First full comprehensive guide to one of the most important genres of music in the Middle Ages. Motets constitute the most important polyphonic genre of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, these compositions are intrinsically involved in the early development of polyphony. This volume - the first to be devotedexclusively to medieval motets - aims to provide a comprehensive guide to them, from a number of different disciplines and perspectives. It addresses crucial matters such as how the motet developed; the rich interplay of musical,poetic, and intertextual modes of meaning specific to the genre; and the changing social and historical circumstances surrounding motets in medieval France, England, and Italy. It also seeks to question many traditional assumptions and received opinions in the area. The first part of the book considers core concepts in motet scholarship: issues of genre, relationships between the motet and other musico-poetic forms, tenor organization, isorhythm, notational development, social functions, and manuscript layout. This is followed by a series of individual case studies which look in detail at a variety of specific pieces, compositional techniques, collections, and subgenres.

The exciting discovery of new music from the Middle Ages sheds new light on knowledge of the medieval motet. From its origins in the thirteenth century, the Latin-texted motet in England and France became the most significant and diverse polyphonic genre of the fourteenth, a body of music important both for its texts and its variety of musical structures. However, although the motet in England plays a vital role in the music-historical narrative of the first decades of the 1300s, it has too often been overlooked in modern scholarship, due largely to its preservation in numerous but almost entirely fragmentary sources. In 2017, substantial new fragments of medieval polyphony came to light. They originated at the Benedictine monastery of Abbotsbury, a major institution located high above Chesil Beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The two leaves once headed an imposing musical scroll, and preserve significant portions of four large-scale Latin-texted motets from early fourteenth-century England. Discovery of this source brings to the fore a massive seven-section motet on St Margaret, hitherto known only through highly fragmentary snippets of two of its four voices, as well as a unicum with extraordinary features addressed to the Virgin Mary and St Nicholas. When coupled with the remaining motets, one on the Ascension and the other on the Virgin Mary, the Dorset motets expand our understanding of how the English developed their own approaches to the genre, forging styles and techniques quite independently of the continental norms against which earlier scholarship has judged (and sometimes demeaned) them. This book introduces the manuscript and its provenance in Abbotsbury, relates it to other scrolls of late medieval music, contextualizes its motets within the larger corpus of contemporary Latin-texted motets, and analyses and reconstructs each of the motets, providing complete performable transcriptions of three of these compositions as well as three of its large-scale comparands. Spurred by the Dorset discovery, this monograph, the first in thirty-five years devoted to the medieval motet in England, offers a new evaluation of the richness of the English repertory in its own terms.

First full comprehensive guide to one of the most important genres of music in the Middle Ages. Motets constitute the most important polyphonic genre of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, these compositions are intrinsically involved in the early development of polyphony. This volume - the first to be devotedexclusively to medieval motets - aims to provide a comprehensive guide to them, from a number of different disciplines and perspectives. It addresses crucial matters such as how the motet developed; the rich interplay of musical,poetic, and intertextual modes of meaning specific to the genre; and the changing social and historical circumstances surrounding motets in medieval France, England, and Italy. It also seeks to question many traditional assumptions and received opinions in the area. The first part of the book considers core concepts in motet scholarship: issues of genre, relationships between the motet and other musico-poetic forms, tenor organization, isorhythm, notational development, social functions, and manuscript layout. This is followed by a series of individual case studies which look in detail at a variety of specific pieces, compositional techniques, collections, and subgenres. JARED C. HARTT is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Contributors: Margaret Bent, Jacques Boogaart, Catherine A. Bradley, Alice V. Clark, Suzannah Clark, KarenDesmond, Lawrence Earp, Sarah Fuller, John Haines, Jared C. Hartt, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Dolores Pesce, Gael Saint-Cricq, Jennifer Saltzstein, Matthew P. Thomson, Stefan Udell, Anna Zayaruznaya, Emily Zazulia