Plainsong and Medieval Music, 16, 1, 31–59 © 2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0961137107000605 Printed in the United Kingdom
‘S’en dirai chançonete’: hearing text
and music in a medieval motet
SUZANNAH CLARK*
A B S T R A C T . The texts of thirteenth-century vernacular motets have held centre stage in many recent
debates about this polytextual genre: the purported unintelligibility of the words in performance has led
to questions about how motets were meant to be understood, especially by third-party listeners, both
medieval and modern. The irony is that the purpose of the music has gone unheard in this debate. Using
a single motet as point of focus, this article suggests various ways in which the music clarifies rather
than obscures the meaning of the text in performance. These range from the use of simple musical
devices, such as musical repetition or changes in texture that draw attention to significant moments in
the text, to the exploitation of refrain melodies, which I argue carries out an ‘intersonic’ duty that serves
as an interpretive companion to the more traditional ‘intertextual’ readings of recent scholarship.
This article takes as its starting point a few observations that Christopher Page made
in his book Discarding Images and subsequently about how the texts of medieval
motets are meant to be appreciated.1 In Discarding Images, Page famously debunked
the long-standing belief that the Ars antiqua motet was a genre exclusively for the
‘elite’, and he made a powerful case that motets had a much wider appeal.2 In line
with the lighter spirit of the genre, he urged scholars to lighten up on their usual habits
of ‘reading’ motets, armed with dictionaries, concordances and Glossa ordinaria.3
Instead, he invited us all to listen to motets. In shifting the balance of enquiry towards
what can be discerned in and through performance, Page returned to the issue of the
*[email protected]
Research towards this article was generously supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. A shorter version was read at the Seventy-first Annual Meeting of the American Musicological
Society, Washington DC, October 2005. I am grateful to Sean Curran and Emma Dillon for their insightful
comments on the ideas presented in earlier versions of this article, and would also like to thank Susan
Rankin for inviting me to participate in her medieval reading seminar at which this paper was discussed
in detail and benefited from valuable feedback. I am also grateful to David Bretherton for preparing the
musical examples for me.
1
Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Cambridge,
1993), esp. 65–84, and ‘Around the Performance of a 13th-century Motet’, Early Music, 28 (2000), 343–57.
2
It was in ‘The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 147–64, that Christopher Page
first suggested that the bawdy nature of motets and the simplicity of the majority of them seemed at odds
with the assumption that they are for the learned, and it was in Discarding Images, 65–111, that he
examined in detail the possible constitution of a broader audience for the motet. However, Sylvia Huot
illustrates just how broad a knowledge was drawn on for even the most rustic and apparently simple of
motets; see Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century
Polyphony (Stanford, 1997).
3
Page, Discarding Images, 86.
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32
Suzannah Clark
sonority of the words, which he had first approached on the basis of personal
experience.
As director of Gothic Voices, he was in the privileged position of being intimately
familiar with the words, yet he conceded that, for motets with three or more voices, he
could only ever pick out the odd word here and there in performance. What chance,
he therefore wondered, would other (modern) listeners have? Thus, in an article
devoted to a detailed study of the motet Par un matinet (M658) / Hé, sire (M659) / Hé,
bergier (M657) / EIUS (O16), Page concludes: ‘There will be many modern listeners
who, when they hear the recorded performance which accompanies this article . . .
will find themselves unable to follow the conversation between the three speakers that
I have just paraphrased, however diligently they study the texts and translations. I
confess that I cannot follow it; indeed, I am not sure that I can follow very much.’4
According to Page, then, it is not possible to make sense of what a motet is about in
performance – no matter how familiar one is with the texts beforehand.
Although Page’s focus was primarily on modern listeners, he asserts that in all
likelihood this was a persistent medieval frustration too. Evidence of performance
practice is scant, but Page suggests that singers may first have paraphrased or read the
texts aloud, or each vocal part may have been sung individually before all voices were
performed together in polyphony; he cites the example of motets being sung to
bishops and their clerical and choral guests after dinners, who first would have been
introduced to the text through either of these methods.5 The audience would get the
gist of the motet, but once the polyphonic performance begins, Page argues that
the words become unintelligible enough that the audience must simply delight in
knowing rather than following the plot.
Page also considers Jacques de Liège’s famous complaint about – albeit later –
motets in Speculum musice, in which the early fourteenth-century theorist observed:
‘I saw in a great gathering of discerning people, when motets were sung according
to the modern manner, that it was asked what language the singers were using:
Hebrew, Greek, or Latin’.6 It seems, therefore, that as the genre progressed matters of
comprehension simply got worse.
Hence, Page concludes that the sonorous rather than semantic quality of the words
must be the important element in performance. In the article on Par un matinet / Hé,
sire / Hé, bergier / EIUS mentioned above, he claims that while motet writing ‘subverts’
the unity of expression prized in plainsong because of its diverse texts and overlapping phrasing, making words with the same vowel sounds coincide every now and
then was probably an important aspect of artful motet composition.7 Page notes that,
4
5
6
7
Page, ‘Around the Performance’, 343.
On the possibility that texts may have been paraphrased before performance, see Page, ‘Around the
Performance’, 351, and ‘Listening to the Trouvères’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 639–59, here 648. The idea of
singing each upper part in turn is an option he chooses for performances with Gothic Voices; see also
Discarding Images, 85 n. 73. On bishops and their guests, see Page, ‘Around the Performance’, 348, 351 and
356.
Citation from Page, Discarding Images, 70. Jacques’s complaint that they could be singing in Hebrew or
Greek is, of course, spurious, for the upper voices of motets were either in Latin or French or both.
Page, ‘Around the Performance’, 354–5.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
33
towards the end of the motet, the three upper parts share the same vowel sound (the
duplum sings ‘Voi et vanter’, while the triplum and quadruplum sing ‘Loialment’).
This, he supposes, is probably what the theorist Johannes de Grocheio meant when
talking about the ‘refinement of skills’ exhibited in the genre.8 Indeed, Page concluded
that ‘it is possible that the ‘‘refinement’’ of the motet . . . lay as much in planned
sonorities of vowel colour as in the ‘‘intertextual’’ play within the poems which has
received so much attention in recent years’.9 In attempting to put matters of sound on
an equal footing to intertextual play, Page has, however, set up a dichotomy between
‘hearing’ and ‘reading’ the motet, where sonority became the business of the former
and meaning the business of the latter.
The idea that the sonority of the words forms a fundamental part of the aesthetic of
motets has been around for some time, and there are plenty of motets with a far more
pervasive use of simultaneous vowels than the example Page cites. Indeed, in 1942
Hans Nathan argued that the very origins of the motet explained why certain vowels
might pervade a motet.10 As he elegantly argued, the essence of the clausula was the
vowel and therefore it should come as little surprise that, when the motet was
developed through the addition of words to the upper voice(s), words would be
chosen to resonate with the vowel(s) that dominated the melismas. The demands of
this kind of troping, according to Nathan, was essentially to find words that are both
meaningful and congruent with the original vowel sounds, although he points to at
least one example where he reckons the words were chosen more for their sound than
their meaning.11 For Nathan, this sonic remnant was all that was left of the vocal
aspect of the chant, which he unequivocally believed was an instrumental accompaniment in motets.12 He also argued that these assonant words served a structural
purpose. Extracted as motets were from their parent organa, they had neither a proper
beginning nor ending. For this reason, assonances (or even the full repetition
of syllables or words) feature most prominently at these points, as a quick-fix to
launching or concluding the musical structure.
Pesce put Nathan’s argument into less purely musical terms and focused more than
he did on the projection of words in the motet as sounding object. She readily
acknowledges that there are plenty of motets in which the meaning of the text is
8
9
10
11
12
Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and A New Translation’, Plainsong
and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 17–41, here 36.
Page, ‘Around the Performance’, 354. Others remain unconvinced by Page’s emphasis on sonority
over semantics. For example, Margaret Bent points out in ‘Reflections on Christopher Page’s
Reflections’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 625–33, here esp. 630–2 that Page perhaps overstated his case in
focusing the aural experience of the texts of motets on sonority, which, she argues, he perhaps did in
an effort to counterbalance what he perceived to be the overemphasis on learned responses. Wegman
makes a similar criticism that Page’s aurally centred image of the motet is a ‘self-imposed horizon’ in
‘Reviewing Images’, Music and Letters, 76 (1995), 265–73, here esp. 267–70.
Hans Nathan, ‘The Function of Text in French 13th-Century Motets’, Musical Quarterly, 28 (1942),
445–62. See also Dolores Pesce, ‘The Significance of Text in Thirteenth-Century Latin Motets’, Acta
Musicologica, 58 (1986), 91–117, here 94.
Nathan, ‘The Function of Text’, 454. This practice is not dissimilar in conception to the search in the early
sequence repertory for words rhyming in ‘-a’ to echo ‘alleluia’.
Nathan, ‘The Function of Text’, 448 and 456–7.
