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‘SHE HAS A WHEEL THAT TURNS …’: CROSSED AND CONTRADICTORY VOICES IN MACHAUT'S MOTETS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Anna Zayaruznaya
Anna Zayaruznaya*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
Email: zayaruzn@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

The tiered structure of Machaut's motets is often taken for granted: the tenor is the lowest voice, the motetus is in the middle, and the triplum is highest. While this is mostly true of Machaut's work and of Ars nova motets more generally, there are a number of significant exceptions – passages in which the upper voices switch roles and the motetus sings at the top of the texture. The most striking of these are consistently linked with the goddess Fortuna. In Motets 12, 14 and 15, moments of voice-crossing serve to illustrate the actions of the goddess, who traditionally raises the low and lowers the high. While they are certainly symbolic, these instances of voice-crossing are also audible: since the voices retain their distinct rhythmic and textual profiles even while their relative ranges are reversed, voice-crossings allow the listener to hear a musical world turned on its head.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 28 , October 2009 , pp. 185 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Line 6, ‘Et de Fortune amis et à mon gré’. Translations from the French are mine unless otherwise noted. Full texts and translation for Motet 14 are found in Appendix III.

2 Unless otherwise indicated, the music examples follow the reading of Machaut MS Vg (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ferrell MS 1). The spelling and punctuation of texts is also as in Vg. Ars Nova note shapes have been used because their syntactical idiosyncrasies are lost in reduction, but these are not ‘diplomatic’ transcriptions: clefs have been modernised, some unnotated inflections have been added, and no attempt has been made to represent dots of division or scribal spacing of notes. The text underlay, with which the scribe of Vg took particular care, has been preserved.

3 The theme of Fortune in Machaut's motets has been most fully engaged by Jacques Boogaart in his 2001 dissertation, where he argues that a ‘Fortune’ rhythmic pattern is used in Motets 8, 12, 14 and 15 to symbolise the ‘instability and unreliability personified in the figures of Fortune or Faus Semblant’; see ‘“O series summe rata”: De motetten van Guillaume de Machaut. De ordening van het corpus en de samenhang van tekst en muziek’ (Ph.D. diss., Universiteit Utrecht, 2001), pp. 130–47, 491–3. I am grateful to Dr Boogaart for sharing with me an English version of parts of his dissertation dealing with Motets 12 and 15. It is gratifying that we have independently come to similar conclusions about some important aspects of Machaut's work. Anne Walters Robertson also discusses representations of Fortuna in Motets 8 and 12 in Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 132–7, 156–9. Sylvia Huot touches upon Motet 12 in ‘Patience in Adversity: The Courtly Lover and Job in Machaut's Motets 2 and 3’, Medium Aevum, 63 (1994), pp. 222–38, at 233–4. More than his motets, Machaut's Remede de Fortune, with its musical interpolations, as well as his formes fixes poetry, have been a frequent locus of inquiry. For a poetic analysis of five ballades by Machaut in which lovers complain about Fortune, see L. Johnson, Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (Stanford, 1990), pp. 41–56. Elizabeth Eva Leach has analysed two Machaut ballades dealing with Fortuna and two related anonymous ballades preserved in the Reina codex in ‘Fortune's Demesne: The Interrelation of Text and Music in Machaut's Il M'est Avis (B22), De Fortune (B23) and Two Related Anonymous Balades’, Early Music History, 19 (2000), pp. 47–79. A related body of scholarship is that treating the role of Fortuna in motets in the interpolated Roman de Fauvel. On this, see especially M. Bent, ‘Fauvel and Marigny: Which Came First?’, in M. Bent and A. Wathey (eds.), Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris—Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS francais 146 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 35–52.

4 In the discussion of the complementary relationship between Motets 12 and 15, Boogaart has compared the registral exchange between the upper voices until the midpoint of Motet 12 with the division into halves of Motet 15 by means of isorhythmic structure; see ‘“O series summe rata”’, p. 492. He also discusses a highly idiosyncratic passage in Motet 17 where the triplum is the lowest of all three voices; see ‘Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and their Function in Machaut's Motets’, Early Music History, 20 (2001), 1–86 at 49. Finally, Bent describes a moment in Motet 9 where low notes on significant words in the triplum ‘sometimes allow the motetus to soar above it’; see ‘Words and Music in Machaut's “Motet 9”’, Early Music, 31 (2003), pp. 363–88, at 376.

