Motet Cycles between Devotion and Liturgy

2019

This book explores the corpus of motet cycles composed and disseminated in manuscript and printed sources of polyphony ca. 1470-ca. 1510, including works by Loyset Compère, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and Franchinus Gaffurius. In doing so, it tackles some of the most essential and stimulating issues of late medieval and Renaissance music, clustering around the role of sacred polyphony in the interaction between devotion and liturgy. The different chapters, organized in four sections, cover topics ranging from the relationship between ritual and cycles to the "shape and sound of prayer texts", revisit the problematic association between Milan, motetti missales and Josquin, and offer a series of case studies approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. By addressing issues of textual and musical design, function, and performance, the book illuminates this fascinating repertory and the rich devotional and cultural context in which it flourished.

Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 56, pp. 179-86., 2003

The homophonic passages usually found in fifteenth-century motets to be sung at the culmination of the mass, the elevation, play a paradoxical role in modern scholarship. On the one hand, these passages serve to identify the liturgical function of the motets and the cycles surrounding them; on the other hand, they are hardly ever analyzed in detail, not only because their homophonic austerity seems to be of little interest, but also because they defy normal analytical procedures. To explain what happens when ‘nothing’ happens, this paper gathers a repertoire of contrapuntal-harmonic stock formulas distinguishable as clausulae, gymel, and tabula naturalis progressions. These progressions can be seen working in very different ways in elevation motets. To imagine composers with these polyphonic complexes at their disposal is to imagine theoretical and practical ways beyond a simple dichotomy between ‘counterpoint’ and ‘harmony’. In the discussion of elevation motets, questions of compositional design, of theoretical context, of performance, and of cultural context coalesce.

Imago Musicae, XXIX, 2017

A modest Marian cycle depicted by Giovanni Domenico Muzi in the small chapel of Santa Maria della Misericordia at Gagliano Aterno (L’Aquila) and dating from the second decade of the seventeenth century, displays a surprising angelic concert related to the Assumption of the Virgin. Despite its rural location and the presumably limited number of beneficiaries, the scene illustrates the performance of two hitherto unknown motets for five voices, composed on cantus firmi derived from the antiphons Ave Maria, gratia plena, and Regina caeli laetare, respectively. Each angel is assigned a partbook-like sheet, perfectly readable and consistent with the instrument he is playing. The unusual features of this representation offer interesting clues as to the possible identity of both the composer (Alessandro Capece?) and the local patron (Don Clemente Perrucci, archpriest of San Martino?), as well as to the overall context in which the work was commissioned, including contemporary Abruzzese soni performances.

Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2013

Canadian University Music Review, 1999

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, 2020

Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era provides new dimensions to the discussion of the immense corpus of polyphonic motets produced and performed in the decades following the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Beyond the genre’s rich connections with contemporary spiritual life and religious experience, the motet is understood here as having a multifaceted life in transmission, performance and reception. By analysing the repertoire itself, but also by studying its material life in books and accounts, in physical places and concrete sonic environments, and by investigating the ways in which the motet was listened to and talked about by contemporaries, the eleven chapters in this book redefine the cultural role of the genre. The motet, thanks to its own protean nature, not bound to any given textual, functional or compositional constraint, was able to convey cultural meanings powerfully, give voice to individual and collective identities, cross linguistic and confessional divides, and incarnate a model of learned and highly expressive musical composition. Case studies include considerations of composers (Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso), cities (Seville and Granada, Milan), books (calendrically ordered collections, non-liturgical music books) and special portions of the repertoire (motets pro defunctis, instrumental intabulations).

2008