French Motets in the Thirteenth Century
Music, Poetry and Genre

This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France.

Mark Everist (Author)

9780521612043, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 November 2004

216 pages, 9 tables 49 music examples
24.6 x 18.8 x 1.2 cm, 0.392 kg

'An impressive series of practical investigations ... a revisionist work of great importance ... this account will become a classic of its genre.' Musical Times

This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it considers the way we conceive genre in the thirteenth-century motet, and supplements these with principles derived from twentieth-century genre theory. The motet is viewed as the interaction of literary and musical modes whose relationships give meaning to individual musical compositions.

Part I. Origins: 1. Introduction
2. The origins and early history of the motet
3. The French motet
Part II. Genre: 4. The motet enté
5. Rondeau-Motet
6. Refrain cento
7. Devotional forms
8. The motet and genre
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Medieval & Renaissance music [c 1000 to c 1600 AVGC2]