The Analysis of Motets

Any new book on medieval motets cannot fail to address fundamental questions that have accompanied the genre on its recent travels around musicological literature. Foremost among these have been the question of how a motet is (or was) heard: how, in other words, can (or could) listeners engage with musical settings that deliberately superimpose two or more different texts in ways that make any single continuous thread of text almost unintelligible? And, given this salient feature of motets as a genre (at least in their thirteenth- and fourteenth-century incarnations), in what ways can (or could) motets encode meaning in the various forms that their first receivers encountered them?Footnote ² Motet analysis has sometimes seemed to retreat from these questions into the sphere of numerological symbolism, identifying underlying structures that govern the form in meaningful ways, but are nevertheless imperceptible to all but the most seasoned analyst. Zayaruznaya surveys the scholarship on the medieval motet in the light of these questions, identifying two recent positions as poles between which she navigates a middle course. On the one hand she places the work of Christopher Page and Emma Dillon, who identify in the motet a deliberate privileging of the purely sonic (or non-verbal) over the projection of texts.Footnote ³ On the other, Margaret Bent contends that aspects of the relationships between music and words, and between the words of one voice and those of another, that are not apparent in a single hearing can nonetheless be identified by a listener who engages in study and reflection outside the real time of performance.Footnote ⁴ Zayaruznaya argues for a third way, in which the analysis focuses on those aspects of the music and textual declamation that are the most audible in performance. Such an approach seems sensible and refreshing, since no one could argue that no musical or textual moments are apparent or prominent in listening to a motet, even just once, and some characteristic motet techniques (especially hocket, but also changes of speed of text declamation, for example) seem calculated to pierce their way out of the texture and demand immediate auditory attention. A crucial factor in this approach is the level of scrutiny accorded to the upper voices, whereas most motet analyses have started from the tenor. Without denying the primacy of the tenor at the very heart of the motet, both in terms of the genre’s history and as the foundation from which each example of the genre takes shape, Zayaruznaya argues that in terms of listeners’ (and presumably performers’) perceptions, the barely audible, often slow-moving tenor pales into insignificance compared with the rhythmically active and higher-pitched upper voices.

This analytical manifesto informs the analysis of examples, which takes up chapters 2–5, and – for the most part – generates persuasive new readings of the works in question. To attempt to summarise Zayaruznaya’s readings of individual motets, which are immensely detailed and carefully illustrated with annotated examples and diagrams, would not do justice to her efforts or to the subtlety of her interpretations, but a few exemplary points can be set out here to give a sense of her approach. In the analysis of Guillaume de Machaut’s motet 12, Hélas/Corde mesto, a key feature is the registral swapping of the motetus and triplum voices during the first half of the piece that is ‘corrected’ by their return to their usual registral positions at the mid-point. Such voice-crossings might seem, at first glance, to belong to the realm of inaudible scholarly abstraction, but in fact, Zayaruznaya shows that the shift is highly prominent in listening, since each voice is texturally distinct: when the smooth melodic line of the motetus is replaced at the top of the texture by the more disjunct triplum, an inescapable division is apparent, splitting the motet into two in a way that Zayaruznaya reads as ‘depicting Fortune’s contrasting halves’ (p. 191). In her analysis of Philippe de Vitry’s In virtute/Decens, Zayaruznaya pays close attention to the hockets and repeating rhythmic patterns in the upper voices that seem to cross the boundaries of isorhythmic sections as identified in previous analyses of the piece. Arguing that such upper-voice features form a significant part of a listener’s experience of the motet, Zayaruznaya proposes a new structural arrangement that divides the motet not into two sections, but into four: two larger sections involving supertaleae, framing two shorter sections each of which consists of two simple repetitions of the talea. Her proposal also reveals and resolves a tension between the isorhythmic scheme and the arrangement of the motet texts:

Readers are invited to test her conclusions about the audibility of certain musical and poetic features via the recordings of all the analysed motets that are included on the book’s companion website (multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/9781107039667).