5 For example, Egidius de Murino identifies the order of composition for a motet as tenor, then contratenor (if there is one), then a third voice ‘above [the tenor]’. He also gives instructions on how to compose a type of motet in which the tenor lies above the motetus, but where the relationship between the two newly composed voices is unaltered: ‘make the triplum concord above the motetus as well as you know how and are able to’; see D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Compositional Procedure in the Four-Part Isorhythmic Works of Philippe de Vitry and his Contemporaries’ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1983), pp. 21, 23.

6 E. H. Sanders, ‘Motetus’, in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, <http://www.grovemusic.com>, accessed 4 Apr. 2007.

7 Boogaart's term ‘registral exchange’ is useful, but I wish to emphasise the contrapuntal act of crossing as opposed to the exchange that results vertically. I exclude the last three motets from this study because they belong to a different stylistic period and intellectual sphere. It is also worth noting that none of Machaut's motets belongs to the small group of motets with a central tenor, which include Tribum/Quoniam, Apollinis/Zodiacum, some English motets, and the Tournai motet discussed in M. Bent, ‘Ciconia, Prosdocimus, and the Workings of Musical Grammar as Exemplified in O felix templum and O Padua’, in P. Vendrix (ed.), Johannes Ciconia, musicien de la transition (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 65–106.

8 This passage attracted the attention of Gustave Reese in his search for early examples of imitation. He calls it a ‘somewhat … effective’ attempt on Machaut's part, since the imitation is ‘obscured … by the prefixing, to the melody of the second voice, of a motive that does not belong to the phrase’; see Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940), p. 355.

9 In other genres, the use of voice-crossings may be less regular. In the ballades, Leach has discussed Machaut's use of voice-crossings to avoid awkward contrapuntal situations; see ‘Interpretation and Counterpoint: The Case of Guillaume de Machaut's De toutes flours (B31)’, Music Analysis, 19 (2000), pp. 329–34. See also J. Bain, ‘Theorizing the Cadence in the Music of Machaut’, Journal of Music Theory, 47 (2003), pp. 321–51, at 350.

10 I discuss the issue of intelligibility in ‘Machaut's Motets and the Mechanics of Intelligibility’ (paper presented at the tenth international symposium on late medieval and early Renaissance music, Kloster Neustift/Novacella, Italy, 6 July 2006), and in my dissertation, currently in progress.

11 The importance of the midpoint in Machaut's music has been investigated on several levels. With respect to the ordering of the motets, Thomas Brown has noticed parallels between the midpoint speech of Amours in the Rose and the middle lines (12–13) of the motetus of Motet 10. Placing the midpoint of the sequence at the ‘silence between M10 and M11’, Brown proposes a mirrored structure in the ordering of Motets 1–20; see ‘Another Mirror for Lovers? Order, Structure and Allusion in Machaut's Motets’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 10 (2001), pp. 121–33, at 128–32. Focusing instead on the first seventeen motets as an ordered unit, Robertson has argued for Motet 9 as an important midpoint, with its fera pessima (most evil beast) analogous to the minotaur at the centre of a maze; see Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, pp. 168–74. In individual pieces of music, the midpoint is sometimes marked by textual or isorhythmic means. For the former, see Brown, ‘Another Mirror for Lovers?’, p. 126; for the latter, Boogaart, ‘“O series summe rata”’, p. 492. In the mass, Owen Rees points to ‘an aurally striking emphasis upon the midpoint’ of the Kyrie I, Christe, Agnus I and Agnus II; see ‘Machaut's Mass and Sounding Number’, in E. E. Leach (ed.), Machaut's Music: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 95–110, at 103. Some important caveats are offered by David Maw in ‘Machaut and the “Critical” Phase of Medieval Polyphony’, Music & Letters, 87 (2006), pp. 262–94, at 285–6.

12 Machaut's other bilingual motet is Quant vraie Amour/O series summe rata/Super omnes speciosa (Motet 17).

13 For another detailed analysis of this motetus, see Boogaart, ‘“O series summe rata”’, pp. 38–9, 103–4.

14 S. Huot, ‘Reading the Lies of Poets: The Literal and the Allegorical in Machaut's Fonteinne amoureuse’, Philological Quarterly, 85 (2006), pp. 25–48, at 36. On mixing the erotic and sacred realms, see also ead., ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry’, Modern Philology, 100 (2002), pp. 169–95 and ‘Reliving the Roman de la Rose: Allegory and Irony in Machaut's Voir Dit’, in R. B. Palmer (ed.), Chaucer's French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of Self and Tradition (Georgia State Literary Studies, 10; New York, 1999), pp. 47–69.

