Making Medieval Motets: Materialty, Intertextuality, and Composition Craft

This course explores current understandings of the medieval motet, in the wake of a flurry of recent scholarly interventions in monographs by David Rothenberg (2011), Emma Dillon (2012), Jennifer Saltzstein (2013), Anna Zayaruznaya (2015 and 2018), Catherine A. Bradley (2018), and Karen Desmond (2018). The new genre of the motet emerged in early thirteenth-century Paris in the cultural circles surrounding Notre Dame Cathedral and the burgeoning Parisian University. It represented a radically new form of polyphonic composition that frequently combined sacred and secular elements and traditions to sometimes shocking and ironic effect. Beginning with largely anonymous motet creations in the thirteenth century, which often borrowed and/or re-texted pre-existing materials, the course concludes with the carefully-curated ‘complete works’ collections overseen by Guillaume de Machaut in the mid fourteenth century. Through readings that span a diverse range of scholarly approaches—from sound studies to the study of musical monsters—we will investigate motets ca. 1200-1350 from various angles, engaging with questions of cultural contexts, audiences, and manuscript production; musical chronologies, quotations, and notations; the sonic impact of polytextuality; intertextuality and textual hermeneutics; authorship and authoriality.