In an article published in 1979, Ludwig Finscher defined imitation and text treatment as the main parameters of the stylistic shift he detected in motet composition around 1500, and Josquin Desprez as the composer whose works embodied them most clearly. This volume of twenty-five essays by leading Renaissance musicologists - based on a conference which took place in Bangor (Wales) in 2007 - takes stock of developments in motet research in the intervening three decades. It does focus considerable attention on text treatment and compositional technique (texture and cantus firmus manipulation as much as imitation in the strict sense), but also on questions such as regional repertoires (such as Bohemia and Spain), manuscripts (such as the 'Medici Codex'), and semantic aspects (devotion, symbolism etc.). Josquin's oeuvre, while still the focus of several essays, is contextualized through studies on composers as diverse as Regis, Busnoys, Obrecht, Fevin, Moulu, Gascongne, Gaffurio, Martini, and Senfl. Although there are still many questions to be answered about the motet around 1500 - a period which, according to Joshua Rifkin, is like a 'black hole' for the genre given the lack of extant works, ascriptions, and stylistic consistency - the volume is an important step forward in exploring and understanding this crucial repertoire.

Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.

From its origins in the thirteenth century, the Latin-texted motet in England and France became the most significant and diverse polyphonic genre of the fourteenth, a body of music important both for its texts and its variety of musical structures. However, although the motet in England plays a vital role in the music-historical narrative of the first decades of the 1300s, it has too often been overlooked in modern scholarship, due largely to its preservation in numerous but almost entirely fragmentary sources.0In 2017, substantial new fragments of medieval polyphony came to light. They originated at the Benedictine monastery of Abbotsbury, a major institution located high above Chesil Beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The two leaves once headed an imposing musical scroll, and preserve significant portions of four large-scale Latin-texted motets from early fourteenth-century England.0This book introduces the manuscript and its provenance in Abbotsbury, relates it to other scrolls of late medieval music, contextualizes its motets within the larger corpus of contemporary Latin-texted motets, and analyses and reconstructs each of the motets, providing complete performable transcriptions of three of these compositions as well as three of its large-scale comparands. Spurred by the Dorset discovery, this monograph, the first in thirty-five years devoted to the medieval motet in England, offers a new evaluation of the richness of the English repertory in its own terms.

This book explores the corpus of motet cycles composed and disseminated in manuscript and printed sources of polyphony c.1470-c.1510 (including, but not limited to, the motetti missales). The di?erent chapters investigate issues of textual and musical design, function, and performance, at the same time illuminating the rich devotional and cultural context in which this fascinating repertory flourished. About the series Since its establishment in 1933, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland / Basel Academy of Music) has been involved in the research of historical musical practice. The series Schola Cantorum Basiliensis Scripta presents topical subjects and research results mostly in monographic form, whereby a broad spectrum of issues and presentation formats is cultivated. The publications are intended not only for specialists, but also for students and interested persons outside the immediate field, and in this way encourage an in-depth occupation with the diversity of Early Music.

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 as well a cutting-edge look at performance questions and works by composers such as Josquin, Willaert, Obrecht, Byrd, and Palestrina, the book 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 vital reading for scholars, performers, and students of medieval and Renaissance music, and anyone else with an interest in the musical culture of these periods. Contributors include Rebecca A. Baltzer, Margaret Bent, M. Jennifer Bloxam, David Crook, James Haar, Paula Higgins, Joseph Kerman, Patrick Macey, Craig Monson, Robert Nosow, Jessie Ann Owens, Dolores Pesce, Joshua Rifkin, Anne Walters Robertson, Richard Sherr, and Rob C. Wegman.