15 Douglas Kelly was perhaps not including the motet texts when he wrote that ‘in only one poem, an isolated ballade, does Machaut [move] from courtly love to a specifically religious sentiment’; Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison, Wis., 1978), p. 104 n. 40.

16 S. Huot, ‘Reading across Genres: Froissart's Joli buisson de jonece and Machaut's Motets’, French Studies, 57 (2003), pp. 1–10, at 5.

17 I am grateful to Rob Getz for his translation of this motetus.

18 Indeed, Machaut's reliance on Boethius is self-declared – a passage in the Remede de Fortune reminds the reader that ‘Boeces si nous raconte / Q'on ne doit mie fair conte / De ses anuis’, ll. 982–4, Machaut, Le jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de fortune, trans. J. I. Wimsatt and W. W. Kibler (Athens, Ga., 1988), p. 222. Huot treats the courtly transformation of Boethius in Machaut's dits in ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry’. Boogaart points to Boethius’ panegyric of Love in Book II, metrum 8 as a rhetorical model for the triplum of Motet 17; ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, pp. 42–4. Robertson also links Motet 17 with Boethius and posits that a passage from the Consolatio (Book II, prose 8) served as an inspiration for the motetus of Motet 12 in particular: Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, pp. 156–7, 174–5. Huot points to the opening passage of the Consolation and its ‘particular relevance … to the poetics of the vernacular Motet’, analysing the motetus of Motet 12 as her example: ‘Patience in Adversity’, pp. 233–4.

19 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. Watts (Baltimore, 1969), p. 109. For ease of reference I use a widely available edition of the Latin Consolation. However, it is likely that Machaut would have encountered it in the French: there are no fewer than thirteen medieval French translations of the Consolatio surviving, of which eleven are from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of these, the most famous was by Jean de Meun; see N. H. Kaylor, The Medieval Consolation of Philosophy: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland Medieval Bibliographies, 7; New York, 1992), ch. 4 (‘The Medieval French Tradition’).

20 This mediation often leads to her degradation, but in at least two isolated cases it causes her exaltation and identification with divine Providence; see T. Hunt, ‘The Christianization of Fortune’, Nottingham French Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 93–113, at 99–100, 105–13.

21 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. C. Dahlberg, 3rd edn. (Princeton, 1995), p. 87.

22 ‘Comment l'amant fait une complainte de Fortune et de sa roe’, fol. 30.

23 See A. H. Nelson, ‘Mechanical Wheels of Fortune, 1100–1547’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43 (1980), pp. 227–33, at 227.

24 D. Leo, ‘Looking at Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts’, paper presented at ‘Guillaume de Machaut: Musica Arte Poesia Storia’, Seminari internazionali estivi Jacopo da Bologna, Dozza, 5–9 July 2004.

25 Lines 911–15, Le jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune, trans. Wimsatt and Kibler, pp. 218–19.

26 The choice may seem like an obvious one, but there are other possible loci of attention, such as Fortune's embodiment of opposite states, or her falseness – qualities discussed in later stanzas of the complainte.

27 The dark image bleeds through considerably, which adds to an effect of unity between the depiction of the creation of the complainte and that piece itself. The first appearance of ‘tourne’ is in fact overlapped with the top of the wheel, and with the lover – a fortuitous coincidence.

28 Line 199; Machaut, The Fountain of Love and Two Other Love Vision Poems, trans. R. B. Palmer (New York, 1993), pp. 12–13.

29 Ibid., ll. 259–60 (pp. 16–17), emphasis mine.

30 D. Poirion, ‘The Imaginary Universe of Guillaume de Machaut’, in M. P. Cosman and B. Chandler (eds.), Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), p. 199, emphasis mine.

31 J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996), pp. 248, 341.

32 On the relationship between visualisation and the emergence of quantification, see ch. 7, ‘Visualization: An Introduction’, in A. W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1997). A variety of primary sources dealing with the role of the visual in mnemonic practice is anthologised in M. Carruthers and J. M. Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory (Philadelphia, 2004). For visualisation as it applies to music, and especially to fourteenth-century motets, see A. M. B. Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2005), pp. 210–51.

