Hearing the Motet
Subtitle: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: November 28, 1996
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780195097092
First sentence: dence.One author, prompted by her new understanding of an upper-voice text, examines a fourteenth-century motet and uncovers multiple layers of structure in addition to the expected isorhythmic skeleton.
Description: The motet was unquestionably one of the most important vocal genres from its inception in late twelfth-century Paris through the Counter-Reformation and beyond. Heard in both sacred and secular contexts, the motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance incorporated a striking wealth of meaning, its verbal textures dense with literary, social, philosophic, and religious reference.

In Hearing the Motet, top scholars in the field provide the fullest picture yet of the motet's "music-poetic" nature, investigating the virtuosic interplay of music and text that distinguished some of the genre's finest work and reading individual motets and motet repertories in ways that illuminate their historical and cultural backgrounds.

How were motets heard in their own time? Did the same motet mean different things to different audiences? To explore these questions, the contributors go beyond traditional musicological methods, at times invoking approaches used in recent literary criticism. Providing a cutting-edge look at performance questions and works by composers such as Josquin, Willaert, Obrecht, Byrd, and Palestrina, the book also draws a valuable new portrait of the motet composer.

Here, intriguingly, the motet composer emerges as a "reader" of the surrounding culture - a musician who knew liturgical practice as well as biblical literature and its exegetical traditions, who moved in social contexts such as humanist gatherings, who understood numerical symbolism and classical allusion, who wrote subtle memorie for patrons, and who found musical models to emulate and distort.

Fresh, broad-ranging, and unique, Hearing the Motet makes indispensable reading for scholars, performers, and students of medieval and Renaissance music, and anyone else with an interest in the musical culture of these periods.