Motet Music

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Motet Music

The genesis of the motet is, like the biblical birth of Eve, a matter of appendage. In the case of Eve, a rib was removed from Adam and fashioned into a women; the motet was a rib added to pre-existing clausulae. James C. Thomson describes this development as follows: “In the thirteenth century, perhaps sooner, it became the practice to add a new text to the upper voice of a clausula. The newly worded, was then called motetus.” (Thomson, 56) Despite its somewhat haphazard birth, the form was widely accepted. Grout describes its popularity as: “Thousands of motets were written in the thirteenth century; the style spread from Paris throughout France and to all parts of western Europe.” (Grout, 99)
Originality was not a hallmark of the thirteenth century motet. In fact, of the two essential characteristics of the motet, one was that “it was constructed on a cantus firmus, some pre-existent melody…” (Thomson, 57) The other was that it had at least two different texts. As Grout points out, “the stock of motet melodies, both tenors and upper parts, lay in the public domain; composers and performers freely helped themselves to the music of their predecessors without acknowledgment and altered it without notice.” (Grout, 99)
A unique characteristic of the motet of this period is the mixing of melodies and rhythms. Alfred Einstein described this technique as: “This may be called polymelody, the compulsory combination of the two or more distinct melodies with different rhythms…” (Einstein, 26) With the acceptance of such combinations came the development of
stranger mixtures. Side by side with a sacred liturgical text appeared secular texts of sometimes outrageous contrast. The mixture of sacred and secular text was a result of the fact that less and less notice was taken of the connection between the texts of the tenor and duplum. Einstein theorized this development was arbitrary, however most belief the music is premised on an, “internal perception” (Bukofzer, 28) and to the musician, “to them a detail was a value in itself.” (Mathiassen, 70)
The motet blended the different planes of music. An additional development in the technique of mixing and adding is that not only was it polyphonic, polyrythmic, and polytextual, but music was now polyglot: “one or more vernacular (French) texts might be substituted for Latin ones.” (Thomson, 57)
During this time, composers of the Notre Dame School concerned themselves with the development of clausulae in “rhyth...

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