33 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts, rev. edn. (New York, 1999), p. 105.

34 ‘de tekst exact in tweeën wordt gedeeld: gedurende de eerste helft van het gedicht beklaagt de dichter zich slechts over zijn smart, terwijl hij in de tweede zijn lijden accepteert en zelfs méér wil lijden, om een hogere graad van verdienste te bereiken dan de anderen “voor wie de liefde van de Vrouwe gelijk van prijs is”’; Boogaart, ‘“O series summe rata”’, p. 106.

35 The music theory treatise to which the ballade is appended is dated 1375, making this the earliest example of circular notation, and one contemporaneous (though just barely) with Machaut. Richard Crocker points out that there may be some connection between Machaut's oeuvre and En la maison: ‘In melodic inflection it bears a striking similarity to Guillaume de Machaut's ballade, Je puis trop bien’; ‘A New Source for Medieval Music Theory’, Acta Musicologica, 39 (1967), pp. 161–71, at 166. Image available at <http://app.cul.columbia.edu:8080/exist/scriptorium/individual/CU-MUSI-863.xml?showLightbox=yes> and <http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/ds/ucb/images/DS004551aA.jpg> (accessed 7 Apr. 2009).

36 ‘en ceste ronde proprement’, Tout par compas, line 2.

37 Trans. C. M. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 242.

38 Ibid., pp. 240–2.

39 In the manuscript, this spot is evocatively marked with a large opaque red circle.

40 ‘series summe rata’, Motet 17, motetus l. 1.

41 Three of these four paradoxical statements are found after the midpoint of the motet – a circumstance which supports Boogaart's reading of the triplum's two halves as different.

42 Boogaart has identified this and other lines in the motetus as textual quotations from Gace Brulé's Ire d'Amour qui en mon cuer repaire; see ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, p. 31.

43 The link between Fortune and the lover's eyes is present also in Machaut's ballade Amours, ma dame, et Fortune et mi oueil (Love, my lady, and Fortune, and my eyes). In the second stanza, the lover complains that, though his eyes have formerly been the venue for attaining earthly joy, Fortune has extinguished his sense and now he does not often see his lady. The third stanza clarifies that the narrator's not seeing his lady, encapsulated in the refrain ‘Quant seur tout l'aim et souvent ne la voy’, is a result of distance rather than of his blindness – and indeed, the ballade is interpolated into the Voir dit before Guillaume has seen Toute Belle. But Leonard Johnson points out that the pervasive presence of eyes also draws our attention to the physical act of seeing – or not seeing (Poets as Players, p. 49). The uniqueness of eyes is significant precisely in the light of the frequency with which sight is mentioned; in fact, Robertson sees sight as ‘central to Motets 1–17 [and] especially important to [Motets 11–14], as they foreshadow the fleeting vision that is finally granted in the tenor of Motet 15, “I have seen the Lord” (Vidi dominum)’ (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, p. 154).

44 She blinds them with riches (‘Les uns de richeces avugle’, Rose, l. 5904), though in her typical paradoxical fashion, she can also make people see clearly (Rose, l. 4952).

45 Lines 8713–8719, Machaut, Le Livre dou voir dit, ed. D. Leech-Wilkinson, trans. R. B. Palmer (New York, 1998), p. 599. Dominic Leo discusses this passage of the Voir dit in reference to the cross-eyed depiction of Machaut in the images accompanying the Prologue in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, f. fr. 1584 (MS A), ‘Authorial Presence in the Illuminated Machaut Manuscripts’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2005), pp. 245–9.

46 On the relationship between Fortune and the courtly Lady in Machaut's work, see C. Attwood, ‘The Image in the Fountain: Fortune, Fiction, and Femininity in the Livre du voir dit of Guillaume de Machaut’, Nottingham French Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 137–49.

47 Robertson suggests that Libera me in this tenor has resonances with Libera me de morte aeterna, from the Office of the Dead, and that Machaut ‘clearly relished the double associations’; see Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, p. 90. Machaut's source is not the biblical text but the Lenten responsory Minor sum (ibid., pp. 89–90).