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34
Suzannah Clark
obscured in polyphonic renditions, which therefore focuses attention on the sonic
aspect, but she does not stop at this point, as later Page would. She points to numerous
instances where the careful placement of words and distinctive musical gestures have,
as she puts it, a rhetorical impact, thus allowing for ‘individual word projection’.13 She
recognizes therefore that hearing the odd word here and there is less a matter of
chance than one of effort on the part of poet-composers to convey the text.
More recently still, scholars have convincingly shown that the sounds of the words
themselves can be meaningful. Taking the example of Entre Adan et Hanikel (M725) /
Chief bien seantz (M726) / APTATUR (O45), Sylvia Huot has argued that the persistent
presence of the vowel sound ‘–ans’ infuses the motet with sounds of its author’s name,
Adam [Adan] de la Halle. Moreover, it casts the lady as Adam’s mirror insofar as her
portrait in the motetus is delivered with this sound as its ever-present rhyme scheme;
additionally, she notes, as Nathan might have, that the sound of Adam’s name is
present in the tenor, APTATUR.14 Emma Dillon has taken the significance of the sound
world of this same motet a step further, arguing that the sometimes staggered and
sometimes simultaneous occurrence of ‘–ans’ throughout offers a kind of ‘soundtrack
of drunken revelry’.15
While Dillon and Huot have powerfully shown that patterns of sonority can bear
meaning, the present article takes one step back and questions the assumption that we
must resign ourselves to losing the sense of the words when listening or indeed that,
as Page suggested, the ‘intertextual play’ (among the texts within and without any
given motet) is the domain of ‘reading’ the poetry.16 It is surely curious that a genre
should enjoy such a sustained development – over centuries, indeed – when its most
characteristic feature – polytextuality – is unintelligible in performance. For the
purposes of this article, then, I shall follow Page’s example and focus on listeners who
are not simultaneously the performers or scribes or readers of the motet, but I shall
shamelessly position my listener as an ideal – and probably modern – one.17 I shall not,
however, conclude – as Page implies – that wholly different aspects of the motet were
intended for their ears, but will rather argue that much of what delighted singers,
composers and ‘readers’ of the motet was also available to listeners. Indeed, I shall
also demonstrate that in straining to hear the words, Page and others have overlooked
the role of the music.
My aim, therefore, is to show through a close analysis of a single motet how
medieval composers did seem to tackle the problem of comprehension, by using the
music to bring out the meaning of the words in performance. The motet under
scrutiny does this in a variety of ways, ranging from highlighting the text with simple
13
14
15
16
17
Pesce, ‘The Significance of Text’, 98.
Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play, 32–5.
Emma Dillon, ‘Sounding Dissent in the Music and Poetry of Adam de la Halle’, paper delivered at the
Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Seattle, 2004.
See note 9 above.
For a convincing argument that medieval musicians and their audience formed a performance space of
a kind not dissimilar to ours today, namely with performers physically separated from their listeners, see
Page, ‘Listening to the Trouvères’, passim. For perspectives on medieval listeners and listening, see the
articles in the issue of Musical Quarterly, 82, nos. 3–4 (1998) and Early Music, 25, no. 4 (1997).
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
35
musical devices to exploiting musical references – tactics which increase the listeners’
chances of hearing the important textual points. In other words, I wish to show how
the musical material and interaction between the voices served to focus the listeners’
attention. Given the dictum that what one hears depends on what one listens for, I
shall argue the case that the music serves as an ingenious means of signalling what
there is to be listened for. In this sense, I explore further Pesce’s claim that distinct
musical gestures assist in word projection. It will become clear that there is more to a
performance of a motet than the extremes of either knowing its plot or indeed
appreciating the sonorous nuance of the text through the juxtaposition or convergence
of vowel and consonant sounds. Rather, it is also possible to grasp the meaning of their
texts.
I will use variants between sources as part of my testimony: the variants introduced
in the four-voice expansion of the three-voice version of my case-study motet suggest
that its poet-composer was attempting to assist in the communication of words to
offset the added complexity of the extra voice part.18 My selected motet also contains
no fewer than eight passages that have been identified by one scholar or another as
constituting a special type of refrain, a type that was unique to the thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries. By scrutinizing patterns of borrowing, citation and the invention
of new refrain material, I shall illustrate how the refrain participated in the communication of meaning. As we shall see, medieval refrains were traditionally regarded as
possessing strict musical and textual identities, but much recent scholarship has
instead drawn attention to their fluidity.19 I shall argue that it is by understanding
their hermeneutic power within a given context that we gain further insight into how
they convey meaning. Additionally, their features suggest that the current definition
of the medieval refrain and existing methods of cataloguing them need further
refinement; my analysis will therefore edge us towards a greater understanding of
both the citation of refrains and the apparent invention of new ones. Before dealing
further with these issues, however, it is necessary to introduce my case-study, its
sources and its narrative content.
The motet survives in three different guises: its fullest version is a four-voice motet
in the second fascicle of Mo, Joliement en douce desirée (M720) / Quant voi la florete
(M721) / Je sui joliete (M722) / APTATUR (O45). Its most reduced extant version is in D,
a manuscript which contains the text only of the duplum (M722). It also appears as a
three-voice motet in Ba and PsAr with M721, M722 and the tenor.20 Ba and PsAr
are closely related versions when measured against Mo. I shall use the version in
Montpellier as my base text and hereafter will refer to the motet as Mo34 (i.e., the 34th
18
19
20
I am assuming, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the three-voice version precedes the
four-voice version.
For an extensive discussion of the characteristics of refrains in motets, see Mark Everist, French Motets in
the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre (Cambridge, 1994), 54–65. More recently, Ardis
Butterfield has fine-tuned our understanding of the literary motivation behind the circulation and
invention of refrains in Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut
(Cambridge, 2002), esp. 75–86.
Mo=Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médicine, H 196; D=Oxford, Bodleian
Library, Douce 308; Ba=Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit. 115; PsAr=Paris, BNF lat. 11266.
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36
Suzannah Clark
motet in Mo) rather than by its lengthy title given above. Where discussion of variants
is relevant, I shall refer to Ba49 (i.e., the 49th motet in Ba).
The duplum begins with a young woman telling, in the first person, of her jollity.
She reveals that she is a ‘young little maid of not yet fifteen years’ (‘joine pucelete n’ai
pas quinze ans’).21 Her ‘little breasts are budding’ (‘point moi ma ma[me]lete selonc
le tans’) and she protests that she should therefore be learning of love. Her happy state
is interrupted when she announces that she feels imprisoned (‘je sui mise en prison’),
and it is not until about two-thirds of the way into the duplum part that we discover
why: she was put in a convent at, she claims, too young an age. The duplum ends with
her cursing the one who made her a nun – ‘I feel the pangs of love below my belt:
cursed be the one who made me a nun’ (‘Je sent les doz maus desoz ma ceinturete:
Honnis soit de Diu qui me fist nonnete!’).
The triplum is the voice of a monk, who finds himself in exactly the same predicament as the nun. Again it is not obvious from the text that he is a monk until, in this
case, almost the very end of the triplum, where he reveals that he will no longer be
imprisoned by his abbey or monastery (‘Pour noient mi tient ceste abeı̈e’).22 In fact the
opening of the triplum gives little away of his ecclesiastical status. It begins with a
description of flowers budding in a meadow. The time of year is spring. Such an
opening evokes the pastourelle lyric theme and, one might therefore imagine the
scene is being described by a knight, the figure who is typically responsible for
witnessing and portraying such scenes in the pastourelle. The clearest indication that
he is unlikely to be our speaker comes with the announcement that the poet-persona
will speak in song – ‘s’en dirai chançonete’ – an announcement that would be an
unusual musical manoeuvre for a knight. He only rarely indicates he is singing;
21
22
Translations and editions of the text are by Susan Stakel and Joel C. Relihan, taken from Hans Tischler
(ed.), The Montpellier Codex, 4 Parts, Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early
Renaissance 2–8 (Madison, WI, 1978–85), vol. 4.
Scholars have tended to see the voice of the triplum as female. Lisa Colton has, for instance, taken the
duplum and triplum to be different nuns, offering a lesbian reading of the motet (‘Lesbian Historiography: Chansons de nonnes and the Clerical Imagination’; paper delivered as part of a session ‘Round Table:
Lesbian Historiography’ at the RMA 39th Annual Conference: Music Historiography, 2003). In Eglal
Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer and Elizabeth Aubrey, eds. and trans., Songs of the
Women Trouvères (New Haven and London, 2001), ‘abeı̈e’ is translated as ‘nunnery’; in Tischler, ed., The
Montpellier Codex, Stakel and Relihan translate it as ‘convent’, while Robyn Smith, ed. and trans., French
Double and Triple Motets in the Montpellier Manuscript: Textual Edition, Translation and Commentary,
Musicological Studies 68 (Ottawa, 1997) uses ‘monastery’, a word which is not specifically gendered and
which she also uses for the duplum. In the version of my paper given at the AMS 2005, I followed suit,
though pointed to gender inconsistencies in certain topoi in the text, particularly in the way the song was
introduced. I am grateful to the anonymous reader for PMM for clarifying that a grammatical point
earlier in the triplum indicates that this voice-part unequivocally belongs to a male speaker (all
manuscripts have ‘navré’, none has ‘navrée’); this also irons out the apparent inconsistencies reported in
my earlier version. The three-voice version therefore already belongs to a large group of motets about
nuns and monks falling in love, a topos undoubtedly made popular by the story of Heloise and Abelard.
