Dated to the 1240s, the Florence manuscript (F: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1) is the earliest surviving source to contain a collection of motets. The exclusively Latin-texted motets in F are widely regarded as the oldest layer(s) of pieces in this new genre. This study closely analyses three motets in F, demonstrating that they are Latin contrafacta reworkings of vernacular motets extant only in chronologically later sources. It traces the influences of secular, vernacular refrains in two supposedly liturgical clausulae in F, proposing that these clausulae are textless transcriptions of French motets, and engages with wider questions concerning scribal practices, the relationship between sine littera and cum littera notations and issues of consonance and dissonance. Reasons as to why clausulae might have been transcribed in F and the possible extent of vernacular influences in this manuscript are explored. These findings challenge established chronological narratives of motet development. The three case studies offer methodological models, demonstrating ways in which relationships between clausulae and Latin and French motets can be tested and their relative chronologies established.

In balades 27 and 38, Machaut likens the wounds suffered by the lover to those that result from the poisons of deadly beasts. He invokes animal imagery to depict the beloved and her behaviour: she encloses within her being monstrous beasts that repel and repulse the lover, causing him grievous bodily harm. In the course of both balades the deadly beasts transform into various allegorical characters that are personifications of secular vices. One of these characters, Refusal (‘Refus’), emerges as central. Machaut personifies the lady's rejection of the lover's advances (which he makes through words/music) as the courtly vice Refusal. In Balade 27, it is her sense organs that enact this refusal: her ears cannot hear him, her mouth rejects him, and her Look kills him. I explore the resonances of Machaut's sadistic and animalistic lady in two spheres: the courtly, where the obvious antecedents for Machaut's imagery are the courtly bestiaries; and the sacred, where parallels between Refusal and the deadly sins of pride and envy can be detected, as suggested by my interpretation of these two balades and some of Machaut's motets, and the links I set forth between these sins, vices, and the senses that partake in them.

Patri carissimo eidemque ingeniossimo, John Patrick Desmond (1943–2013)

The early German lied setting is the musical genre that is considered to be the first polyphonic art form in German music. The genre was revived in the nineteenth century in the context of early nationalism, linked with the idea of ‘Volkslied’. This article traces the evolution of the ‘Tenorlied theory’ in early musicology, featuring prominent figures such as Arnold Schering, Hans Joachim Moser and Heinrich Besseler, and connects it with a specific performance practice that developed simultaneously with the emergence of various amateur musical circles: the Jugendmusikbewegung, the male choir movement, the Hausmusik movement and the Collegium musicum. A fatal period in the history of the early German lied setting led to the politicisation of its repertory in the Third Reich. Ludwig Senfl, a German hero of early times, provides a case study in point. The years after the Second World War were characterised by efforts to standardise the performance practice of the lied as well as the usage of the term ‘Tenorlied’, while still insisting on the German identity of the genre.

This article investigates a corpus of sixteen thirteenth-century motets whose formal structures are rigorously modelled on the AAB formal type of the trouvère chanson. This corpus bears witness that the first specimens of hybridization between polyphony and the high-style lyric chanson arose as early as the 1240s, well before the emergence of fourteenth-century polyphonic song. The analysis of the make-up of the AAB form of the motets first reveals that its elements completely match those of the pedes-cum-cauda formal type of trouvère chansons. The formal impact of song citations within the corpus is then explored, together with the different modalities according to which they are involved in the make-up of the AAB form. Finally, the analysis of the texture of the works brings to light the singularity of their fabric: remodelled by the structures of the trouvère chanson, it breaks with the traditional format of the motet and turns into the texture of a motet-chanson.

As one of the more striking contrapuntal devices of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century polyphony, the hocket has been studied at great length. Until recently, however, little attention has been paid to the question how this texture accommodates the verbal text with which it often appears: as it breaks up a musical phrase into small segments separated by rests, it often necessitates a breaking up of the words themselves. Already some contemporaries had condemned this as one of the principal defects of the hocket, and most modern editors (implicitly or explictly agreeing with these comments) have sidestepped the issue by moving the text as much as possible to non-hocketed sections of the music. This article attempts to take a positive view of the ways in which words were matched to notes in the hocket. It distinguishes between ‘unbroken hockets’ – where the words and the notes are devised and deployed in such a fashion that word breaks and rests coincide – and ‘broken hockets’. In the latter, it is argued that the way in which words are split up is by design and not happenstance; taking the etymological meaning of ‘hocket’=‘hiccup’ as a point of departure, it is shown that the most logical way to bridge the rests is not between syllables, but in the middle of syllables. This solution is corroborated not only by etymology, but also by the underlay in the sources, by the compositions themselves (in which by virtue of this ‘hiccup underlay’ musical phrases and text phrase match seamlessly, as elsewhere in the repertory) and by some theoretical evidence as well.

In the tenth century, when the earliest chant books were being compiled in the heart of the Carolingian Empire and polyphonic music was entering the realm of theoretical speculation in the anonymous writings of Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, organa were also being notated for performance outside music treatises. We would not know this, were it not for a two-voice organum on an antiphon for Saint Boniface written in the first decades of the tenth century on the last page of a long-neglected manuscript, now in the British Library. A second notated antiphon, Rex caelestium terrestrium, provides elements for a reconstruction of a further, ‘hidden’, organum. These newly identified organa shed light on a significant phase in Western music history, being the sole evidence from the tenth century of a polyphonic practice before the great eleventh-century collection of organa from Winchester.