48 K. Brownlee in ‘Machaut's Motet 15 and the Roman de la Rose: The Literary Context of ‘Amours qui a le pouoir/Faus Semblant m'a deceü/Vidi dominum’, Early Music History, 10 (1991), pp. 1–14 and M. Bent, ‘Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number in Machaut's Motet 15’, ibid., pp. 15–27.

49 As Bent has pointed out, the triplum is also divisible into ‘two parallel textual halves’, not in terms of textual content but as regards ‘line count, metrical and rhyme scheme’; ibid., pp. 21–2.

50 As translated in Brownlee, ‘Machaut's Motet 15 and the Roman de la Rose’, p. 2.

51 Bent, ‘Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number’, pp. 25–6.

52 It is also possible that both motets act by the same code. While in Motet 12 the repudiation of Fortune allows the speaker access to divine truth, for the motetus of Motet 15, the truth hurts. Unlike his Boethian counterpart, the undeceived lover is worse off in the second half than when he began. Blithe happiness is replaced by bitter disappointment. Thus crossings are perhaps being used in both cases to represent an unfortunate state of affairs.

53 Boogaart, the only analyst to note the extent and importance of these crossings, argues that they depict the reversals that form the heart of the biblical history of Jacob and Esau, ‘“O series summe rata”’, p. 108.

54 For a different analysis of the tenor's relationship with the upper voices, see Huot's reading, in which the tenor ‘underscores the importance of penance and of divine intervention if a suffering humanity is ever to be free of destructive passions and desires’ (Reading across Genres, p. 6). See also her ‘Patience in Adversity’, pp. 233–5.

55 Since voice-crossings of the type I have focused on highlight the motetus by bringing it to the top, it seems reasonable that the motetus texts would have the most analytical significance here.

56 See Bent's diagrams of verbal correspondences in ‘Words and Music’, p. 383, and ‘Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number’, pp. 20–1; see also Boogaart, ‘Love's Unstable Balance, Part I: Analogy of Ideas in Text and Music of Machaut's Motet 6’, Muziek & Wetenschap, 3 (1993), pp. 3–23, at 3.

57 Huot's reading of Motet 14 in Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet (Stanford, 1997), p. 193, groups the upper voices together: ‘the upper voices detail the joys of love for which the lyric protagonist wishes in vain’. Robertson also reads the two voices as essentially in agreement: ‘In both texts, the Lover seems fed up: he is tired of pretending that he is making progress in the strenuous pursuit of love and wants to “tell it like it is”’, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, p. 161.

58 Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet sees at the heart of the motet an ‘opposition symétrique des deux textes’ which results in a doubtful and ambiguous mood; see Guillaume de Machaut: Les Motets (Collection Ricercare; Paris, 1998), p. 34.

59 Agathe Sultan finds the two opposing interpretative solutions equally untenable, arguing that the lyric subject of the motet does not exist as such, ‘mais se construit à travers l'opposition des pronoms personnels’; see ‘Lyre – cette pratique’: Texte et musique dans le motet 14 de Guillaume de Machaut’, in Perspectives médiévales, supplement to vol. 28 (2002), p. 230.

60 K. Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison, Wis., 1984), p. 12.

61 Ibid., pp. 24–156.

62 A. Minniset al., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary-Tradition (Oxford, 1988), p. 43. For a broader discussion of poetry and veracity, see the introduction to ch. 4, pp. 112–26.

63 One solution to the emotional inauthenticity of commissioned poetry was the notion of the real or metaphorical ‘coffer’ – a place where heartfelt works could be kept until such a time as they were needed; see J. Cerquiglini-Toulet, The Color of Melancholy: The Uses of Books in the Fourteenth Century, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Baltimore, 1997), p. 37. On the topic of poets as liars, see S. Huot, ‘Reading the Lies of Poets’.

64 Lines 407–9; Machaut, Jugement andRemede, pp. 188–9. To say, as we often do, that this is Machaut's own opinion is perhaps oversimplifying, since it is not the aging poet but his young protagonist who makes the assertion. The lover, as yet untortured by Fortune, could even be saying the opposite of what Machaut himself thinks. I thank an anonymous reader for offering this important caveat.

65 ‘Et s'il vous plaist, ma dame chiere, / A resgarder la darreniere / Chansonnette que je chantay, / Que fait en dit et en chant ay, / Vous porrez de liegier savoir / Se je mens ou se je di voir’ (ll. 3705–10), trans. Brownlee, Poetic Identity, pp. 56–7.

