YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

42 JULIE E. CUMMING
a variety of sources, including poetic prayers and sequences. These texts often divide
into stanzas, and use accentual meter and rhyme, like chansons. 30 New kinds of texts
were accompanied by a new kind of music: a music that looks to the chanson for
many of its features. Most of these motets abandon perfect tempus and the freewheeling
constantly changing melismatic style. Instead they use the cut-C typical of
chansons after c. 1470, with the occasional song-like tripla section. Like chansons
they set text syllabically at the beginnings of phrases, with many repeated rhythmic
patterns. Some even quote chansons – Josquin examples include Christe fili Dei from
Vultum tuum (J’ay pris amours), Tu facis (D’ung aultre amer), Victimae paschali
(J’ay pris and De tous biens). 31 Some of the new motet texts have no associated preexistent
chant melody. Where there is a textual reference to chant, however, these
new motets often recall the imitative treatment of the chant-paraphrase motet by
quoting the chant in imitation in all voices. This is exactly what happens at the opening
of Ave Maria, where the sequence melody is used as the basis for the first four points
of imitation, after which the piece is freely composed.
This new subgenre, the ‘Milan motet’, thus adopted and adapted the techniques
of repetition and imitation that had been developed in the lower genres and subgenres
such as the chanson, the song-motet, and the chant-paraphrase motet. The position
of the motet in the middle of the genre hierarchy allowed it to reinvent itself time
after time. In the late fifteenth century reference to the low end of the hierarchy opened
the door to repetition and pervasive imitation in all genres of sacred music. By c.
1500 pervasive imitation had taken over. But why did this happen? What kinds of
forces could have caused composers to abandon Tinctoris’s preference for varietas
in sacred music?
30 For studies of motteti missales and their texts, see: T. NOBLITT, The Ambrosian Motetti Missales
Repertory, in Musica disciplina, 22 (1968), pp. 77–103; L.H. WARD, The Motetti Missales Repertory
Reconsidered, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39 (1986), pp. 491–523; P. MACEY,
Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Musical Patronage in Milan: Compère, Weerbeke, and Josquin, in Early
Music History 15 (1996), pp. 147–212; L. FINSCHER, Motetti missales, in L. FINSCHER ed., Die
Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., Kassel, 1994, Sachteil 6, cols. 549–552; N. GASSER,
The Motet Cycles of the Gaffurius Codices and the New Status of the Motet in Late-Fifteenth-Century
Italy, in Abstracts of Papers Read at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Kansas
City, 5 November, 1999; and PERKINS and MACEY, Motet, Renaissance, pp. 207–208.
31 Other motets that could be said to belong to this same subgenre quote relatively ‘low status’ lauda
tunes; see J. BLOXAM, ‘La Contenance italienne’: The Motets on Beata es Maria by Compère,
Obrecht, and Brumel, in Early Music History, 11 (1992), pp. 39–89.