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322 Pages
The Monstrous New Art
Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs, and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text–music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.
anna zayaruznaya is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Yale University. Her research brings the history of musical forms and notation into dialogue with medieval literature, iconography, and the history of ideas. Her work has appeared in the leading journals of her field, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of Musicology. Her study of musical voice-crossings used to depict the action of the goddess Fortune in the motets of Guillaume de Machaut was awarded the 2011 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize by the Medieval Academy of America. She has also received awards and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she was a fellow in 2013–14.
Introduction
For reasons that are not hard to guess, the practice of including audience comments in the published proceedings of academic conferences has been largely abandoned. As standards of documentation have risen, published papers have become more like articles, rendering the idea of printing informal feedback quaint. But where such exchanges survive, they offer evocative glimpses of fields of study at specific moments, inviting the reader to put herself into the action – at least in the role of a fly on the wall. Such an opportunity is afforded by the proceedings of a conference that took place at the Wégimont château near Liège, Belgium, on September 19–23, 1955. The theme was “ars nova” – a shorthand for French musical production in the period c. 1315–1370 borrowed from treatises on notational practice written during this time.
At the start of the conference’s third day, a paper by Indiana University professor Willi Apel was read in absentia. It raised some terminological questions and proposed a system of pseudo-mathematical formulae for summarizing structures of repetition in motets – songs for 3 or 4 voices which are the ars nova’s most characteristic genre. Apel’s system did not catch on, and his Wégimont paper is perhaps most noteworthy as the origin of the term “pan-isorhythmic,” which is still occasionally used to describe motets whose upper voices feature strictly repeating rhythmic patterns.1 Much more interesting from our perspective is the discussion that followed. After a few remarks about rhythmic repetition (“isorhythm”) in tenors and upper voices of motets, it took a swerve towards issues not broached in Apel’s paper: words and meaning.
The collocutors included: Jacques Chailley (1910–1999), a French composer, musicologist, student of Nadia Boulanger, and co-founder of the Colloques; Richard Hoppin (1913–1991), an American musicologist and eventual author of the textbook Medieval Music; Gilbert Reaney (1924–2008), a British musicologist who would move to UCLA in 1961; Suzanne Clercx (later Clercx-Lejeune, 1910–1985), a Belgian musicologist and co-founder of the Colloques; and Fr. René Lenaerts (1902–1992), founder of the Musicology section at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Here, according to the conference proceedings (edited by Chailley), is what they said: m. chailley: Is isorhythmic structure only a structure of the tenor, or do we understand it to be a rhythmic structure that pertains to the other voices as well? mr. hoppin: I think there are structures in the thirteenth-century motet which are already almost isorhythmic, or in any case with [repeating] rhythmic sections clearly discernible. mr. reaney: Moreover, I do not think [Guillaume de] Machaut’s motets are completely isorhythmic.
They are only close to it. mme. clercx: But we should not forget that if music is a mathematical science, it is also, in the modern sense of the word, an art, which is to say that alongside the mathematics at the root of isorhythmic motets there is also the inspiration, the imagination and the necessity of adapting the music, learnedly elaborated, to a text which has its own requirements and could oblige the musician to modify the strict precision of his musical invention. m. lenaerts: I do not think that’s right, since relations between text and music did not come alive until the end of the fourteenth and [beginning of the] fifteenth centuries. What Mr. Apel has put into stark relief in his paper is that the composer begins by making a mathematical schema. m. chailley: Furthermore, we are very familiar today with such a conception, since the formulas excavated by Mr. Apel could be extracted just as well from the music of [Pierre] Boulez. More precisely, Boulez and his partisans very explicitly reclaim for themselves the example of the ars nova.
