 343–​45
734 General Index

Roesner, Edward, 71–​73, 76 relation to text, 185–​88, 186t, 202, 203–​8, 233t,
Roger, Kévin, 358, 396 241, 250t, 268–​72, 328–​29, 357
Rolandus de Casale, of Santa Giustina, 553–​56, 570 stanza–​talea correspondence, 241, 247–​48, 374–​
Roman de Fauvel, 67–​81, 83–​109, 111–​29 75, 419, 452
chronological paradoxes, 69–​81, 111, 126–​27, see also color and talea; period, supertalea or
140–​42, 145–​47 Großtalea
Rosen, Charles, 42 Tapissier, see Index of Compositions: Eya dulcis
Rossi da Giffoni, Leonardo, 504t, 526 Taxinus de Parisius, 353–​55, 363
‘Roy Henry’, 465–​66 Templars, motets connected with, 68
Royal Choirbook (RC), Table 25.1, Ex. 25.3, tenors, 12–​13
445, 486–​87 ad longum, 35–​37
Royllart, Philippe, see Index of Compositions: coloration, 652
Rex Karole and contratenors, 37–​38
homographic, 21, 24–​26, 35, 43–​44, 49, 52–​53,
Sanders, Ernest, 57, 70, 71, 118–​23, 131, 133–​35, 55, 61–​64, 94, 155, 261, 268, 374, 405, 414, 416,
140, 145, 150, 306, 497 459, 562
Saucier, Catherine, 633–​34 in Italian motets, 511
Schrade, Leo, 71, 83, 93, 131, 133, 145, 147 middle-​voice, 20, 305, 310, 320–​21, 508
Sedulius, 356 motives in upper voices, 13, 84, 91–​96, 147, 238–​
self-​recommendations, authorial, 347–​48 39, 268, 275–​76, 278, 308
semibreves: texts, 12, 84–​85, 116–​17, 175, 203–​8, 271–​72,
stemless, 250–​51, 254, 331–​32, 610, 651–​52 304–​5, 394, 433
updated with stemmed minims, 140, 254–​55, 311 Terencinus de Verona Heremitarum, 501
see also under rests texts, 9–​13
sharps, 123–​24, 146, 471 text distribution, 241
Sigismund, Emperor, 480, 482, 632 Theobaldus, 353–​55, 363
similis ante similem, 157, 310 Thibaut de Champagne, 269; see also Index of
singers criticised, 447–​48 Compositions: Tout autresi con l’ente fet venir
solus tenor, 26–​27, 29, 34–​38, 232, 404–​6, 413–​16, Thomas of Canterbury, St, 652
432, 437, 457, 512, 568, 615–​16, 619, 649, 668 Thomas de Diciaco, 339
stems, 311–​13, 394–​95 Thomas de Duacho (Thomas de Douai), 325–​27, 339
minim, 251, 254–​55 Thomas Duke of Clarence, 465–​66, 468, 471–​72,
Steno, Michele, Doge, 504t, 509, 554t, 565 485–​88
Stephanus, named in Musicorum collegio, 343–​45 Thomson, Rodney M., 484
Steve Sort, see Index of Compositions: Patrem Tideswell, William of (G. de Horarum
omnipotentem Fonte), 369–​72
Stoessel, Jason, 573–​74, 623 Tractatulus de cantu mensurali seu figurativo musice
Stone, Anne, 545, 625 artis (Melk), 296
Strohm, Reinhard, 623, 625, 626, 643, 646, 667 Tractatus de musica mensurabili (Wrocław), 295
Strutevilla or Struteville, J., 353, 355, 362 Tractatus figurarum (Philippus de Caserta or
Sturgeon, Nicholas, 472; see also Index of Egidius), 17–​18, 97n.30, 287, 319–​20, 498
Compositions: Salve mater Domini triplets, minim, 563
successive procedures, 210–​12, 220–​25 triplum–​motetus, order of listing, 645–​46
supertalea, see period Trowell, Brian, 284, 382–​86
