YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

FROM VARIETY TO REPETITION: THE BIRTH OF IMITATIVE POLYPHONY
poser to conceal or avoid imitation; most mid-fifteenth-century sacred music contains
imitation only in certain limited contexts. Let us look, for example, at Flos de
spina, a motet by Johannes Pullois, probably composed in the 1450s (Example 2). 7
The imitative passages are enclosed in boxes.
Imitation in mid-fifteenth-century sacred music serves as an ornamental addition
to a fundamentally non-imitative texture. It rarely corresponds in a noticeable
way with units of text, due in part to the highly melismatic style, and the fact that it
emerges in the middle or at the end of a phrase, rather than at the beginning, without
being preceded by rests. It usually occurs: (1) in two voices only, either in duet sections
(Example 2, bb. 19–21) 8 or over a pedal tone in one voice (Example 2, bb. 6,
11–12, 18–19, contratenors over held cadential pitches in the tenor); (2) the second
voice often follows very closely, after only one beat or half a beat (short time interval
of imitation, as in Example 2, b. 20 ff.); 9 (3) rhythmic values between the two parts
are different, resulting in shifting time intervals of imitation (Example 2, bb. 19–21);
(4) the time interval of imitation often conflicts with the mensural structure (one
minim, as in bar 20; three minims as in bar 12).
This mid-fifteenth-century use of imitation is clearly very different from the pervasive
imitation found in Josquin. So how did we get from Flos de spina to Ave Maria?
What allowed pervasive imitation to emerge? I suggest that the late fifteenth century
saw a radical shift from an aesthetic that valued ‘variety’ to one that valued ‘repetition’
as an organizing force.
7 J. CUMMING, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 239–253, esp. pp. 245–246.
8 Thomas Brothers suggests that imitation in duet sections is a “vestige of the introitus sections of isorhythmic
motets of old”. See T. BROTHERS, Vestiges of the Isorhythmic Tradition in Mass and Motet,
ca. 1450–1475, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 44 (1991), p. 38.
9 Ludwig Finscher calls this fuga ad minimam, in L. FINSCHER, Loyset Compère (c. 1540–1518): Life
and Work, (Musicological Studies and Documents, 12), 1964, p. 136.
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