Their attitude is purely mathematical. mr. hoppin: In the motet Musicalis scientia[/Sciencie laudabili], about which we [i.e. Hoppin and Clercx] talked yesterday, Rhetoric [one of the seven liberal arts] exhorts musicians no longer to sin against the laws of rhetoric and grammar. Pertinently, this motet is pan-isorhythmic and contains seven taleae [rhythmic cycles in the tenor]. m. chailley: I really think that prosody and the sense of the words are of no importance in the isorhythmic motet. It proceeds from a purely musical construction; contemporary music, in this regard, is akin to the ars nova, as the recent cantata of Leibowitz shows well.2
Many of the questions raised on this fall Wednesday in 1955 will ring familiar to scholars working on the ars nova today, insofar as they anticipate the chief debates that have consumed the field in the ensuing 60 years. Other aspects of the conversation – for example, the confident, categorical tone of most of the speakers (“relations between text and music did not come alive until...”) will feel less current, may perhaps even seem quaint in the present climate of hypothesizing and hedging. On the other hand, few of my readers will find the brush-off Suzanne Clercx receives at all amusing. The combined familiarity and foreignness of this snapshot invite comparison both with the conversations that led to it, and with those currently happening in the field. And these conversations, in turn, help to explain the scope and analytical methods of the present book, which explores some specific ways in which text and music do relate (pace Chailley) in a group of ars nova motets. The works in question are united by common themes – monstrosity and hybridity – and evidence similar approaches to form and musical texture. We will get to the monsters in due course; first, musicology.
Structure, sound, and sense It should come as no surprise that questions of structure loomed large at Wégimont, since they remain at the forefront of inquiry today. Even (or perhaps, especially) a casual encounter with ars nova motets leaves an impression of careful, almost obsessive formal planning, and to wonder at this was nothing new in 1955. The repetition of rhythms independently of pitch, dubbed “isorhythm” by Friedrich Ludwig in 1904, naturally draws attention to form.3 In a groundbreaking 1927 study of “The Motet from Franco of Cologne to Philippe de Vitry,” Heinrich Besseler had already analyzed and tabulated the tenor structures of all motets in the chief sources for the repertory – the Machaut, Fauvel, and Ivrea manuscripts.4 His tables track how in each motet an arbitrary rhythmic pattern (usually called talea by medieval theorists) is strung like beads onto a looping, elastic snippet of plainchant (color; these and other terms are defined more fully in the glossary). Besseler’s diagrams also note cases in which upper voices feature repeating rhythms keyed to cycles in the tenor – this is Apel’s “pan-isorhythm.” A completely (“pan-”)isorhythmic motet will have the rhythmic form AAAA(etc.), with its upper voices throughcomposed as regards pitch, while the tenor executes larger cycles of melodic repetition. Accordingly, the motet’s highly structured nature has been a mainstay of its historiography.
In 1929 Rudolf von Ficker commented on the strictness of these “variations upon a rhythmical skeleton that remains unchanged throughout,” claiming that“in the entire history of music hardly an example is found in which the constructive energy of tectonics attains to such a degree of rigidity.” 5 Fast-forwarding almost a century, readers of Richard Taruskin’s 2005 Oxford History of Western Music will still find “the fourteenth-century isorhythmic motet” characterized as “possibly the most hierarchically conceived and rigorously ordered genre in the history of European music.” 6 Which is not to say that nothing has changed in our ideas about motet structures. For example, Margaret Bent has called into question the ubiquitous and imprecise use of “isorhythm,” Ludwig’s modern name for the intersection of color and talea. 7 Some of the Wégimont delegates would have been sympathetic to her argument: later on in the day, historian Edouard Perroy argued against words like “isorhythm” as pedantic neologisms, recommending that we stick to the contemporary terms color and talea. 8 And a question raised by Gilbert Reaney as to whether motet structures could be audible has recently been answered in the affirmative by Alice Clark.9
The twenty-first-century strand of work on isorhythm farthest from the delegates’ concerns is probably Anna Maria Busse Berger’s argument that the structural regularity scholars have tended to see as an end in itself is actually the result of mnemonic practices.10 And even this is somewhat anticipated by a brief discussion later that Wednesday about the possible relationships between talea and the tala of south-Indian Carnatic music, or between medieval hockets and African polyphonic traditions in which notes and rests are quickly exchanged between voices.11 So the conference attendees were ready to discuss terminology and generic boundaries, interested in experiential issues, and open to the mnemonic aspects of isorhythm, even if these were not their primary concerns. As regards structure, the field’s subsequent activities have some continuity with the evident interests of the Wégimont delegates, but the same cannot be said of scholarly attitudes about motet texts and their functions. In this regard the fourteenth-century motet presents two obvious problems, both linked to its famous propensity for simultaneously placing different texts in different voices. The first problem is one of intelligibility: if two texts sound simultaneously, how can they be heard by a listener? And if they cannot be heard, then do they matter? Are they intended to make sense?