At the same time, however, Zayaruznaya is careful to avoid specifying too precisely what any given listener might hear, inviting us instead to ‘put [our]selves in the place of a connoisseur of ars nova motets hearing [a given piece] for the first time’ (p. 213). Describing such a listener’s possible experience of the motet Beatius/Cum humanum, she suggests that the process might have begun with an initial recognition (derived from the first few lines of text of either voice) of the kind of subject matter being treated. The imagined connoisseur might then listen out for hockets, and deduce, when they did not appear in the usual places, that this was a motet without hockets; subsequently, when hockets finally did make an appearance after seventy-eight breves, the listener might assume that this signalled the start of a concluding untexted hocket, such as sometimes occurs. But when this hocket continues well beyond the normal length for such concluding gestures, ‘our hypothetical listener might wonder that the hockets are still going on – it might seem, at some point, that the hocket section has gone on longer than the motet proper, though surely that couldn’t be right’ (p. 214). When this excessive hocket finally draws to a close, and – instead of finishing – the motet resumes a polytextual texture and continues, the curious listener might deduce that this motet is highly unusual in having an extra third section. If so attuned to the formal curiosity, and able to pick out the text (sung to a familiar tune) right before the end: ‘Nunc igitur Sanctam Trinitatem veneremur atque Unitatem’, our listener might be moved to an appreciative chuckle at the composer’s ‘joke’: ‘[this] really is a punch line, commenting on the motet’s flamboyant tripartite structure and justifying it at the same time. The Trinity and the Unity! Good one’ (p. 214). While such imagined encounters might seem whimsical, they do an important job in helping to anchor the analytical remarks to the experience of the motets as music, and though audibility is by no means the sole justification for every aspect of Zayaruznaya’s readings (comments such as ‘this is not to imply that anyone would be expected to “hear” [In virtute/Decens]’s quadripartite form. A listener would at most be aware that there was hybridity afoot’ (p. 90), make this clear), the analyses are fresher, and richer, for according such a degree of attention to those aspects that are aurally striking, alongside the underlying and often much more hidden devices of tenor construction and isorhythmic technique.

Perhaps inevitably, when dealing with something as subjective as listening, certain points that Zayaruznaya claims for her category of aurally prominent features are more debatable. Discussing the text-setting in Vitry’s Cum statua/Hugo, for example, she draws attention to words that are superimposed when sung in the motetus and triplum voices in a way that invites us to consider conflation of their subjects (Nebuchadnezzar’s statue and the eponymous Hugo respectively). Her point that ‘the musical setting highlights similar sounds’ is made abundantly clear in the score-notated and helpfully annotated Example 3.9 (p. 122; with the words in question boxed or circled and connected with lines between the voices), but I would admit to having difficulty in picking out these ‘relatively unsubtle’ features through listening alone. In this instance, I am of the view that the essential interpretation is unaffected, supported as it is by numerous other indications of Vitry’s compositional ends in this motet that Zayaruznaya lays bare, although the fourteenth-century listener (or even reader, without the analytical convenience of score notation that aligns simultaneously occurring musical moments in all the voices) might not have found this to be a particularly significant pillar in their understanding of the motet’s meaning. More problematic (at least for me) is the approach taken to the section of the triplum text that describes the statue’s various materials. In Figure 3.2 (p. 123) Zayaruznaya highlights the enjambment that spreads the description of each section of the statue over the poetic line-breaks: gold is described in a phrase spanning lines 5–6, silver in lines 6–7, copper in 7–8, and iron in 8–9. Laying out each of these syntactic units regardless of their disposition across the poetic lines and the location of the rhymes in Table 3.1 (p. 124), Zayaruznaya accords significance to the decreasing amount of poetic and musical space allotted to each one (gold is described in fourteen syllables set to eleven measures of music, silver in ten syllables set to nine measures, and so on), arguing that this constitutes a kind of surface diminution that warrants analytical attention. Zayaruznaya contends that ‘only when set to music, which controls declamation, can this metaphorical diminution of the statue’s parts be executed without peril of being spoilt by a reader’s whim’ (p. 124). Yet Vitry’s music seems to go out of its way to avoid controlling the declamation in any way that would highlight this metaphorical device: the musical setting emphatically continues to respect the poetic structure and not the syntactic one, with the (rhyming) end of each poetic line marked out with a long (or a breve plus breve rest). Had Vitry wished to draw attention to the enjambment and the surface-level ‘diminution’ that it engenders, he surely had the means at his disposal to do so, and in opting not to, his music seems to risk imperilling his metaphor just as much, or perhaps even more, than any reader’s declamation might.