One motet that makes the pairing explicit from the first word of each respective voice is Nonne sans amour
(M549) / Moine qui a cuer jolif (M550) / ET SUPER (M66) (Nun . . . / Monk . . .). Despite the fame of this
topos, and although Colton’s reading does not hold in the case of Mo 34, her lesbian reading of Nus ne m’i
pourroit conforter (M736) / Nonne sui (M737) / APTATUR (O45) remains plausible, as the triplum is in the
first person and the gender is not specified.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
37
certainly knights do not sing of shepherdesses in this manner. It becomes clear, then,
that the triplum is the voice of someone who is singing about a woman of a more
elevated social status than a shepherdess. Our monk, as he turns out to be, sings more
in the manner of a trouvère who spells out that he is inspired to sing because of his love
of a particular woman. His song is about a love that he has found to his liking (‘s’ai
trové amouretes a mon gré’). After he finishes his little song, his idyllic thoughts are
interrupted as he is reminded of the reality of his situation. We learn (from the text) at
this point that he is a monk, vexed by the conflict between the demands of monastic
life and his new-found love. The triplum ends with his exclamation about how his
torment will not allow him to live long (‘je ne vivrai mie longuement’).
The motet’s fourth voice, the quadruplum, again supplies the perspective of a male
lover. His brief lapse into Latin (‘nostra sunt sollempnia’; ‘these are our solemn
rituals’) half way through his text again suggests he is a monk. The quadruplum
complements the monk’s thoughts in the triplum: he speaks of his desire for a
blonde – presumably the nun of the duplum – and reveals he wants to sing about her.23
The conflict between his ecclesiastical vows and carnal lust is made obvious when
he reveals that his expressions of love ‘have been costly and will cost him more’
(‘acoler et baisier m’a cousté et coustera’), which suggests that, unlike the nun who is
discovering love for the first time, the monk may be a seasoned lover. Certainly, he
seems less concerned than the nun to denounce the restraints of the cloth than to
pronounce on the virtues of finding love that is tender.
It is, of course, hardly the done thing for nuns and monks to fall in love in this way.
The tenor thus supplies an ironic underpinning. The melisma on which the motet is
founded is ‘Aptatur’, meaning ‘it is fitting’.24
Does the sense of this tale have to be lost once the music begins? Does the act of
performance wholly obscure the words? To be sure, the polytextual nature of a motet
as complex as this one makes them hard to hear, but I shall argue that the poetcomposer(s) of this motet attempted to negotiate this problem and to devise ways of
focusing listeners’ attention on key passages. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, to listen
to the music is to get more out of the text.
Three- and four-voiced motets employ three possible textures. The upper voices
can be largely homorhythmic, with phrase endings coinciding or they can be mainly
homorhythmic, but the length of the phrases varies in each part. A single motet may,
of course, explore both of these styles by fluctuating between synchronized cadences
23
24
I interpret the quadruplum to represent the same monk as in the triplum.
It is difficult to say much more than this on the tenor, as its context remains unknown. While the word
‘aptatur’ with this melisma appears in O45 ‘Cum in hora . . .’ from the Office of Saint Winnoc, Pierre
Aubry argues that this Office was unlikely to have been responsible for making this tenor so popular in
the thirteenth century (see Aubry, ed., Cent motets du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1908), vol. 3, 72). The same
melisma appears over the words ‘prebere celestia’ in the response ‘Beatus Nicolaus’ from the Office
of Saint Nicholas. This last association might explain at least one motet in Mo that explicitly mentions
St Nicholas in its upper voices. If this is indeed the right connection, then, given his legacy as the
‘conqueror of the people, or . . . of all vices that are mean and common’, the tenor may suggest that Mo
34 is a rescue motet. See Granger Ryan and Helmust Ripperger, trans., The Golden Legend of Jacobus de
Voragine (New York, 1969), 16.
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38
Suzannah Clark
and independent phrase lengths. Motets in the third style enjoy a greater independence among the parts, with the upper voices employing different rhythmic modes,
text and phrase lengths. In such motets, the duplum is usually substantially shorter
than the triplum and quadruplum, the latter two of which are usually similar in
length. Therefore, in order to occupy the same musical space as the other parts, the
duplum’s musical pace tends to be slower. It is by hearing Mo34 against these stylistic
possibilities that its musical strategies begin to become meaningful.
It becomes significant, for example, that the words ‘Par ma foi’ and ‘Et enamouré’
sound simultaneously (see Ex. 1). In this particular case, the duplum and triplum are
roughly the same length. The words in question appear at the 84th and 81th syllables
respectively, almost guaranteeing that they will sound together. The music makes
them coincide exactly, creating an artful and meaningful simultaneity. As just recounted, the overall sentiment of the duplum and triplum is of a nun and a monk who
feel constrained by the vows they made, in the face of their feelings of earthly love. By
putting these sentiments together in the manner shown in Example 1, the polytextuality of this unique genre is exploited to portray their mutual conflict of love versus
faith.
Ex. 1 The conflict between love and faith in the triplum and duplum, and the clash between the nun’s
and monk’s voices (duplum and quadruplum); edition adapted from Hans Tischler, ed., The
Montpellier Codex, Part I, pp. 66–9, bars 37–41.
Christopher Page would argue that the semantics of this intricate detail would be
lost in performance. Nevertheless, this moment would also strike him as significant
because of the concordant vowel sounds generated by the choice of words ‘foi’ and
‘enamouré’. A closer look at the musical setting of ‘Et enamouré’ and ‘Par ma foi’ in
Example 1 suggests that the meaning of these words is also meant to be discernible in
performance. After singing ‘par ma foi’, the nun continues with ‘en relegion vif a
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
39
grant anoi’ (‘in the convent, I live in great chagrin’). As indicated in the example, the
words ‘en relegion’ in the duplum echo the music of ‘et enamouré’ in the triplum. This
musical device serves to bring these words out of the texture.25
There are other musical features that the poet-composer of this motet employs to
ensure that this moment – the crux of the motet’s meaning – is heard. To grasp how
this is the case, we must first examine the phrase structure of their two voice parts up
to this point and then introduce the quadruplum.
In the three-voice version, the phrase structure of the upper voices seems to be used
to deliberate communicative effect. The first four phrases are broadly homorhythmic,
with synchronized phrase lengths and with a clear break between each one (this
follows the first motet style mentioned above). When the monk bursts into song
midway through the triplum, he sings only the first couple of lines of his song along
with hers, before the two parts begin to lose their synchrony (this is shown in Ex. 2
with the jagged lines). It is as though his musical outburst cannot be contained within
the strictures set up in the first part of the motet; in other words, his desire to break
away from the confines of the cloth is metaphorically represented in the freer textural
setting of his song.
Additionally, the internal phrase lengths of the monk’s song are significant. Instead
of the regular four-bar phrases set up at the opening of the motet (see Ex. 2), the
song oscillates between two- and four-bar phrases, creating a regular structure but
not the kind of stanzaic structure familiar from the trouvère repertory. While his
song emulates the sentiment of trouvère chansons, it does not quite follow their
more regular phrasing. One might, therefore, wonder why the composition did not
proceed the other way around: why not construct the motet with unequal phrasing, as
many are, and have the song he sings constructed like a real song, with equal
phrasing?
Again, playing with the texture in this way has a powerful effect. By not quite
following the expected procedure of vernacular song, it communicates the message
that our monk has not yet learned to sing in such a mode, occupied as he has been
by religious music. He is therefore not so much singing a ‘composed’ song, as an
improvisation – though as we shall see later his improvisation nonetheless does show
him to be capable of generating a certain degree of musical structure, punctuated as
his song is by melodic repetition (see bars 21-2 and 27-8 in Ex. 2). For now, suffice it to
say that this intrusion of song within the fabric of the motet constitutes a ‘real’
moment. It emulates how someone in his position may well sing on the spur of such a
moment; he borrows elements of secular song, without matching it exactly in structural design. On a functional level, the return to synchronized phrasing after his
outburst further serves to draw attention to the two phrases cited in Example 1. They
may now be heard in context: they draw attention to themselves because they stand
out as synchronized and extremely short, and are surrounded by silence.