Though not mentioned explicitly in the Wégimont discussion, the difficulties raised by polytextuality likely stand behind Chailley’s assertions about the irrelevance of prosody and the sense of the text: after all, which voice’s prosody? Which voice’s sense? This was already cause for alarm in the early 1890s when August Ambros, contemplating a polytextual song surviving in an ars nova source, wrote in exasperation:“What, one must ask, has Robin’s wedding to do with confession-hearing hermits?” 12 Even more troubling to Ambros was the mix of sacred and secular he encountered in a motet from the Montpellier codex (late thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries): Without a doubt the summit of all madness is when, with an absolutely worldly French text sung in one voice, the second sings a sacred Latin text... We have heretofore often remarked on the degeneracy of the fourteenth century; these frivolous combinations of the sacred and profane are a sign of it.13
The rhetoric has cooled since Ambros wrote, but the questions raised by polytextuality lingered, only moving to the forefront of scholarly attention in the 1990s. While it is not the goal of this book to add to that considerable literature, my approach is conditioned by arguments made about listeners and listening. One important development was a turn from deep structure to sonic surface. In his 1993 Discarding Images, Christopher Page suggested that composers of medieval motets were less concerned with the projection of text than they were with creating an attractive wall of sonority. Inspired by his ensemble Gothic Voices, whose matched tones, careful balance, and pervasive blend do indeed privilege sound over the articulation of text, Page downplayed the hyper-intellectual and architectonic view of the motet inherited from the 1950s, drawing in its place a picture of a genre whose chief pleasure was sonic and whose greatest intellectual achievement may have been the denial of intellectual experience.14 More recently, Emma Dillon has built upon Page’s ideas to define a category of sonic experience she terms “supermusical,” which involves “the play on a musical sound wrought through verbal excess.” 15 Outside of music, the supermusical may be evoked by the busy cries of a city market, carnivalesque festivals, or the ravings of the insane; within poetry it is wrought through excessive alliteration, obsessive rhyme, assonance, and other devices that foreground the sonic at the expense of the semantic. And in music, Dillon argues that the motet, in which the “sound of words [is] lost in the mêlée of music”is“the hallmark genre of the supermusical.” 16
Within this framing, the motet’s failure to make sense becomes meaningful in its own right. But the creation of a dense sonic surface is clearly not the only way in which motets signify. Around 1300 the music theorist Johannes de Grocheio famously recommended that the motet “should not be performed in the presence of the uneducated (coram vulgalibus)” since they “do not notice its subtlety.” 17 And some decades later Jacobus identified “a great gathering of discerning people” as an occasion at which motets were performed.18 In the course of this discussion he complains about a performance that was bad because the words could not be understood – thus revealing that the ideal was in fact audience comprehension. Actually, the argument could be made that the “problem” of intelligibility is in no small part a product of modern recordings, which deny to listeners precisely the kinds of information (visual as well as auditory) that would allow them to single out individual streams of sound in the presence of other competing ones. Cognitive scientists call this “the cocktail party problem,” evoking an environment not so different from Jacobus’s “gathering of discerning people.” What has changed, however (in addition to the cocktails), is the means of production.