66 ‘Singing More about Singing Less: Machaut's Pour Ce Que Tous (B12)’, in Leach (ed.), Machaut's Music, pp. 111–24; the relationship between love and falsehood is further explored by Brownlee in ‘Machaut's Motet 15 and the Roman de la Rose’.

67 ‘Aucune gent m'ont demandé que j'ay / Que je ne chant et que je n'ay cuer gay, / Si com je sueil chanter de lié corage; / Et je leur di, certes, que je ne sçay. / Mais j'ay menti, car dedens le cuer ay / Je trop grief dueil qui onques n'assouage’ (ll. 1–2, 4–6), trans. Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, p. 301.

68 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. C. Dahlberg (Princeton, 1994), p. 119.

69 Ibid., p. 103.

70 ‘Et mi partie est par deduist / D'or et de fiens … C'est l'arbre de inhumanité, / Entraciné seur fausseté; / L'estoc est qu'en sa verité / Est mensonguese’ (ll. 1127–8, 153–6); Guillaume de Machaut, Jugement andRemede, pp. 230–2.

71 The antiphon is used for various Marian feasts, but especially the Assumption. For a comparison of sources and discussion of variants, see A. Clark, ‘Concordare cum materia: The Tenor in the Fourteenth-Century Motet’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1996), pp. 196, 246–7.

72 M. F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 21–4, 110–11.

73 Balduini de Forda Opera, ed. D. N. Bell (Turnhout, 1991), pp. 331–9; see the discussion of this sermon in Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, p. 92, where the tenors of the first seventeen of Machaut's motets are mapped onto the sermon's text.

74 Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, p. 18.

75 Ibid., p. 63.

76 Ibid., p. 20.

77 J. W. Hassell, Middle French Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases (Subsidia Mediaevalia, 12; Toronto, 1982), A119–A120.

78 ‘Que cuer d'ammant qui aimme fort / Or a joie, or a desconfort, / Or a rit, or pleure, or chante, or plaint, / Or se delite en son complainte, / Or tremble, or tresu, or a chaut, / Or a froit, et puis ne li chaut / D'assaut qu'Amours li puisse faire; / Or li plaist; or ne li puet plaire; / Car selonc ce qu'Amours le veult / Deduire, il s'esïoist ou duet, / et selonc l'estat de Fortune’ (ll. 875–87); Machaut, Jugement and Remede, pp. 216–17; emphasis mine.

79 The opposition of the texts, the self-proclaimed lies, and the invocation of Fortune herself are all enough to signal the important presence of the goddess in the piece, and yet Robertson has excluded it from her list of motets in which the image of Lady Fortune is employed, focusing instead on the link between the Song of Songs and the Assumption liturgy: ‘The time of no more lying for the Lover in Motet 14 is … analogous to the moment when Mary tells the truth in the story of the Assumption’ (Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, pp. 84, 162). The link implied here seems forced; indeed, there is no real reason why Mary would not tell the truth. We assume that she is truthful in anything she says because she is Mary. Precisely for this reason it seems unjustified to compare her with the motetus here: the Virgin had never lied to begin with. A different Mary, Mary Magdalene, is identified as truthful in the sequence Victimi paschali laudes, but even here there is no implication that she has lied recently; she is truthful only by comparison: ‘Credendum est magis soli Mariae veraci quam Iudaeorum turbae fallaci’. David Rothenberg suggests that the identity of Mary was left purposely ambiguous in the sequence and could refer to the Virgin, but the occasion for its singing was still Easter and the feast of Mary Magdalene (22 July), not Assumption. See ‘The Marian Symbolism of Spring, ca. 1200–ca. 1500: Two Case Studies’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59 (2006), pp. 319–98 at 368–9. I am grateful to David Rothenberg for sharing his thoughts on this matter.

80 Lines 8300–1, Machaut, Le Livre dou voir dit, p. 567.

81 A comparable passage with identical words simultaneously declaimed occurs at the beginning of Motet 18, Bone Pastor Guillerme/Bone Pastor qui pastores/Bone pastor. Here the triplum and the motetus begin to sing the words ‘Bone pastor’ together, but immediately diverge owing to the latter's slower verbal rhythm. This passage is punctuated by a voice-crossing, which draws additional attention to the common subject matter of the upper voices – and indeed of all three voices.