Nevertheless, such quibbles do no more than support the idea that each new analysis turns up new things, some of which will be more apparent to one analyst than to another – just as different listeners (or the same listener, on different occasions) will find their attention seized by different musical features. Zayaruznaya amply acknowledges this, and provides her readers with a rich and thought-provoking palette of new observations about the motets she explores, bringing together aspects of their texts’ structures, poetics and literary allusions with their music’s citations, forms and rhythmic and textural organisation. Central to each analysis is the disclosure of an overall shape that makes each motet stand out as atypical: this proceeds from a fundamental premise – which I do not doubt – that ars nova motets have a normative shape or form (‘we have to know what a motet is to say that In virtute/Decens is a strange one’; p. 105). Thus, alongside the wealth of interpretative detail that each analysis affords, Zayaruznaya shows that the works in question all ‘contain – and embody – hybrid creatures, and do so in formally hybrid ways’ (p. 105), and this theory is extensively underpinned by a justification of how music can function as embodiment, a discussion to which I shall now turn.

Songs as Bodies

Chapter 1 of The Monstrous New Art, headed ‘Songs alive’, devotes some forty-eight pages to the discussion of songs as creatures, proposing what Zayaruznaya terms a ‘creature concept’ for the late medieval motet. The notion that music can be described in terms of the body, or bodily parts at least, is abundantly clear from medieval music theory, where all manner of musical phenomena are described as having tails (caudae) and heads (capita); from musical notes as written (the minim has an oblong body and a stroke on its head, according to the mid-fourteenth-century Quatuor principalia), to musical works (the tails of antiphons, and – according to Dante – the feet, foreheads, and tails of songs). As Zayaruznaya puts it, music theory is often colourfully, even ‘unnecessarily visceral’ (p. 30), which was, of course, part of its pedagogical potency: the ubiquity of the Guidonian hand in medieval manuscripts is a marker of the effectiveness of corporeal teaching techniques. Moving from theory to practice, she goes on to claim that ‘there are plenty of moments in surviving compositions that encourage an analysis attuned to embodiment’ (p. 34), regardless of whether their composers were familiar with the bodily terminology that permeated music theory. Charting a course through instances of musical zoomorphisation that takes in the evil beasts of Machaut’s motet 9, Fons/O livoris, concerning which Jacques Boogaart has contended that the tenor’s ‘late’ arrival on the final chord (following a rest which separates off the final note of its talea) effectively describes the scorpion stinging from behind which is referred to in the text of the triplum (cited on p. 35), Zayaruznaya arrives at what she calls ‘an older and more robust tradition of granting songs “personhood”’ (p. 39). This tradition is that of song, and in particular the widespread conceit of songs having selves, independent of their creators. It is not difficult to summon to mind examples of songs whose authors instruct them to go off on their travels, especially those with envois or tornadas: such instructions invite the listener to collude in the ‘highly artificial literary conceit’ (p. 42) that songs might have bodies, agencies, and voices to themselves.Footnote ⁵ Dante takes this conceit several steps further, addressing the songs of his Convivio at length and endowing them with fair features and refined skills of communication. That songs might have voices and the ability to make utterances is hard to avoid in relation to songs like Ma fin est mon commencement and Tout par compas, a pair of ‘self-absorbed’ works whose texts describe their musico-poetic forms (or bodies) in the course of enacting them (pp. 43–6). And it falls to the interpolated Roman de Fauvel (of course) to pursue this course of musical embodiment right through to its preposterous end, when the narrative’s final motet declares itself, in all three voices, to be thirsty: ‘cis chans veult boire’ (‘this song wants a drink’, p. 58). This declaration that songs can have both body and desire may be a pretence or an artifice, but it is one invented by medieval minds, not our own. Responding to Richard Taruskin’s statement that ‘motets cannot revel. Only people can revel’, Zayaruznaya offers up this motet (Quant je/Bon vin): ‘it would seem . . . that motets occasionally like to have a good time. Or rather, we can pretend that they revel, and to do so is neither ahistorical nor meaningless’ (p. 59).