25
For another analysis of musical echoes, see the musical example annotated in Dolores Pesce, ‘Beyond
Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout me fu grief / Robin m’aime / Portare’, in Hearing the Motet: Essays
on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Dolores Pesce (Oxford, 1997), 30–1.
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Suzannah Clark
Ex. 2 Edition adapted from Hans Tischler, ed., The Montpellier Codex, Part I, pp. 66–9.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
41
Ex. 2 Continued.
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Suzannah Clark
Ex. 2 Continued.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
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Interestingly, the voice of the quadruplum, a part most likely composed later and
perhaps even by another poet-composer, collaborates in this hearing. Its phrases
generally obscure the two lower voices, but at this point – and indeed for the first time
in the motet – its phrasing is organized with and not against the duplum and triplum
(see Ex. 2). The quadruplum’s musical phrases are also broken up with rests (divisions) at this point (see Ex. 1). The structure of this added part strongly suggests that
the person responsible for its creation knew to cordon off this portion of the motet in
order to allow the crux of it to be heard. Moreover, on a symbolic level, it clearly
emphasizes the fact that the nun and the monk are in (musical) tandem, while the
words at this point express their shared dilemma. It is perhaps significant – though I
would not wish to press the point – that the melody in the quadruplum to ‘nostra sunt
sollempnia’ – his brief reminder to himself of his ecclesiastical responsibilities – is
closely related to the music echoed in Example 1 (compare Ex. 3). If this is unconvincing, one can, by contrast, state with some degree of certainty that this added part
continues to adopt melodic repetition as a means of portraying a conflict between the
two expressions of love, one pious, the other earthly. Example 3 provides the context
in which his Latin appears; it follows on immediately from his assertion that there will
never be any baseness in worldly love (‘ja vilein part n’i avra’). The two lines of text
share the same music, as indicated in the example.
Ex. 3 The monk’s conflict between ‘secular’ desires and ‘sacred’ duties.
The version of the two short phrases of Example 1 in Ba49 sheds interesting light on
the compositional strategies found in Mo34. As indicated earlier, Ba49 does not
include the quadruplum. The equivalent passage to Example 1 is given as Example 4.
It is immediately evident that the echo is not exact – the response to f-e-e-d-c is e-e-e-d-c.
In Ba 49, the parallelism between the two phrases is instead located in the counterpoint: each phrase begins with a standard unison (octave) and fifth sonority in
relation to the tenor. It is surely the presence of the fourth part in Mo that led to the
more precise echo, for it enhances the audibility of its accompanying message. And
having made the change to the echo, Mo34 gives the nun’s e-e-e-d-c response to the
monk in the quadruplum (compare Exx. 1 and 4).
There are both musical and hermeneutic consequences to this recomposition. The
presence in Mo34 of the f introduces a clashing sonority: e and f against two as in a
prominent rhythmic position.26 The expressive force of this musical detail reinforces
26
A comparison of these two sources also bears witness to Page’s point that four-voiced motets admit an
extraordinary amount of dissonance, which met with surprise and disdain as these works were first
being recovered by musicologists. Page cites John Stainer’s exasperation at the medieval ‘toleration of
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Suzannah Clark
Ex. 4 The version of the nun and monk’s conflict in the three-voice motet in Bamberg; edition adapted
from Anderson, ed., Compositions of the Bamberg Manuscript, CCM 75, pp. 65–6, bars 37–41.
the harsh reality of the predicament of the nun and the monk. In this passage, the
monk sings of the noble virtues of finding love without coercion in the quadruplum
(‘trop fait a proisier, qui l’a sans dangier’) and of the sweetness of being in love in the
duplum (‘enamouré tant doucement’), while the nun speaks of the frustration at her
imposed fate. The musical clash between the f and the e of the duplum and quadruplum specifically prevents the nun and the monk from singing entirely in unison,
a detail which signals that their fantasy jars with the reality of their respective
situations.
Singing secular song
Musical echoes also serve to convey meaning elsewhere in the motet, though on a
broader scale than the kind just mentioned. The melody that opens the duplum also
features in the triplum (near the beginning of the monk’s song) and again, though
slightly varied, at the end of the duplum (these are given as Ex. 5a, b and c). Why these
large-scale echoes? Most scholars who have worked on or edited this motet have
agreed that all three of these passages constitute refrains.27 If their views are to be
upheld, then the received definition of the medieval refrain comes under strain.
Again, a more subtle understanding of the use of music in these passages will clarify
both their status and function as refrains. But first a summary of the current understanding of thirteenth-century refrains is required.
27
cacophony’ as a remark typical of the turn of the century (Page, ‘Around the Performance’, 356, citing
J. Stainer et al., eds., Early Bodleian Music (London, 1901), vol. 2: 14). The addition of a fourth voice often
entails much doubling. The poet-composer could easily have had both the duplum and quadruplum
singing the same thing here, as happens a few bars later for instance (see bars 44–5 in Ex. 2). So, in this
respect the treatment of the phrase in Example 1 and the added dissonance in the inner voice is poignant.
For details, see note 44 below.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
45
Ex. 5a–c Melodic echoes in the duplum and triplum.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of ‘refrains’ is the section of text
and music that is repeated at the end of each stanza in lyrico-musical forms. This kind
of refrain seems to have been around for as long as music has been and was certainly
exploited in many thirteenth-century chansons (known as chansons à refrain). Peculiar
to the thirteenth century, however, are refrains that are textual and melodic entities,
ranging from one word to a couple of lines long, which are incorporated into a host
genre. These hosts were narratives or various musical genres, especially motets and
trouvère chansons. In 1889, Alfred Jeanroy wrote that refrains are always accompanied by their own particular melody (‘toujours accompagnés d’une mélodie
qui leur est propre’). He assumed therefore that music and text belonged together
uniquely.28 However, Eglal Doss-Quinby, who primarily studied refrains from a
textual viewpoint, indicates that a single refrain can change its melody (‘un même
refrain peut changer . . . de mélodie’).29 The evidence clearly reveals that Jeanroy’s
claim was too strict, and Doss-Quinby rightly points to the fact that the same words
can change melody. Her sentence reveals a belief that ‘refrain’ and ‘text’ are synonymous and therefore that it is principally the words that define the refrain and that the
melody is of secondary importance (‘a single refrain [=text] can change . . . its
melody’). No doubt this is in large part due to the logistics of creating catalogues; the
28
29
Alfred Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Âge: études de literature française et
comparée suivies de texts inedits, 3rd edn (Paris, 1925), 102.
Eglal Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (New York, 1984), 4–5.
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two standard ones exclusively focus on the texts.30 However, Example 5 raises the
opposite scenario: a common melody is shared amongst different texts. Do these each
constitute a different refrain? Or, are they a case of ‘un même refrain peut changer . . .
de texte’, to adapt Doss-Quinby? Indeed, the role that music plays in refrain usage
remains, despite much impressive research, little understood and certainly demands
yet more attention. One major frustration in any attempt to trace the practice of
citation or variation is that notation is invariably missing from the narrative sources
and all too often also from the chansonniers.31
Another aspect of these so-called migrating refrains that has become integral to
their definition is the question of their origin. Jeanroy suggested – again rather
categorically – that they all originated from oral song traditions, a claim that is now
generally regarded as spurious. In a sense, his claim simply made it easier both to
assume that all refrains constituted borrowed material and to explain away the
numerous unica as merely part of an untraceable history. Another persistent, though
perhaps equally spurious, vestige of their purported origin is the belief that refrains
first appeared in written form in the trouvère repertory and subsequently were cited
in motets. This notion of their transmission history means that, when faced with
extant concordances, scholars have all but automatically assumed that the usual
trajectory of citation is from chanson to motet. It is rarely the case that enough tell-tale
signs exist either to challenge or to confirm with certainty this assumed transmission
history. There are numerous instances where a refrain that appears in a chanson also
appears in a motet with a parent clausula, which raises the possibility that the refrain’s
point of entry into the repertory came in the process of texting the clausula and that it
subsequently made its way into a chanson (but, again, this is only a possibility, as one
would not want to presume a rigid historical lineage from clausula to motet either).32
30
31
32
Although Friedrich Gennrich was a musicologist, his catalogue lists only the texts; see Gennrich,
Bibliographisches Verzeichnis der französischen Refrains, Summa musicae medii aevi 14 (Langen bei
Frankfurt, 1964). It was superseded by Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au
début du XIVe (Paris, 1969), whose method of listing refrains in alphabetical order rather than by rhyme
scheme was instrumental in making it the standard reference tool for refrains; it is also more comprehensive. Refrains in this article are referred to by their number in van den Boogaard’s catalogue (using
the abbreviation vdB). But see also note 31 below.
