1. I wish to thank David Maw for extensive and invaluable discussions of this material, and am indebted to Elizabeth Eva Leach, Mark Everist, and the anonymous readers of this Journal for their comments and suggestions. Parts of this article were presented at the Yale Song Lab, 2014; the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Birmingham, UK, 2014; the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society / Society of Music Theory, Milwaukee, 2014; the symposium “Ars Antiqua III: Music and Culture in Europe, c. 1150–c. 1330,” Lucca, 2018; the colloquium series at the Music Faculty of the University of Cambridge, 2019; the conference “Música y contextos en el mundo ibérico medieval y renacentista,” Borja, Zaragoza, 2019; as a keynote lecture at the Theory and Analysis Graduate Students Conference of the Society for Music Analysis, Edinburgh, 2019; the conference “Compositeur(s) au Moyen Âge,” Université de Rouen, 2019; and the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Basel, 2019. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the EURIAS Fellowship programme (cofunded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions under Framework Programme 7) and the Institut d’études avancées de Paris.
2. Johannes de Grocheio, Ars musice, 86–87.
3. See the translation of Murino's De modo componendi in Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 1:21.
4. On the semantic potential of tenor quotations in motets, see especially Huot, Allegorical Play. For a summary of the traditional conceptualization of tenors as structural foundations in ars nova motets, see Zayaruznaya, Upper-Voice Structures, 11–21. Zayaruznaya's book, published after this article was accepted for publication, challenges the perceived foundational role of the tenor in fourteenth-century motets, arguing that tenors are often shaped not at the outset of a compositional process, but in response to planned upper-voice structures. Her thesis is complementary to that espoused by the current study for ars antiqua motet tenors.
5. The practice of examining a complex or family of interrelated motets that share the same musical material is well established; see, for example, Baltzer, “Polyphonic Progeny,” and Planchart, “Flower's Children.” Large-scale studies of broader tenor families, considering multiple different motet compositions on the same tenor, are less common. Two notable exceptions are Pacha, “Veritatem Family,” and Klaus Hofmann's book-length study of the thirteenth century's most widely used tenor, in seculum: Hofmann, Untersuchungen zur Kompositionstechnik. The semantic potential of this Easter tenor has also been explored in Rothenberg, “Marian Symbolism of Spring.”