While recordings are a boon to the study of medieval music, the acousmatic sounds they produce can tell us nothing about the experiences of medieval listeners.19 While some ars nova audience members may have been interested primarily in the pleasing sound of motets, others surely thought about their texts and the musical settings that fixed the delivery of those texts during performance.20 Margaret Bent has suggested that these listeners might have familiarized themselves with the texts and musical structures of motets outside the time they take to perform (three to four minutes on average).21 With a goal of recovering the meanings motets might have had for such prepared, discerning audiences, a large body of work has shown how their multiple texts can relate to each other, to the chant tenor, and to the musical structure of the whole. To put it simply: Suzanne Clercx was right. Texts do have their own requirements, and within the mathematical schemes evident in motet construction there are telltale signs of inspiration and imagination. Words really could “oblige the musician to modify the strict precision of his musical invention.” More than this, it now seems likely that the texts often preceded and influenced the mathematical schemes of isorhythmic form. This was the argument made by Bent about the motet Tribum/Quoniam, 22 in which she saw an Ovidian quotation at the end of the triplum voice as the work’s point of origin: the choice of tenor chant, the structure of the other texts, and hence the composer’s decisions about talea length and syllable count all followed from this.23
And Tribum/Quoniam is not alone. In the last several decades, a number of sensitive analyses of individual works have argued that the music of ars nova motets can reflect their texts through mensural and isorhythmic design, textural manipulation, control of diction, the symbolic use of number, and a wide array of other techniques.24 Attention to the musical, textual, and liturgical content of motet tenors has widened the realm of analysis by contributing further texts with which musical forms might interact.25 And growing awareness of interrelationships between motets has expanded the arena in which musico-poetic associations may play out, prompting analysis on the level of oeuvre or manuscript.26 With regard to text, then, the field finds itself in a completely different place now than it did when Suzanne Clercx’s appeal to an art as well as a science of motets could be brusquely brushed away by Lenaerts’s “je ne le crois pas.” Today her view of the genre seems by far the most reasonable of those expressed on that afternoon.
The perhaps inevitable side-effect of this is that motets have gained a reputation for being “difficult.” As Alice Clark notes, The complexities inherent in the genre – including bitextuality, number symbolism, allusions to other motets, and other techniques that are inaudible or that cloud the surface comprehension of text and music – can make us wonder whether anyone listened at all, and if so, what they heard.27 In other words, and perhaps ironically, analysis that is too attentive to text– music relations and symbolism can circle around through “too much meaning” back to “meaninglessness.” By overwhelming us with its significance, the ars nova motet in this guise may encourage us to shift focus back to deep structure and/or surface sound.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the list of subtleties evoked by Clark is largely compiled from studies of individual motets. Each of these understandably asks a different set of questions, and may even call upon a unique set of methodologies to explore the semantic, cultural, and musical content of the given work. This approach, diametrically opposed to the early twentieth-century projects which aimed to take the entire repertory into account, threatens to render works incommensurable even as it gives each one space to be maximally meaningful. Like the symphony in Mahler’s description, each motet is a world in itself – full of intellectual sophistication, intricate compositional schemes, and deeply coded meaning. But these worlds may well be in different galaxies.28 In terms of its analytical methods as well as its chosen scope, this book aims to occupy a middle ground.
Though some of the phenomena upon which I base my interpretations would be hard to hear, I am chiefly concerned with those aspects of form most salient to the analyst or listener. In some cases this means paying attention to those same repetitive rhythmic structures that occupied the Wégimont crowd. But where their descriptions of motet form usually began with tenors, I start with the more active and audible upper voices. Especially important here will be hockets – rapidly exchanged notes and rests in the upper voices that are, as Clark notes, among the most audible moments in motets.29 Other features foregrounded in this book include changes in declamation (that is, when a voice speeds up or slows down its delivery of text) and in range (when a particular voice sings higher or lower than expected). All of these are audible. Occasionally, the placement of specific words is important to an analytical point being made (as in examples 1.2, 2.8, 3.8–9, 3.12–14, 5.1, and 5.10a and b), but in those cases the word in question is often spoken by both upper voices at once, is the first word of a motet, or is delivered over a space of time that renders it hard to miss. For example, at the beginning of the motetus (middle) voice of Vitry’s Cum Statua/Hugo, the name “Hugo” sounds for about 25 seconds. Not coincidentally, that motet’s text is all about Hugo. If in evaluating musical form this study is interested in big gestures, the same is true of text.