The most prominent exception to the lack of notation in narrative sources is the Roman de Fauvel (Paris,
BNF fr. 146). The fifty-five refrains in it have been edited by Ardis Butterfield, which marks the first
published catalogue of refrains with music (see the appendix to ‘The Refrain and the Transformation of
Genre in Le Roman de Fauvel’, in Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford, 1998), 105–59). Interestingly,
Fauvel includes a case like Example 5, where the same music accompanies different words (and
Butterfield considers them to be separate refrains). As regards the chansonniers, even those which do
include notation often preserve only the music of the first refrain of the chansons avec des refrains, a
frustrating state of affairs given that the genre was the brainchild of the thirteenth century and exploits
the use of different refrains at the end of each stanza. Motet sources form much richer musical sources
because of their higher degree of musical preservation. My own collation of the melodies of refrains in
motets in the Montpellier codex (of which there are over 400) and their concordances clearly reveals that,
to Doss-Quinby’s point that the refrain ‘can change its melody’, one should add ‘and it frequently does’.
One of the most widely disseminated refrains (vdB 338) seems to have originated in a clausula. For a
discussion of its network, see Everist, French Motets, 66–8. This clausula spawned numerous motets,
including Latin ones, for which this portion cannot be considered a refrain. Although Everist leaves open
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
47
Mo34 contains one refrain with a concordance from a motet that has a related clausula.
It will prove instructive to this debate too.
In 1969, Nico H. J. van den Boogaard offered a more plausible scenario for refrains
than Jeanroy’s: while acknowledging that a popular origin is possible, he argued that
the flourishing interest in the thirteenth century in casting short intrusions into
narrative and musical textures undoubtedly led to the invention of many new refrains.33 Thus, although he called them ‘parasites’ that migrate from piece to piece and
genre to genre, suggesting that citation rather than repetition was their distinguishing
feature, he left open the possibility of newly composed refrains. This means that,
notwithstanding an inevitable loss of material, the numerous unica in his catalogue
may well represent less a measure of the plethora of lost concordances than of the zeal
with which new refrains were invented.
Scholars continue to hold different attitudes towards these unica, however. Mark
Everist, despite being sceptical that refrains are necessarily borrowed, suggests that
many of the unica in motets may not be refrains at all.34 Especially doubtful, he claims,
are those in direct speech, which he rightly regards as a common feature of refrains
but as a weak criterion for their identification as such.35 However, one must bear in
mind that any urgency to overhaul the unica runs the risk of privileging borrowing as
a criterion for identification. Moreover, Ardis Butterfield has conclusively shown that
part of the play with refrains included the pretence of citation, as van den Boogaard
previously suspected.36 Nonetheless, it remains the case that, with motets, the existence of a concordance is the only way to be sure of the presence of a refrain. By
contrast, in narratives and chansons, refrains are easily detected through the formal
structure of their host genres. As this study will reveal, Mo34 is a rich source for
elucidating the problems associated with these various scenarios of refrain usage. It is
to a detailed examination of these that I now turn, resuming my discussion where I left
off – with the three refrains in Example 5.
Friedrich Gennrich took all three to be refrains, cataloguing them separately according to their text entries as Ex. 5a=1470, Ex. 5b=1392 and Ex. 5c=1469 respectively.
By contrast, van den Boogaard considered only Ex. 5b and 5c to be refrains (they are
33
34
35
36
the possibility that such clausulae may have served as notational models for motets (p. 71), it nevertheless remains likely that the refrain vdB 338 was created from the clausula and subsequently cited outside
the motet. On this basis, it seems that Guillaume d’Amiens’ rondeau, which is based around vdB 338,
originated in the clausula. This explains its unusual characteristics. On this last point, see also Alejandro
Enrique Planchart, ‘The Flower’s Children’, Journal of Musicological Research, 22 (2003), 303–48, here 343.
Van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 16 and 17.
Everist, French Motets, 55–7.
Everist, French Motets, 165, n. 23. The idea that the announcement of singing or of direct speech was used
by refrain cataloguers as an important means of identifying the presence of a refrain is clearly stated in
van den Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains, 23, n. 21. As we shall see shortly, Mo 34 provides an opportunity
to examine Everist’s suggestion that a shift into direct speech (singing) does not inevitably signal the
presence of a refrain.
See, for example, Ardis Butterfield, ‘Repetition and Variation in the Thirteenth-Century Refrain’, Journal
of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991), 1–23, and ‘The Language of Medieval Music: Two ThirteenthCentury Motets’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 1–16. For more on the manipulation of
pre-existent materials, see also Pesce, ‘Beyond Glossing’, 28–51.
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numbers vdB 142 and vdB 1126 respectively). Van den Boogaard’s catalogue additionally indicates whether refrains have concordances or not. According to him, the
final refrain in the duplum (vdB 1126) has a concordance, while vdB 142 is unique.
Although Examples 5a and b have no extant textual concordances, it is clear from the
music that they do involve an act of borrowing (or since it has not yet been determined
which bit existed first, I should at this point more carefully say that they involve an
‘act of sharing’). So why were they not both refrains according to van den Boogaard?
Why, if the melodies of Examples 5a and b in particular are so closely linked, did van
den Boogaard consider only one of them to be a refrain? Why this discrepancy? An
exploration of how these passages arose and why their melodies might overlap will, I
think, reveal answers.
It is my contention that the refrains at the beginning of the duplum and middle of
the triplum were created during the composition of this motet, and indeed that their
music was adapted from the refrain at the end of the duplum (vdB 1126), which, it will
be recalled, is the only refrain of the three to have a known concordance. Although
Gennrich’s catalogue makes no reference to music, it may well be his sensitivity to the
music that led him to list all three passages as refrains, whereas van den Boogaard
found nothing about the text of the opening of the duplum that suggested to him that
it constituted a refrain.
VdB 1126 also appears in the chanson Quant ce vient en mai que rose est florie
(R1156).37 I shall argue that its presence in Mo34 follows the classic definition (if I can
call it that) of a refrain in a motet on two counts: first, the motet quotes the chanson
and not the other way around and, second, it consists of a musical citation, a claim I
believe I can make despite the fact that no music for this chanson survives to verify the
point. To my mind, it is the musical echoes between these three passages that strongly
suggests that a musical as well as textual citation makes this intertextual borrowing
(Ex. 5c) and internal adaptation (Ex. 5a and b) meaningful.
Preserved in two manuscripts,38 the chanson Quant ce vient en mai tells of a young
woman trapped in a nunnery. It is sung by a narrator, who begins by evoking a
pastourelle-like scene: he sets out to find a lover, suggesting he will be the kind of
narrator who is an active participant in the plot. However, he remains an observer
throughout. He hears a voice and we are told in the first stanza that it emanates from
a woman near a convent (‘pres d’une abı̈ete’).39 The refrain, which is repeated at the
end of each stanza (this is a chanson à refrain), is first introduced as if the narrator is
reporting what he hears her singing. In the body of the next three stanzas, the narrator
reports the substance of the nun’s song. First she apparently exclaims that whoever
made her a nun should be cursed by Jesus and that she has no desire to sing Compline
and Vespers anymore. She would rather be in the company of a lover. And then she
37
38
39
R1156 refers to the catalogue number of chansons in Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des
altfranzösischen Liedes (Leiden, 1955).
Paris, BNF fr. 20050 (U) and Bern, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, 389 (C).
The edition and translation of this song used here comes from Samuel N. Rosenberg, Margaret Switten
and Gérard Le Vot, eds. Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology of Poems and Melodies (New
York and London, 1998), 208–9.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
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sings her refrain once more. The next stanza opens with a reminder that the narrator
is an observer. ‘Elle s’escriait’ (‘she cried out’), he begins, followed by a series of her
exclamations, including an exasperated question, ‘God, who placed me in this convent?’ (‘E Deus! ki m’ait mis en ceste abaı̈e?’), an emphatic statement that she is
determined to escape and no longer wear a habit or surplice (‘n’i vestrai mais souplis
ne gonnete’), and the refrain once again. The fourth stanza centres on her plan to send
a message to her lover to come and retrieve her so they can live together in Paris. In the
last stanza, the narrator reports that the lover received her message and arrives to
rescue her.
I have already asserted that I suspect the music at the end of Mo34 is likely to be a
quotation of not just the text but also the melody of this repeated refrain from Quant ce
vient en mai. Clearly the stories of the chanson and motet resonate closely with one
another, and a musical borrowing seems apt. But to my mind, it is the use of this
melody in the rest of the motet that clinches the argument of a musical as well as
textual citation.
It will be recalled that in the triplum the monk is so excited by the love he has found
that he announces he will sing a song about it (‘s’en dirai chançonete’). The music at
that point (Ex. 5b) is a close approximation of the music of the refrain from the end of
the duplum (Ex. 5c), although the words are different. He is, we must remember,
trained in the music of holy orders, the music of the Mass and Office. As mentioned
earlier, his song emulates how someone in his position may well sing on the spur of
the moment. Wanting as he does to lead a secular life, his initial foray into secular song
is halting, yet exuberant – ‘amouretes’ is sung to long notes, contrasting with the
musical texture that immediately precedes it (Ex. 2). He could just as easily be singing
nonsense or humming at this point, until he manages to crystallize his song into the
melody that he somehow summons from another repertory (Ex. 5b). The basis of my
argument that the melody in Example 5c originates as the refrain melody in Quant ce
vient en mai and that Examples 5a and b are adaptations of it is a hermeneutic one.