This highly engaging account of songs with bodies from grand chant to Fauvel leads, at the close of chapter 1 of The Monstrous New Art, to a lengthy and useful discussion of whether and how medieval motets can be considered works in the Goehrian sense: this section is wittily headed ‘The imaginary zoo of musical things’. Outlining the ways in which medieval music has been perceived not to fit the requirements of a later work concept, Zayaruznaya draws attention to the question of its status as ‘act’ versus ‘object’, ultimately concluding that it can easily be read as both: ‘Doubtless medieval composers would have thought of their works as sounding events, but they apparently also thought of them as entities with, if not precisely bodies, then certainly shapes’ (p. 66). Clearly medieval composers employed different mental representations of musical forms than did composers of later periods, but this is not say that they had no conception of (or interest in) the shapes that music took. Given the largely anonymous transmission of late medieval music, and the almost total lack of materials which might help us to uncover composers’ mental representations of musical forms, it falls to analysts to generate historically apposite and contextually supported methods for identifying such forms in surviving works, and Zayaruznaya’s ‘creature concept’, though neither ‘regulative, nor . . . the only or even the dominant late medieval mode of thinking about song’ (p. 69), is one such tool which proves its worth in the analysis of motets with divided forms in the rest of the book.

Monstrous Bodies and the Art of Division

Some sense of the scope of Zayaruznaya’s study, in terms of the monstrous creatures alluded to, and the musical techniques which are harnessed alongside them, can be found in her Figure 4.4 (p. 163), a diagrammatic representation of musical and literary links between five key works. Four of these are motets: Machaut’s Hélas/Corde mesto, and Vitry’s In virtute/Decens, Cum statua/Hugo and Phi millies/O creator, a four-voice work whose texts have come down to us in full, but whose music survives only as a fragment of the triplum, transcribed and discussed for the first time in The Monstrous New Art (see pp. 131–41 and Appendix 3). The fifth work in this diagram is Machaut’s complainte from the Remède de Fortune, Tels rit au main. The inclusion of a monophonic song amongst these motets indicates that Zayaruznaya is more interested in shared concerns between works than in the boundaries of genre, an interest that is particularly apparent in the ‘Interlude’ between chapters 4 and 5, where accounts of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue across medieval literature (reaching far beyond musical texts) are surveyed. The purpose of this investigation is to show that Vitry’s reading of the biblical story – as revealed in Cum statua/Hugo and Phi millies/O creator – seems to be out of step with the more usual medieval interpretations. It turns out, however, to have much more in common with Machaut’s – as expounded in Tels rit au main – and, strikingly, with John Gower’s well-known description in his Confessio amantis. Zayaruznaya’s study thus offers an important revision to Gower scholarship that has previously posited this reading of the dream as originating with him, whereas it can now be shown to have been circulating earlier in the musical works of Machaut and Vitry. It is eminently possible that Gower may have known the work of Machaut (as his fellow English poet Chaucer did), and of Vitry too, and in this respect it may be telling that Jehan de la Mote, whom Zayaruznaya identifies as the target of Vitry’s attack in Phi millies/O creator, had travelled to England to work at the court of Edward III.