For the most part the focus here is on main ideas – what medieval French authors called the “matière,” or subject matter of their poems. As a reader, a listener, and an analyst, then, I seek to position myself somewhere between Page’s blithe audience member carried away by the sound of words and the sophisticated musicus evoked by Bent. This is by no means to imply that medieval listeners would not have been attuned to more subtle gestures, nor that modern analysts should not dig deeper. It is simply a level of zoom chosen because it fruitfully reveals patterns within and among the works at hand. When motets are considered in broader contexts, their manuscripts and authors often provide useful frames: a work from Fauvel might be best understood alongside its neighboring images and poetry, and one by Machaut might be read in conjunction with others in his oeuvre, or in light of the goings-on at Reims, where he lived for a time.30 In contrast, the motets at the heart of this book are united only by the themes of monstrosity and disjunction (“division” is the overarching category I borrow from the English poet John Gower in Chapter 4). While they share composers and sources among them, many of them (the composers and the motets) traveled as widely as the ideas with which they engage.
Thus I rely on the nebulous frame of a “culture” to inform my readings. That culture (like the motets themselves) is a mixture of courtly and clerkly, and distinctly northern French. But Italian, English, and Walloon voices also appear in this study, and the survival of French motets in sources now in England, Italy, and Germany as well as in France attests to their wide reach. Temporally, the motets discussed are roughly coterminous with the “ars nova” label as used to designate an era in musical composition; namely the years c. 1315–1370. This time-frame coincides with the careers of the two composers most firmly linked with the period: Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) and Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361). Machaut’s corpus is easily defined since he self-anthologized; Vitry’s authorship of some of the motets discussed here can be inferred. Other compositions are unlikely to be the work of either of these men. In most cases, the authorship of a given motet is not important to the arguments made here about it. Occasionally, however, extra levels of meaning emerge from biographical details such as Vitry’s zytiron encounter (Chapter 2). And the zytiron – a marine monster with the body of an armored knight and the tail of a fish – brings us to this book’s matière.
Of monsters and motets In part due to the priorities of the Wégimont generation, ars nova motets still hold a prestigious place within music history, and the “typical” work called upon when an example is needed is high-minded in its purview. Vitry’s Tuba/In arboris, which concerns itself with the Christian mysteries of virgin birth, incarnation, and Trinity, is frequently chosen, as are Machaut’s late political and devotional motets.31 Such works are in keeping with the genre’s broader history. Most of the previous century’s motet texts can be classified as either courtly or religious in nature; the former in continuity with the troubadour and trouvère songs from which they inherited their language, topoi, and refrains; the latter in response to the liturgical plainchant and polyphony from which their tenors and sometimes their upper voices borrowed melodic material.32 And sometime after the 1360s, motets lost their intimate, courtly aspects, transforming into public, monumental works in the service of politics, religion, or both. They stayed this way for the next 600 years. If it were not for the ars nova, the motet as a genre could be neatly defined as a devotional or ceremonial (or, before 1400, courtly) song of intermediate length for two or more voices. The French repertory of c. 1315–60 forces us to tell a different story. Few textbooks fail to mention works such as Tribum/ Quoniam and Garrit/In nova, which rail against courtly and clerical corruption.33
These have as their earliest source a lavishly decorated manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel, an allegorical cautionary tale about the vices some saw as rampant in 1310s France. Fauvel’s name is an acronym made up of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilainie, Variété (fickleness), Envie and Lascheté (cowardice or moral irresoluteness), and in the illuminated manuscript that tells his story he is drawn in turn as a horse, a centaur, and a horse-headed man. The denizens of this Fauvelline world are beset by moral hideousness, and the author of a motet on the first page of the manuscript asks with impatience whether the eyes of the people have not yet seen enough monsters (“non viderunt/Monstra tot oculi”) to make them change their ways.34 Fauvel may seem like an anomaly, and stressing the allegorical meaning of his story rather than the colorful forms in which it is told can bring this invective repertory closer to later devotional and political motets. But Fauvel is not alone. There are enough monsters in the world of motets to make the musicological eye pause and ponder. Not only do motet texts occasionally spend what seem like excessive numbers of lines describing them, but musical settings respond to their presence in striking ways. Hybrid and monstrous creatures, and their musical lives as motets in the years c. 1315–1370, are the topic of The Monstrous New Art.