There is a far more powerful message in the motet if the melody is a recognizable one
and if it comes from a trouvère chanson. In other words, if we were to interpret the
music of the motet in isolation (or as not borrowed), the interpretation could only go
as far as follows: a nun sings a tune to joyful words at the beginning of the duplum; it
is adopted by a monk who sings about a lover he desires and the melodic echo
suggests the object of his desire is the nun who was just singing the melody herself;
then at the end of the motet the nun revises the tune to curse the one who made her a
nun – a curse whose words are also found in a song about a nun in the same
predicament. By contrast, if the melody is pre-existent, its incorporation into the motet
means that Examples 5a and b are not solely linked to 5c, but that all renditions of the
melody are intended to invoke Quant ce vient en mai. This creates a deeper level of
meaning that not only makes sense of the rest of the motet but also seems to have been
recognized by the melodic choices made by the poet-composer who wrote the
quadruplum.
This does raise one obvious question, however: what is a monk doing singing a
nun’s song? The gesture of turning to the trouvère repertory to express his love is
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entirely appropriate, for it is a repertory in which lovers woo their ladies. The religious
music in which he is trained is not suited to such a task. A melodic borrowing from
Quant ce vient en mai is a powerful asset in the monk’s seductive routine. He uses
music with which she can identify and, if she overhears him singing, she will know
that the song to which he alludes through his choice of melody implies he could be her
rescuer.
Additionally, there are two points of a technical nature that suggest a careful
crafting of the monk’s song on the part of the poet-composer. First, his citation begins
just as the tenor melisma starts its first repetition, as indicated in Example 2. This is
significant because such points of tenor repetition increasingly became the structural
moment of choice for composers from the late thirteenth century onwards to signal
important events. Second, a textual variant with Ba49 has important interpretative
ramifications. In the Montpellier source, the monk sings ‘amourete, amourete’, while
in Bamberg he is recorded as singing ‘amourete, joliete’. The words are similar enough
that the variant might seem of little significance; however, both Rokseth and Tischler
have taken ‘amourete, joliete’ to be authoritative for Mo too, presumably on the
grounds of lectio difficilior. At any rate, ‘joliete’ links this passage nicely with the other
two refrains that share this melody: they also begin with the letter J – surely a kind of
coherence that might have excited a medieval craftsman and that further suggests the
nun and monk share a unity of purpose.40 Moreover, from the point of view of
sonority, the beginning of each refrain is articulated by the same sound, which helps
to bring it out of the texture.
The monk’s song continues beyond the material just discussed, and, as noted
earlier, he fashions his improvisation into an impressive little musical structure. As
shown by the paradigmatic graph of Example 6, in Mo it consists of a short preamble
(the long notes to ‘amouretes’) followed by an abcb+refrain structure. He exclaims ‘en
non De(u)’ (‘in the name of God’) to an emphatic motif (b), which is soon echoed
exactly by ‘s’ai trové’ (‘for I’ve found . . .’), between which his words are sung to the
rhythm found in the melody I argued was from Quant ce vient en mai (labelled a). He
even manages a rhyme scheme. Note also that his song begins and ends with the same
note (the 21st note) in the tenor’s melisma, as is indicated in Example 2.
Example 7 provides the melody in Ba49. In this version, the opening contains no
initial hesitation. Instead there is an elegant (from a musical structural point of view)
opening repetition. As shown in the paradigmatic graph in Example 7, the first two
words ‘amouretes, jolietes’ form a complementary musical gesture a–a’. The result is
a melody less obviously connected to the melodies of Examples 5a and c.41 What
implications might this have for my argument given above about the origins of the
melodies in Example 5? If anything, it reinforces the argument. Whoever refashioned
Mo34 did so by recognizing the opportunity was there to echo the melody of Example
5a, which provides further evidence that there is something special about it.
40
41
The scribe in Mo even gave the final refrain a capital letter, which is a common means of indicating the
beginning of a refrain in narratives and chansons. It is less common in motets. Robyn Smith indicates
those that are marked with capitals in French Double and Triple Motets in The Montpellier Manuscript.
Between Mo and Ba, there are no variants in Example 5a and c; only Example 5b (from his song) differs.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
51
Ex. 6 The monk’s song as it appears in Mo.
The melodic structure of the version in Ba49 also implies a different reading to that
given above of our monk’s capacity and method of seduction: instead of beginning
hesitantly, the more structured opening of his song suggest he is more confident or
self-assured. The rest of his melody, however, is simpler than the version in Mo34. As
shown in Example 7, motif b is now a simple and less characteristic stepwise motion,
rising a third. ‘Li cuers mi halete en joliveté’ (from vdB 671) is the same as in Mo 34 but
the final phrase ‘. . . amouretes a mon gré’ (from vdB 982) is varied.
It seems especially curious – if only from a scholarly perspective – that his song is
the portion of the motet that is subject to the starkest variation in material, given that,
for reasons undoubtedly to do with the kind of rubric that introduces refrains in
narrative genres (they usually announce that someone is about to sing),42 the monk’s
song has been taken by various scholars to consist entirely of refrain material. That is
to say, his song is thought to be made up of three separate refrains, though, as noted
earlier, scholars are unanimous only about the status of the first and third ones.43 If
42
43
It is this very assumption that Everist has sought to question; see note 35 above.
‘Amouretes, / Amouretes, / M’ont navré’ is a refrain according to Gennrich (1392) and vdB (142), and
the various editors of this motet (or its texts) follow suit: see Yvonne Rokseth, ed., Polyphonies du XIIIe
siècle, 4 vols. (Paris, 1935–9); Tischler, ed., The Montpellier Codex; Doss-Quinby et al., eds., Songs of the
Women Trouvères; Smith, ed., French Double and Triple Motets in The Montpellier Manuscript, and Gordon
A. Anderson, ed., Compositions of the Bamberg Manuscript (n.p., 1977). ‘En non Dé / Li cuers mi
halete / En joliveté’ is a refrain according to Gennrich (1947), vdB (671), Smith and Anderson; however,
according to Rokseth (and as is often the case, consequently Tischler) only its first line is taken to be a
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Suzannah Clark
Ex. 7 The monk’s song as it appears in Ba.
indeed these are refrains and if citation is apparently such an important aspect of their
definition, what does the fact that a medieval poet-composer would recompose
precisely this portion of the motet tell us?
Perhaps a more telling question, however, is: why should his song consist entirely
of refrains when a real song never does? If his were a genuine song – a chanson à refrain
or chanson avec des refrains, of which we hear only one stanza – then it should consist
of newly composed material and end with a refrain.44 In this scenario, neither vdB 142
nor 671 would constitute refrains. The final couplet (vdB 982), by contrast, would.
Whatever the case, it remains intriguing that the greatest degree of variation between
Mo and Ba should appear precisely at this point. An explanation for this divergence
may again be found by scrutinizing the function of the song within the motet.
The two versions of his song in Mo and Ba offer different solutions to a compositional problem, one that seems to have everything to do with performance: if his song
is to be heard, then it must stand out in the musical texture – a familiar tune would
44
refrain; Doss-Quinby et al. do not mark this passage as a refrain. ‘S’ai trouvé / Amouretes a mon gré’ is
a refrain according to Gennrich (325=1944) and vdB (982), who identifies concordances in R2064.I and
Ovide 94d; all editors concur that it is a refrain.
Chanson à refrain refers to stanzaic songs whereby the same refrain is repeated at the end of each stanza;
chanson avec des refrains is also a stanzaic song but each refrain at the end of each stanza is different. The
latter form was unique to the thirteenth century. To judge from the concordances with R2064.I and Ovide
94d that were identified by van den Boogaard, he does appear to be singing a song with a refrain, rather
than simply a stanza of a song without refrain.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
53
achieve this effect. However, if his song is to be a realistic chanson à refrain or chanson
avec des refrains, then we must expect newly composed material for the stanza,
followed by a refrain, which may or may not consist of borrowed melody.45 Mo opts
for the former solution, Ba for the latter. For both sources, the musical connection of his
song to the trouvère repertory seems crucial: he is not just expressing budding
sentiments of love, he is expressing them in a characteristically vernacular manner,
whether structurally (Ba) or melodically (Mo).
The composer did not rely solely on this method of recognition, however. As noted
earlier, the structural underpinning of the song is well crafted: the last note coincides
exactly with the point in the repeating tenor where the first note of his song begins.
This observation surely is all the more significant given that this same point in the
tenor also marks the beginning of the refrain in the duplum at the end of the motet. In
the case of Mo in particular, the connection between his invented song and its
inspiration is made explicit.
