YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

FROM VARIETY TO REPETITION: THE BIRTH OF IMITATIVE POLYPHONY
Example 4. Johannes Touront, Compangant omnes/O generosa/Je suis seulet, bb. 1–38, TrentC 89
(Trent, Castello del Buon Consiglio, Monumenti e Collezioni Provinciali, MS 1376),
fol. 123v–124. Material in boxes is the only music that is repeated.
Repetition and pervasive imitation thus enter the motet via the lowest subgenre of
the motet: the song motet. In the chanson and in the Latin-texted song motet, imitation
serves to bring out the structure of the text. In the textless instrumental versions
of these pieces imitation becomes a way of articulating form in the absence of text.
The same could be said of the highly melismatic duet and trio sections of Mass movements,
which are usually much more imitative than the four-voice sections. Imitation
is intensified in the textless instrumental tricinia composed in the decades around
1500; think of Josquin’s La Bernardina, or Johannes Ghiselin’s La Alfonsina. 27
27 On this kind of piece see STROHM, The Rise of European Music, pp. 560–570. There were also fourvoice
song motets closely related to the three-voice motet/chanson/tricinium group, such as the fourvoice
pieces in the ‘peacock’s tail complex’ including Barbingant’s Pfawinschwanz and sections of
Martini’s Mass on that model; see CUMMING, The Motet in the Age of Du Fay, pp. 254–256.
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