That said, readers who come to this book to learn about the things that go bump in the night will be disappointed. There is a wealth of teratological literature within the interdisciplinary field of medieval studies, and there be the dragons.35 Here, the bestiary is circumscribed by the topics with which motet texts directly engage. Fauvel is a centaur of sorts; another character is a chimera with the head of a woman, the neck of a horse, feathers, and a fishtail. Two motets discuss a biblical statue with a “horrible countenance” and piecemeal body: a head of gold, a breast of silver, a bronze belly, iron legs, and feet of clay. And then there is the pagan goddess Fortune, split vertically down the middle: finely dressed and beautiful on one side; an old hag in tatters on the other. What unites this motley crew is their lack of unity: they all have pronounced bodily rifts that make them part something, part something(s) else. This study argues that such rifts extend to the musical fabric of the motets in question, which is also fragmented and deformed; the entire musico-poetic complex of a motet can take monstrous shape.
Fourteenth-century composers’ engagement with these creatures may have been spurred in part by a spirit of musical experimentation drawn to their odd forms, and such forms could in turn be given full musical expression only with the advent of the ars nova motet. The idea that songs have forms that can be likened to bodies, and thus can embody beings and ideas, is the focus of Chapter 1. The evidence adduced there ranges from bodily discourse in medieval music and literary theory to evidence from song texts. These findings have implications for narratives about the evolution of musical ontologies (I propose a “creature concept” of the musical object). But for the purposes of the story traced here, the most productive aspect of a rhetoric of “songs alive” lies in the frame for analysis it provides: one which overlays a body with a piece of music. Any body can be so overlaid – human, animal, or angelic, as long as it has a shape. But it is the motets whose texts describe monstrous creatures that are musically fragmented in deliberate ways. Two chapters substantiate this claim through case-studies of musical reactions to the Horatian chimera in In virtute/Decens (Chapter 2) and the biblical statue of many metals in Cum statua/Hugo and Phi millies/O creator (Chapter 3).
The texts of all three works engage in anatomical description, and in the process invite a form of analysis focused on identifying the component parts of the whole. Indeed, the monsters in question help to dictate the units of analysis. What emerges from these case-studies is a toolkit for identifying musical engagement with monstrosity of the fragmented kind. Rhythmic segmentation in the upper voices results in more piecemeal constructions than the tenors alone would lead us to expect. The placement of words is also of importance, and sudden changes in the rate of their declamation allow some parts of motets to be texturally differentiated from other parts. Hockets especially emerge as powerful tools for signifying, signaling, and effecting segmentation. The chimera described in In virtute/Decens has a specific meaning ascribed to it by Horace in his Ars poetica. What the multi-metal statue from the book of Daniel is doing in motets is less clear. Chapter 4 compares Vitry’s reading of the so-called Dream of Precious Metals with other roughly contemporary vernacular adaptations of this story, including those by Machaut, Dante, Boccaccio, Philippe de Mézières, Guillaume de Digulleville, and John Gower.
What emerges from within a great variety of interpretations is a surprising rift between Vitry’s and Machaut’s musical adaptations and the purely poetic ones of most of their colleagues. Simply put, Machaut’s and Vitry’s versions of the statue are more terrifying, menacing, and fragmented than those of their peers. (The exception here is John Gower, who I argue might have been influenced by one or both of the composers.) Chapter 4 is not about motets at all, and reads like an aside. But without understanding how this particularly rich symbol functions outside of the musical realm, it would be hard to appreciate the uniqueness of its musical renditions. In the case of the Dream of Precious Metals, its musicopoetic instantiations are inherently different from the purely poetic ones, showing how the use of a given symbol in song can change the meaning of both symbol and song.
The possibility that musical treatments of given themes are particularly drawn to their disjointed or hybrid aspects leads me in Chapter 5 to posit that division, stratification, and disjunction play key roles in the compositional aesthetics of ars nova motets. Once we have been alerted to the possible importance of stratified subjects and texts, we find them in unexpected places. The fickle courtly lady, a layered body politic, and even the Trinity are interpreted in some motets in ways reminiscent of the monsters in Chapters 2 and 3. Ultimately I suggest that hybridity and division can serve as powerful lenses through which some of the most influential motets of the era can be fruitfully reconsidered. The preoccupations of this book are as linked to the 2010s as the Wégimont discussion was to the 1950s. The conflicting cultural meanings of given symbols, the potential eloquence of forms, the ambiguous ontology of song: not surprisingly, medieval music treatises are largely silent on these points, since they are my preoccupations, not those of their writers.