The link to Gower is important to Zayaruznaya’s argument because of the poet’s concept of ‘division’ which lies at the heart of his reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue: it is division, in Gower’s view, that underpins most of what is wrong with the world (from its weather to the unhappiness of its people). As an interpretative tool, Zayaruznaya contends that

The musical connections between the works analysed in chapters 2–4 are too extensive to summarize, but emerge very clearly from a thorough reading of these analyses: nevertheless, this idea of division cements the links and also allows Zayaruznaya to cast her net still wider in the search for ars nova motets that might yield evidence of ‘divided forms’. Table 5.1 lists a total of twenty motets ‘on monstrous, bestial, and disjunct themes’, beginning with those already mentioned in this review, and continuing with further pieces treating themes such as Fauvel himself (four motets), Fortune (five motets in addition to Hélas/Corde mesto), wolves, vipers and the Devil. She points out (p. 173) that this group forms a sizeable proportion of the total repertory (of around ninety motets), though still a minority: necessarily so, in fact, as the features identified as abnormal or hybrid in the analyses must have ‘a backdrop of standard compositional procedure’ (p. 176) to have any force. A longer discussion of what unites the themes of these works ensues, with the key factors being hybridity and fragmentation, rather than deformation (another category of monstrosity not found among these motets); a few doubts may linger about whether every motet in Table 5.5 meets these criteria, though Zayaruznaya lacks the space to analyse all of them.

Extending even further than the reach of Table 5.5, Zayaruznaya delves into Post missarum/Post misse, an estates satire in motet form, which relates strongly to Gower’s idea of division, and is further linked to the motets treated earlier in that its theme, the divisions of society, is mapped onto Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in a contemporary text (p. 181). In this piece she shows how the upper voices are less clearly divided from one another than is usual, but instead attain a kind of parallelism, which suggests that despite the social divisions of the body politic all parts of it should be contributing to the same aims. Voice-crossing and sharing of text sounds might similarly point to a musical exploration of social mobility, a contentious topic at the time: society should be strictly divided or chaos will result. This discussion resonated for me with some of the themes of the Roman de Fauvel, but also seemed to bear comparison with the thirteenth-century motet, in whose texts and musical settings social boundaries are regularly transgressed with comic or satirical intent. Indeed, it is hard to avoid echoes of Johannes de Grocheio’s famous statement about the motet’s proper place in society: ‘This kind of music should not be set before a lay public because they are not alert to its refinement nor are they delighted by hearing it, but [it should only be performed] before the clergy and those who look for the refinements of skills.’Footnote ⁶

Chapter 5 turns, finally, to consider motets referring to the Trinity. At first, eyebrows might be raised at the decision to explore the threefold Godhead in a book concerned with monstrosity, but the choice turns out to be an eminently logical step, once the interpretative lens has widened from monstrous/hybrid bodies to other instances of division and segmentation. Trinitarian symbolism has been abundantly revealed in motets, and the specific notion of ‘3-in-1’ finds an obvious parallel in tactics of diminution (at least where it concerns perfect values). Nonetheless, late medieval understandings of the Trinity are shown here to be quite varied (and not universally sanctioned), as is revealed through a discussion of iconography. A tradition of depicting the Trinity as a three-headed person (in contrast to the more conventional Father supporting the cross of the crucified Son, with the dove of the Spirit hovering above or between them), was condemned by church authorities as ‘monstrous’ (p. 216, n. 71): unsurprisingly, given the representation’s resemblance to the three-headed dog of the underworld, Cerberus. In other visual depictions of the Trinity, three adjacent faces are combined on one head to make a four-eyed creature. Zayaruznaya probes these different visualisations of the Trinity as evidence of the different conceptions that underpin some motets on the subject: her analyses of Firmissime/Adesto and Beatius/Cum humanum propose that the former encodes an interpretation based on the idea of ‘three into one’, whereas the latter postulates a unity with three separate parts. Beatius/Cum humanum is one of only two clearly tripartite motets of the fourteenth century,Footnote ⁷ which helps to cement its Trinitarian theme (otherwise not particularly prominent in its texts). It is also unprecedented (in the fourteenth century) in containing a quotation from the older – and much more obviously Trinity-focused – motet Firmissime/Adesto, and for Zayaruznaya this places the later piece in a crucial position in her argument about musical representation: ‘It is only a small stretch, then, to read the tripartite form of Beatius/Cum humanum in conjunction with its prominent reference to an older Trinity motet as a comment on the changing aesthetics of musical representation. Beatius/Cum humanum is not a motet about the Trinity, but a motet about a motet about the Trinity, and thus a motet about motets about’ (p. 214).Footnote ⁸