Lastly, we must ask why the phrase that opens the duplum, ‘Je sui joliete, sadete,
pleisans’ (Ex. 5a), also adapts the melody of the refrain at the end of the duplum (Ex.
5c). It serves an important purpose in being cited at the outset of the motet (in both
versions). Earlier I noted that the text reveals very late on that the speaker of the
motet’s duplum is a nun. The music, by contrast, reveals the identity of the young girl
at the outset through this melodic citation. The catchy little tune reveals she is a nun
and not, say, some shepherdess. In this case, the issue of whether or not one can hear
the words at this point is immaterial; also immaterial is the fact that the words
constitute a contrafactum at this point. A recognizable tune conveys the meaning –
and it is crucial to the argument here that the tune is recognizable; and hence this
further supports my belief that Example 5c must be a melody also known to Quant ce
vient en mai. The tune alone tells us that this is a nun hoping – indeed singing – for
freedom and love, just as the nun sang and achieved freedom and love in Quant ce
vient en mai.
The presence of these passages (Ex. 5a–c) in this motet provides a convenient
means of thinking further about the definition of refrains. Their identity is always
much more straightforward in other genres than in motets. This is especially so in the
case of chansons – whether they are chansons à refrain or chansons avec des refrains46 –
because they are marked by structure. Technically, refrains may appear anywhere in
a motet, although most of those identified occur at the end. In cases where text and
music both appear elsewhere in a motet, each instance may be taken to constitute a
refrain, especially when, as in many cases, they generate a rondeau form. But note
how, again, it is form that marks their presence. The case of Mo34 is relatively unusual,
45
46
There is no music in either R2064.I or Ovide 94d. Unlike the case of Example 5c, where I am prepared to
argue that a borrowed melody makes the most sense of both a hermeneutic and communicative point of
view (see also below), there seems to be no similar means to argue a case for whether or not the melody
to vdB 982 would have been shared with R2064.I.
For exceptions where the regularity of line-lengths has potentially masked whether certain songs
are merely stanzaic or are ‘avec des refrains’, see Friedrich Gennrich, ‘Trouvèrelieder und Motettenrepertoire’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 9 (1926), 8–39 and 65–85.
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Suzannah Clark
then. If a melody, but not the text, is grafted in multiple places in a motet, does each
instance of the melody automatically constitute a refrain? Such a scenario in a chanson
would not yield multiple refrains. Indeed, in this instance, Example 5b complicates
matters because, as I noted earlier, surely it is part of a song stanza, not a refrain; at the
same time, however, it also yields its authority as a song by being formulated through
the citation of refrain material. Indeed, this case points to an inevitable tension
between definitions generated for the purposes of cataloguing material and the study
of the playful manner in which such material may be used. The inventory of refrains
is an exercise that demands certain decisions, and the idea that Examples 5a–c are
three separate refrains is a product of cataloguing. To be sure, Example 5b is a
refrain – but it is a refrain that poses as a stanza in Mo34. Yet vdB 671, the next line of
the monk’s song, is not a refrain; it is ‘merely’ sung material within a motet, functioning within the world of the motet as stanza-material. By contrast, vdB 982, the final
line in the monk’s song, is a refrain, both as part of a chanson within the imaginary
world of the motet and as a refrain within the motet. Thus the identification of refrains,
particularly in motets, must necessarily take account of their internal structural
function (are they part of a medieval musical structure that contains refrains?), as well
as their inter- and intra-textual purpose.
Singing church music
According to Gennrich and van den Boogaard, the monk proclaims another refrain at
the end of the triplum (G 1415 and vdB 1105). It too is interesting both for its
intertextual links and for what it can reveal about the nature of refrains. The monk
cries out that he can’t live much longer in his situation (‘je ne vivrai mie longuement’
(‘I shall not live long at all’) (vdB 1105)), a seemingly standard plea for one who feels
the torment of love. According to van den Boogaard, this refrain features in two other
places, as the refrain in the sixth stanza of the trouvère chanson avec des refrains Pour
mon cuer a joie atraire (R157) and at the end of the duplum in a two-voice motet En
espoir d’avoir merci (M791) / FIAT (O50) in W2, f. 232v.47
Although no notation is preserved for the refrain in Pour mon cuer a joie atraire, of
the two concordances, the connection of Mo34 to the motet En espoir d’avoir merci /
FIAT in W2 is nevertheless the most interesting one because it is linked to a clausula –
a genre with close ties to the church.48 A few scholarly assumptions need to be
addressed before this observation can be tackled from a hermeneutic perspective. As
any textbook reports, motets were created when French texts were added to the upper
voices of clausulae. Clearly, if refrains are generally thought to migrate from chansons
to motets, then one of the following two historiographical assumptions about the use
of pre-existent material in motets must give way to the other: if the refrain in the W2
motet is pre-existent, then the clausula cannot be; if the clausula is pre-existent, then
47
48
W2 =Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, cod. Guelf. 1099 Helmstad.
The current wisdom that many of the clausulae we have may never have been performed in a church, but
may instead be compositional experiments, does not undo the fact that the origins of the genre still lend
the clausula, as a genre, a close association with the church.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
55
the refrain must be newly crafted. In view of the discussion so far in this study, in
which the possibility of newly composed refrains seems certain, it is surely more
expedient to conclude that the refrain in En espoir d’avoir merci / FIAT was created when
the words were added to the clausula and it subsequently found its way into the
chanson and Mo34. The source of the clausula requires discussion before this conclusion can be deemed secure, however.
The clausula of the W2 motet is in the St Victor manuscript (Paris, BNF lat. 15139),
a source whose clausulae were first argued by Yvonne Rokseth to come from motets
that were stripped of their texts.49 She suggested that once organa and clausulae were
no longer composed but were still needed in services, new clausulae were taken from
motets to satisfy the desire for up-to-date styles. According to her, various anomalies
regarding the St Victor clausulae support her hypothesis: first, there is a notable
absence of intermediary Latin motets between this set of clausulae and their French
motets;50 secondly, the tenors are not the usual ones known to the clausulae of the
Notre Dame sources; and thirdly (and most relevant to the present discussion) the
high number of refrains in the French motets suggested that they must have been
written first. In other words, Rokseth gives greater weight to the pre-existence of the
refrains than to the clausulae.
Jürg Stenzl has since revisited the issue, noting in particular that the St Victor
clausulae are generally simpler than their motet counterparts.51 He rightly suggests
that it would be odd to simplify the clausulae if the desire for up-to-date styles was
what motivated their creation, a factor that Rokseth acknowledged but dismissed.
Moreover, and again rightly, he does not agree that the presence of refrains deserves
such prominence in overturning the usual historical trajectory that motets came from
clausulae.52 Nonetheless, if we go along with Stenzl and restore the idea that these
clausulae are parents to the motets, then the intriguing question arises as to why
they attracted so many medieval poet-composers to cite portions of them, thereby
generating refrains. That question requires a separate study.
For the purposes of interpreting the refrain in Mo34 it is not necessary to resolve the
question of whether the clausula predates the W2 motet or not. This matter of origin
would have been an unlikely concern for the poet-composer of Mo34; rather, the mere
existence of the clausula would have sufficed (I am assuming – safely, I think – that the
motet and clausula would both have existed by the time Mo34 was being composed).
49
50
51
52
Rokseth, Polyphonies du XIIIe siècle, vol. 4, 70–1. Her theory was further supported by William Waite, who
supplemented the list in St V with another fifteen from Florence. Waite, The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century
Polyphony (New Haven, 1954), 101. For a more general discussion of the relationship between the
clausula and motet, see Norman E. Smith, ‘The Earliest Motets: Music and Words’, Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, 114 (1989), 141–63.
The clausulae in question also all have the incipits of the motet texts in their margins, in a much later
hand to the musical script. See Ethel Thurston, The Music in the St Victor Manuscript, Paris lat. 15139,
(Toronto, 1959), 2.
Jürg Stenzl, Die vierzig Clausulae der Handschrift Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Latin 15139 (Bern and
Stuttgart, 1970), 113–19.
Stenzl, Die vierzig Clausulae, 120–5. For a similar argument, see also Rudolf Flotzinger, Der Discantussatz
im Magnus Liber und seiner Nachfolge (Vienna, 1969).
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Suzannah Clark
At the very least, then, we can conclude that the refrain vdB 1105 was chosen for its apt
words and for the relevance to Mo34 of the subject matter of its host motet, summarized by its incipit ‘En espoir d’avoir merci’, meaning ‘In the hope of obtaining mercy’.
And for anyone aware of the clausula, the refrain’s ecclesiastical connotations would
have made it all the more powerful: it seems altogether appropriate that our monk
sings material whose modified tune has links to the church (see Ex. 8).53
Ex. 8 The melody of the refrain at the end of the triplum, the motet in W2 and the clausula in St. V, and
the melody of refrain Mo34 and Ba43.