As a result, and also in accordance with current fashions, this study is necessarily omnivorous in the kinds of evidence it turns to. I look primarily to motets themselves, cognizant that the processes of selecting texts, pairing them with other texts, and controlling their delivery in a musical setting to some extent elucidate the meanings those texts held for their composers. Other hints come from literary treatises such as Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia and glosses on the Convivio. And while, for the most part, motet manuscripts do not come with pictures, the broader book culture of fourteenth-century France provides plenty of images that depict analogous monstrous content in ways that can illuminate some motets’ meanings. There is also a fair amount of poetry in here. Such multi-disciplinary approaches seem suited to the cultural production of the Middle Ages.
A public intellectual like Philippe de Vitry (famous as a poet and composer, expert in law, and, according to his friends, learned in the mathematical sciences) would hardly have been sympathetic to our disciplinary boundaries. He and Machaut combined texts and ideas, images and notes in striking ways, and their output encourages, and rewards, as broad an approach as possible. And if that were not enough, monsters themselves encourage out-of-the-box thinking. Or that is the claim made about them from several disciplinary directions. The anthropologist Dan Sperber calls “perfect animals, hybrids, and monsters... food for symbolic thought,” arguing that they cause us to think about taxonomies in transcending them.36 And the literary scholar David Williams has identified a distinctly medieval “deformed discourse” in which monstrous and hybrid forms enable discussions of the ineffable and irrational, the paradoxical and the absent.37
Their arguments, addressed in Chapters 2 and 5 respectively, help explain why this book occasionally seems undecided as to whether it is about monsters in motets or about ars nova symbolism and genre. It is both, because monsters tend to make us think about language, symbol, genre, and meaning. I do not suggest that all ars nova motets are monstrous. That would be impossible: deformity and hybridity always define themselves against a backdrop of normalcy (a point taken up in Chapter 2). But, as it happens, it is not easy to judge what is normal for an ars nova motet, because a detailed and comprehensive study of the repertory – its formal structures, poetic themes, harmonic tendencies, and common modes of relating text to music – has yet to be written.38 The present volume is not that book, but it necessarily takes some steps in that direction. In the later Middle Ages “monster” was frequently etymologized as deriving from “monstrare” (to show) because such creatures are able to show how things are by showing how they are not.39 And unusual motets yield information about the norms of the genre precisely in those moments when they transgress or push against them (for example, with regard to the relationship between hockets and diminution explored in Chapters 2 and 3).
This book, then, attempts to do double duty – to focus on the peaks and outliers while keeping an eye on the mean. Not all beasts are marginal; some are exemplary (the unicorn, the phoenix). And while it may be that in their formal aspects the motets analyzed here are indeed extreme – if within an account of “standard” compositional procedure they may be as marginal as many a manuscript monster – in another sense they are exemplary: monstrous motets provide us with unambiguous and striking examples of those very links between musical structures and poetic texts whose impossibility Lenaerts proclaimed so confidently. Such examples are timely. If the ars nova motets of 1955 were purely musical and sonic objects, their twenty-first-century versions perhaps suffer from the opposite problem: we expect them to mean too much. As Daniel Leech-Wilkinson warns, The danger [of circular reasoning] is particularly acute when one attempts to read an ars nova motet in detail. It is all too easy... [to claim] sophisticated interrelations between text and music, particularly... [when] every line contains at least one highly charged descriptive word relevant to the theme of the whole. It is inevitable, therefore, that musically striking or distinct gestures will coincide with significant concepts from the text, yet it is impossible to prove that this is anything but coincidence, and thus impossible to argue that it reliably indicates anything else.40 Leech-Wilkinson’s answer to the challenges he identifies is to shift analytical focus back to the formal and sonic features of medieval compositions, either primarily or exclusively.
