8 - The Motet

Summary

WE begin with the problem of definition. To paraphrase William S. Newman and Philip Gossett, what is called a motet in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a motet. I propose, therefore, to survey the characteristics of some representative pieces called motets in sources of the period in order to arrive at a conspectus of features that typify the genre and distinguish it from related genres. My premise is that, although contemporaries may on occasion have used the term inconsistently, they are likelier than we to have known what it meant ; we, therefore, ought to use it in a way that is consistent with and respectful of their usage.

The term is found in various kinds of sources : music prints entitled, for example, Motets of the Crown or of the Flower, manuscript materials that contain rubrics employing the term, contemporary narrative accounts (diaries and chronicles) of the professional activities of musical establishments (see the discussion below), contemporary correspondence, contemporary music-theoretical treatises (see the discussion below), and so on. The earliest music prints that employ the term in the title date from the first years of music printing. Later in the sixteenth century, it evidently came to offend the more refined linguistic sensibilities of printers influenced by Renaissance humanism, for whom the medieval term was characteristic of inelegant scholastic Latin usage. They accordingly began to entitle their prints Liber xiii Ecclesiasticarum cantionum quinque vocum (Antwerp : Susato, 1557), for example, or Continuatio Cantionum sacrarum quatuor, quinque, sex, septem, octo, et plurium vocum (Nuremberg : Catharina Gerlach, 1588), changes in nomenclature that cannot be said to be motivated by changes in the type of text set, for example. The titles of other prints reveal more clearly still the discomfiture of their editors concerning the medieval term : one late-sixteenth-century collection is entitled Vincentii Ruffi veronensis musici praeclarissimi, Sacrae modulationes vulgo Motecta, quae potissimos totius anni festos dies compraehendunt, & senis vocibus concinuntur, nunc primum in lucem editae : Liber primus (Brescia : Pietro Maria Marchetti, 1583).