syllables, placement of, 10 Tubal (/​Jubal), 369–​72, 373, 381
syncopation:
of tenor and/​or contratenor, 34, 156–​60, 236–​37, Ugolino of Orvieto, 538; see also Index of
266–​67, 305, 359–​62, 391, 467, 478–​79 Compositions: Ce est la bele flour
of upper parts, 260, 275, 277–​78, 319, 352, 362, upper parts, in Italian motets, 511–​12
377–​80, 421, 432, 440–​42, 462–​63, 671 Urban V, Pope, 527
Urban VI, Pope, 499, 526, 619, 621–​23, 637
talea, 182t, 202
curtailed, 21–​28, 163–​64, 167, 377 Vain Glory, 133–​35, 134t
displaced, syncopated, 157–​60, 180, 236, 266–​67, Valquerus de Valenciennis (Volquier de
360–​62, 467 Valenciennes), 325–​27, 335, 340
joins, 176, 180–​81, 185, 232, 236, 238, 240 van den Borren, Charles, 542–​43
non-​coincidence with upper parts, 236–​37, 305–​ Van, Guillaume de, 635
6, 377–​78, 437–​38 Vavassoris, Johannes, 5, 412; see also Index of
patterned by composer, 177–​78 Compositions: Ferre solet
 General Index 735

Veliout, Gillet (Gilet Velut?), 662 cuers ioans, Tribum que non abhorruit, Tuba
Velut, Gilet, 662–​64; see also Index of sacre fidei, Vos quid admiramini
Compositions: Benedicta viscera, voice-​crossing, 11, 124, 148, 171, 190–​92, 195, 239,
Summe summy 268, 275
Vinderhout, Petrus, 339 voice exchange, 148, 406, 437–​38
Visconti, Anglesia, 662 vowel rhyme, 10–​11, 88–​90, 161, 347–​48, 356
Visconti, Bernabò, 662
Visconti, Giangaleazzo, 551, 625 Wathey, Andrew, 126, 139–​40, 317, 333–​34, 384,
Visconti, Luchino, 504t 461–​64, 611, 615–​16, 643, 650
Vitale-​Brovarone, Alessandro, 661, 681 William of Exeter, 384–​85
Vitry, Jean de, 340–​41 Wolf, Johannes, 45
Vitry, Philippe de, 301–​2, 304, 308, 309, 325–​27, word-​painting, 11, 23, 123–​24, 156–​57, 164, 197,
329, 334, 335, 338–​39, 612–​13, 652 205–​6, 244, 260, 275, 350
attributions to, 9, 29, 71–​73, 83, 102–​3, 118–​23, Wright, Craig, 643, 645, 647
127, 139–​50, 151–​67, 286–​87, 288–​89, 311–​ Wright, Peter, 486–​87
12, 346
books borrowed from Muris, 151–​52 Ydrolanus, 353
creator of isorhythmic motet, 47–​48, 51–​
52, 59–​60 Zabarella, Francesco, 504t, 510, 516, 554t, 565–​66,
identity as Gallus, 99–​100 569, 573, 623–​25
signature in motets, 288–​89 Zacara (Zacar), Antonio, da Teramo, 472n.14, 514,
see also Index of Compositions: Almifonis, Aman 539–​42, 548, 551–​52n.5, 572, 606, 623–​26; see
novi, Amer amours, Apta caro, Beatius, Colla also Index of Compositions: [Cacciando per
iugo, Cum statua, De terre en grec Gaulle gustar], Dime, Fortuna
appelle, Douce playsence, Firmissime fidem Zanobi da Strada, Giovanni, 365
teneamus, Floret cum Vana Gloria, Flos ortus, Zayaruznaya, Anna, 29, 34, 39–​41, 44, 252, 258, 274,
Garrit gallus, Impudenter circumivi, In virtute, 448–​49, 452–​57, 612, 615–​16, 650
O canenda, Per grama, Petre clemens, Orbis Ziino, Agostino, 651
orbatus, Phi millies ad te, Scariotis geniture, Se zodiac, 350–​52, 357, 396