82 Breves 76–110. There is also a six-breve crossing near the beginning of the motet (breves 4–10). Otherwise, the voices hardly cross: proof again of careful and deliberate control of range. Edited by F. Harrison in Motets of French Provenance (Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 5; Monaco, 1968), pp. 92–4. In the light of its Fortune-rich content, it is also interesting that the motet is notated upside down in the Ivrea Codex. This may be, as Karl Kügle suggests, a result of the refolding of a folio across its central crease – see The Manuscript Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare 115, Studies in the Transmission and Composition of Ars Nova Polyphony (Ottawa, Ont., 1993), p. 6. However, as Kügle cautions, there is no real evidence that this was done. It is just possible that ideas of Fortune as a goddess who causes reversal and inversion led to the strange notation. There is no direct evidence for this either, though I have argued elsewhere that the bassus part of another Fortune-infused piece, Josquin's Missa Fortuna desperata, is notated upside down; ‘What Fortuna Can Do to a Minim’, paper delivered at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Quebec City, 2007.

83 Edited by L. Schrade in The Roman de Fauvel; the Works of Philippe de Vitry; French Cycles of the Ordinarium Missae (Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 1; Monaco, 1956), pp. 6–8. A rich analysis of this piece is available in M. Bent, ‘Polyphony of Texts and Music in the Fourteenth-Century Motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta latronum/Merito hec patimur and its “Quotations”’, in D. Pesce (ed.), Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (New York and Oxford, 1997), pp. 82–103. See also Kügle's discussions of motets that place the tenor in the middle of their texture (The Manuscript Ivrea, pp. 137, 164).

84 Edited by Harrison in Motets of French Provenance, pp. 100–3. For the attribution to Vitry, see D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Related Motets from Fourteenth-Century France’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 109 (1982), pp. 13–14, and Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, pp. 130–8.

85 The circumstance is all the more remarkable since, owing to the presence of an introitus, the end of the first color is not the centre of the piece. The composer actually manipulates the motetus voice so that the first moment of uncrossing occurs not when the tenor is transposed back downwards, but earlier. Furthermore, the uncrossing occurs on the word ‘contraire’, located on breves 58–60 of the motet: these three breves are preceded and followed by 57, resulting in perfect symmetry.

86 I address the implications of these findings and the aesthetics of reversal as they are manifest in other Ars nova motets in my dissertation, currently in progress.

87 See above, n. 3.

88 V. Newes, ‘Turning Fortune's Wheel: Musical and Textual Design in Machaut's Canonic Lais’, Musica Disciplina, 45 (1991), pp. 95–121.

89 ‘Philological Iconoclasm: Edition and Image in the Vie de Saint Alexis’, in R. H. Bloch and S. Nichols (eds.), Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, 1996), p. 392.

90 I am indebted to the audience at the Kalamazoo presentation of this material, who kindly obliged me by voting on whether a given monophonic fragment was from a motetus or a triplum voice. Though I transposed both to be in the same range, their vote was unanimously correct.

91 Boogaart sees Motet 1 as ‘the model isorhythmic motet’ both in terms of its structure and its texts: see ‘Encompassing Past and Present’, pp. 15–16.

92 This deliberate restriction of rhythmic vocabulary enables the composer to set certain passages in relief; see Bent, ‘Words and Music’, p. 384.

93 Motet 11 is a border case somewhat similar to Motet 15, but its hocketed declamation is much more pronounced. All other motets have recognisable hocket sections in which both voices participate, with the exception of Motets 8, 16 and 17, which have no hockets in either voice.

94 There are some exceptions, but they are rare. For one breve in Motet 16, for example, the verbal rhythm of the motetus is faster than that of the triplum during a crossing.

95 Or at least such has been this singer's experience.

96 I am not merely speculating: in presenting this material and asking my colleagues to pay attention to crossings, I have several times seen shoulders drop in a visible release of tension after the midpoint of Motet 12. As Boogaart has noted, this central pivot point is further accentuated by a rare instance of imitation: the triplum's bar 81 echoes the motetus's bar 80; see ‘“O series summe rata”’, pp. 107–8.

1 Reading 3. terror, 4. casu, 7. obryzum.

2 Most editions place a full stop after line 5, but this has no basis in the manuscript tradition and I have chosen to omit it, since it spoils the clever structure of this text: in fact, the entire motetus is one sentence, and the main verb for its first ten lines is ‘suis’ in line 11.