Polyphony of Texts and Music in the Fourteenth-Century Motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta latronum/Merito hec patimur and Its “Quotations”

Abstract

Abstract The late-medieval motet has been criticized as an art form for the incomprehensibility of its simultaneous texts. It is true that such texts cannot be understood at an unprepared hearing, but neither can heterogeneous texts in an operatic ensemble, or certain kinds of musical art that address the mind and eye as much as the ear. Fourteenth-century motet texts were composed and coordinated at least as artfully as the music to which they are wedded, thus magnifying the “hearing” problem. We can only “hear” these compositions adequately if we also do some “listening” outside the real time of actual performance. Although we have no external evidence that our medieval counterparts practiced anything resembling modern analysis on this music, it is my belief that intelligent contemporary appreciation of motets must have depended on some reflection beyond performance, and that whatever form such reflection took, it must have been less visually determined than ours, conditioned as we are to reading scores. Many aspects of the sounds they heard are now wholly inaccessible to us. Analysis can, however, recover-albeit partially-some of the ingredients of informed listening. It is with such recoverable aspects that the present paper will be concerned, and it is in that sense that it addresses “hearing” the motet. It is true that errors in the words as well as the music in the manuscripts that have come down to us give a clear indication that understanding was never complete or that it rapidly decayed, but although the texts may be corrupt, they are not always incorrigible, and the kind of observation and analysis to be exemplified in this paper may take on the status of tools for textual criticism and point to solutions that can inspire some confidence.