This book focuses on the literary artistry of the texts of Old French and bilingual motets, notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality.

This complete edition of Gallus Dressler's Latin motets includes a modern transcription of eighty-three of the composer's works. In addition, it features a substantial introduction, based on the most recent research into Dressler's life and music. A detailed critical report shows relationship between the three major editions of Dressler's motets, dating from 1574, 1577 and 1585, and their derivation from Dressler's XC Cantiones Quatuor, Quinque et Plurimum Vocum (1570), as well as several other earlier publications and one manuscript source. The presentation of the Latin texts and their translation into English, plus the identification of the varied sources of the texts and their significance, forms a new contribution to research on Dressler that moves well beyond the partial identification of some of the composer's text sources in previous studies of the composer and his works. This volume includes one motet for eight voices, thirty-seven for four voices, and five from other sources for four and five voices.

This study of partsongs and soloistic music is concerned with the musical settings of classical verse. The work, the first of its kind, is a result of a collaboration between a classicist and a musicologist. This book studies, for the first time, the whole genre of the secular motet to Latin text in the Renaissance. Musicologists and classicists with medieval and Renaissance knowledge, as well as expertise in each other's disciplines, bring together ancient, early Christian, medieval and Renaissance materials in an interdisciplinary exploration of the texts, their settings and the social, political and cultural context of the genre. The book takes as its starting-point Renaissance settings of classical verse, most importantly Virgil's lines from the Aeneid that begin 'Dulces exuviae', the lament of Dido, Queen of Carthage, after being abandoned by Aeneas. This text examines metre and the relationship between the classical materials and the Renaissance works derived from them, and many other matters. The result is to open up of a corner of musical history that has previously been given little recognition, and a new understanding of a much-neglected genre.

Polyphony associated with the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame marks a historical turning point in medieval music. Yet a lack of analytical or theoretical systems has discouraged close study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century musical objects, despite the fact that such creations represent the beginnings of musical composition as we know it. Is musical analysis possible for such medieval repertoires? Catherine A. Bradley demonstrates that it is, presenting new methodologies to illuminate processes of musical and poetic creation, from monophonic plainchant and vernacular French songs, to polyphonic organa, clausulae, and motets in both Latin and French. This book engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring concepts of authorship and originality as well as practices of quotation and musical reworking.