The similarity between the melodies of Mo34 and the motet in W2 and St V becomes
all the more convincing when placed in the context of refrains that contain similar
words to ‘je ne vivrai mie longuement (ainsi)’ but which van den Boogaard regarded
as separate, namely vdB 504 (‘Dieus d’amors, vivrai je longuement ainsi?’), vdB 1092
(‘Je ne puis ensi vivre longhement’) and vdB 1692 (‘Se la bele n’a de moi merci, je ne
vivrai mie longuement einsi’). Only the first of these appears in a source with notation,
as the others are refrains in chansons avec des refrains in stanzas other than the first.
Interestingly, the melody of vdB 504, which appears in a motet in Montpellier (Mo76)
and Bamberg (Ba43), is very different from vdB 1105, as can be seen from the bottom
staff in Example 8. This serves to bring into relief the musical connection between Mo
34 and the motet En espoir d’avoir merci, and shows they are more closely related than
if one were to look at their two melodies in isolation. In other words, a musical citation
does seem to be intended here. But Mo76 is helpful in yet another respect: its refrain
appears twice in the course of the motet, and significantly its final rendition at the end
of the triplum is in counterpoint to a refrain comprising the exclamation ‘Hé, amours,
53
Recall the point in note 48.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
57
mourrai je sans avoir merci?’ (‘Hey, Love, will I die without having mercy?’).54
Irrespective of the order of composition of Mo34 and Mo76, they share the association
of dying of love and hoping for mercy, but Mo34 additionally has the association with
the motet En espoir d’avoir merci and the clausula, which is not available to Mo76 in
melodic terms.
Moreover, the refrain’s connection to the clausula makes particular sense for Mo34:
placed as it is against the refrain from Quant ce vient en mai in the duplum, the conflict
experienced by the nun and monk is symbolized once more: in the triplum, he
declares that he can no longer live according to the demands of the church, singing as
he does to a loosely adapted tune of music of the church; while in the duplum, she
sings about her new feelings of love to the tune of a trouvère chanson. Again, it is the
music that embodies the message of their personal struggle.
In counterpoint to this pair of refrains, the monk sings yet another refrain in the
quadruplum (vdB 253). Its concordance is found in the chanson Quant estés faut
encontre las saison (R1898), which is uniquely preserved in R90.55 As Jeanroy and
Långfors noted, this song consists of a series of clichés, a feature shared by all of
the unique anonymous chansons from this manuscript.56 In this case, the music of the
refrain closely and convincingly resembles the chanson (see Ex. 9), but note that the
monk offers a negative form of the refrain text, which however amounts to the same
thing: ‘bad is love where tenderness and sweetness are not found’ as opposed to ‘good
is love where tenderness and sweetness are found’.
Ex. 9 The melody of the monk’s refrain at the end of the quadruplum and the refrain in the chanson
in R.
More importantly, however, is the context that this citation invokes. Quant estés faut
encontre las saison is a song about singing and about song being heard. The protagonist
insists he will sing without reprobation of the one he has placed in his thoughts and he
ends the chanson by addressing song itself, asking it to ‘go to the one that I love so
much’ (‘chançon, va t’ent a celle que j’aim tant’). It must have been a considerable
compositional challenge to find a song of such suitable intertextual meaning whose
54
55
56
The music of this refrain is also known in another source, where, as in Mo 76, it appears as an enté refrain.
See Hé amors, morrai je, qui l’a deservi? in Paris, BNF fr. 845, f. 184c.
R=Paris, BNF fr. 1591.
Alfred Jeanroy and Arthur Långfors, ‘Chansons inédites tirées du manuscrit français 1591 de la
Bibliothèque Nationale’, Romania, 44 (1915–17), 454–510, here 455.
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Suzannah Clark
pre-existent refrain melody could be preserved over a pre-existent three-part counterpoint. Yet the effort of keeping the melody is crucial to the meaning of the gesture:
given that the singer is addressing his song and asking it to travel to his lover, it is
imperative that his melody arrives intact. Thus, as Examples 8 and 9 illustrate, the
philology of refrain melodies must be understood in context: it may be crucial that the
melodies are similar, as in Example 9; but does it altogether stretch plausibility to
pursue the argument that the adaptation in Example 8 signals the monk’s desire for a
critical distance from the source of his music, manifested here in the form of musical
variation? To be sure, the study of refrain usage – both in terms of tracing similarities
and differences in the text and music – must take account of the medieval zest for
intertextual games: modification can be as meaningful as citation.
Rehearing the motet
This article first introduced the motet Joliement en douce desirée / Quant voi la florete /
Je sui joliete / APTATUR in a manner close to that imagined by Page for medieval
audiences: I paraphrased the text of each voice-part. The audience would then be
ready for a polyphonic rendition of Mo34, during which, however, they would have
been limited to knowing the plight of the nun and the monk and perhaps catching a
word here or there. They would follow little else. I have argued, however, that a
musical performance can enhance rather than obscure the meaning of the text. By way
of conclusion, I wish to imagine a performance of Mo34, heard as both music and text
in the manner explained in this article. Let, as it were, the performance begin.
Third-party listeners could be expected to hear the tenor and recognize it as one of
the most popular tenors for motets of the thirteenth century. They might be in a better
position than us to identify its liturgical context, but if not, they – like us – would know
it is easily subject to irony, for ‘unfitting’ material was often sung above it (they could
certainly bring to this motet a whole host of associations with Aptatur, a tenor that
enjoyed numerous other parody upper voices). The portions of the upper voices most
likely to catch their attention as the performance goes along would be the opening of
the duplum, the monk’s song in the triplum, his French and Latin echo in the
quadruplum, the two short phrases encapsulating dilemma of the nun and monk, and
their refrains at the end. A successful hearing would surely rely on performers
knowing to bring out these features.
Listeners would immediately grasp from the duplum’s opening tune that this
motet involves a nun, a feature not yet revealed in the text. Shortly thereafter (in Mo)
they would hear the same melody again, this time championing a miniature song,
whose beginning is articulated by a repeat of the tenor with its emphatic falling fourth.
In the midst of the song, the quadruplum’s repeated phrase sounds out.57 We resume
57
Robyn Smith in French Double and Triple Motets, 47, uniquely believes that ‘nostra sunt sollempnia’
deserves to be included as a refrain on the grounds that it behaves like a citation and that it was probably
only omitted from Gennrich and van den Boogaard’s respective catalogues because it is Latin not French.
Although it behaves like a refrain as an interjection, it is really meant to evoke a kind of invocation, one
which the monk wishes to resist, however.
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‘S’en dirai chançonete’
59
attention on the song, with the internal repeat of the musical gesture for ‘s’ai trouvé’.
A few phrases later, the texture becomes basically homorhythmic again, and the
phrases are short and emphasized by the rests. No doubt the singers of Mo would have
tossed the echo between ‘et enamouré’ and ‘en relegion’ to each other. In subsequent
hearings, listeners might be ready for the density of cues in these short phrases,
especially with the clashing harmonies and intricate layers in the four-part version. At
the end of the motet, a place where listeners would certainly have expected refrains to
appear, they are treated to three of them. It becomes a question of listening out for
their intertextual (nay, intersonic?) resonances: the monk sings a polyphony of sacred
and profane fragments, while the nun sings a secular fragment. By hearing all the
moments in the way that I have highlighted, the listener will have grasped what the
motet is about.
In one of the most outstanding contributions to the study of thirteenth-century
motets, Sylvia Huot has shown that the jovial subject matter of many motets belies a
subtlety that is clearly best appreciated by those with a knowledge of chant and its
liturgical context, of biblical exegesis and of vernacular traditions.58 Certainly her
work suggests that motets appeal most to those who understand the vernacular and
sacred texts enough to get the allegory or comical meaning facilitated by the textual
juxtapositions. As I have shown, the music is an equal partner in this dialectical
interplay. In short, if we are to convince ourselves that the semantic aspect of words is
meant to be heard in performance, we might enter into the spirit of this repertory and
take heed of our nun and monk and the two protagonists of the trouvère chansons
from which they quote.
The singing nun in Quant ce vient en mai sings of her desire for escape; she is
overheard by a narrator but more crucially by her rescuer. The protagonist in Quant
estés faut encontre las saison, from which the monk quotes, pleads with his song to make
its way to his lover: he wants the music to carry his words to her. Thus, when the monk
announces in the motet that he will speak of his love in song – ‘s’en dirai chançonete’
– he is not just singing away to himself. By adopting the melody that the nun in the
duplum clearly knows (in the version in Mo34), he surely hopes that the object of his
affection will hear his song and its words. He borrows her melody to seduce her. But
there is also a message here for us: why would all these characters sing if doing so risks
the possibility of obscuring their pleas for rescue or mercy? Surely, then, in bringing
together multiple texts in a motet – ‘s’en dirai motet’ – it is unlikely that thirteenthcentury poet-composers would want to risk obscuring their message either.
58
Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet.
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