These are the approaches he modeled in two analyses of Machaut’s rondeau Rose, lis published twenty years apart (1984 and 2003). In the first of these he famously asserted that “in Machaut’s view, at least, musical form operated, to a large extent, independently of textual association.” 41 Understandably, this claim became a whipping-boy; it was already conservative in 1984 and to agree with it now would literally be to set the field back 60 years. But Leech-Wilkinson’s broader warning – or let’s call it a question – about ars nova motets and their ways of encoding meaning is worth taking on board. And here monstrous motets can serve as exemplary animals. Their superimposition of stratified forms with hybrid content is far from subtle, and can hardly be accidental. How might this way of signifying be described? The history of text–music relations has no salient chapters before Renaissance “text-painting,” and thus no name for such connections. The Epilogue proposes the term “form–idea relations” to describe these congruencies and dwells on their driving mechanisms of analogy and allegory. Ultimately I argue that monstrous motets are not marginal. In alerting us to the modes of musical thought that give their curious denizens formal prominence, these works turn out to be indispensible to an understanding of musical and poetic production in the ars nova and beyond. This book’s conclusions are most clearly presented in its final pages. Some of the chapters – the ontological Chapter 1, the case-study in Chapter 2 – can stand alone. Others are more deeply interconnected: Chapter 3 refers frequently back to Chapter 2, and the significance of Chapter 4 is most obvious after reading Chapter 5. A cumulative, emergent approach to argumentation seems warranted because the conclusions depend on many moveable pieces: on the outcomes of analyses, the interpretations of texts, and on interrelationships between works which need to be demonstrated. Much groundwork must be laid, in other words, before it can seem reasonable for me to argue that a monstrous lens has anything new to show us about the ars nova.
And no matter how carefully one hews to the most salient and audible events in text and music, motets are rather complicated creatures; getting to know them takes time. The appendices give texts and editions for the most frequently discussed motets, and a certain amount of page-flipping will be inevitable. But many of this book’s readers will already know that time spent in the company of motets is time well spent. Perhaps the biggest sea-change in the field’s view of ars nova motets since 1955 is that we have come to like them. It may not always be apparent that earlier generations did not. After all, didn’t Chailley relate them to the most recent compositional trends of his own era? In drawing parallels between the “purely mathematical” attitude of “Boulez and his partisans” and ars nova motets, Chailley was not doing either repertory any favors. In his own compositions he preferred more conservative techniques, and used serialism only in the service of satire (for example, in the third movement of his 1953 Suite sans prétention pour Monsieur de Molière for three ondes Martenot).42 As for the “recent cantata” to which Chailley referred, he probably meant René Leibowitz’s The Grip of the Given (op. 21, 1950–54), presumably implying that it does not respond musically to its text, a sonically repetitious account of a sudden thunderstorm.43 In the case of Leibowitz’s cantata, Chailley was in all likelihood reacting to a performance, since the score was not yet published.
When it came to ars nova motets, the modes of engagement available to him were much more limited. While Machaut’s motets had been available in Ludwig’s edition since 1929, the bulk of the ars nova repertory had not yet been published in 1955, and the motets of the Ivrea codex, the main source for mid-century repertory, would have to wait more than a decade for a critical edition.44 It is thus hardly surprising that there were few available recordings – these also would begin to appear only in the 1960s.45 Quite possibly, Chailley and his colleagues knew most ars nova motets as formulas in tables. Making them legible for modern musicians was the primary order of business. To their first editors, these strange works might well have looked less like expressions of human thoughts and emotions than like crosswords or philological puzzles which, when solved, could be used to fill in narratives about the broader progress of musical forms and notations, from the troubadours to Du Fay.
In this context, Suzanne Clercx’s assertion that inspiration and imagination must have been involved understandably fell on deaf ears. But due to the pioneering efforts of that generation, whose editions still support most performances of motets, audiences have come to listen to the repertory with more sympathetic ears. As a result, much recent work, the analyses in this book included, comes from a place of admiration and trust: admiration for motets as the products of careful thought, musical and otherwise; and trust that they “make sense” on a fundamental level – that features which seem strange or unusual are places to look deeper rather than anomalies to gloss over. It is hoped that the recorded examples on this book’s companion website will help keep the artful, playful, and vital aspect of these works in the foreground even as the analyses veer occasionally towards formulas and diagrams that might have felt at home in Wégimont.
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