Motets and Modes of Musical Representation

If motets can be about other motets – as well as monsters, statues, and Fortune – how is it that they work? It is clear that there are things that motets can do (that other genres cannot): their simultaneous intertextuality, for instance, effects or invites a kind of comparative analysis of two or more texts similar to but more effective than side-by-side layout. Polytextual motets are not the only medieval musical genres caught up in intertextual relations, but unlike citations and refrains, in motets there can be no doubt about the intention to bring two texts into association and provoke speculation on their relationship, even if that be one of deliberate and jarring contrast or disjuncture. Their musical settings can foreground both dissonances and consonances of texts, by exploiting contrasts and similarities of themes, ideas and linguistic features (sounds, structures, rhythms and rhymes). When Zayaruznaya states that ‘use of a given symbol in song can change the meaning of both symbol and song’ (p. 15), she might have gone further to add that there are two layers of this in the motet, as use of a symbol in polytextual song (where it might be placed into juxtaposition with one or more other symbols) is different from that in mono-texted singing. Any subject that is contradictory or duplicitous is well suited to presentation in a motet, just as any segmented body can find musical resonance in the highly structured environment of isorhythmic practices. ‘Indeed motets’, Zayaruznaya contends, ‘with their ability to present conflicting ideas both simultaneously and sequentially, are an ideal medium for highlighting such contrasts’ (p. 202).

Many of these features are present in the thirteenth-century motet, and it is worth asking whether everything that is here claimed as a specific feature of fourteenth-century (or ars nova) examples is really unique to them. The distinction Zayaruznaya sets up between the ‘neatly defined’ and ‘classified’ motets of the thirteenth century and the more difficult to pin down works of the ars nova may be overstated: while it is true that thirteenth-century motet texts very often treat courtly or religious themes, plenty of works superimpose the two in ways that play them off against one another.Footnote ⁹ Likewise, their ultimate origins in the texting of (mostly) pre-existing discant clausulae led to a dazzling array of poetic and musical forms, complemented in its variety by the extensive practice of citation: hence, as Sean Curran has remarked, ‘a motet [in the thirteenth century] may look like several different kinds of song, but not one kind exclusively, and this is surely related to the variety and kinds of book into which motets or their texts were copied’.Footnote ¹⁰ Thirteenth-century examples that relate to the themes under discussion do sometimes feature in the footnotes of The Monstrous New Art: indeed the example from the Montpellier Codex detailed on p. 180, n. 16, defies classification along the lines that Zayaruznaya proposed, with its courtly quadruplum, clerical triplum, and dice-playing motetus. This concern does not diminish the value of Zayaruznaya’s work on her chosen case studies, nor am I suggesting that thirteenth-century pieces ought to have been brought into the discussion more than they are. But a possible path for future research on the dynamics and transformation of the motet during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries might involve closer attention being paid to their points of similarity as well as difference, and might also address what Zayaruznaya describes as the dramatic expansion of topics for the motet from Fauvel onwards: ‘motets still praise saints and ladies, but they also participate in politics and argue points of doctrine’ (p. 222). In so doing, such motets seem to me to be assuming the mantle of the discourse of the conductus, a genre that had largely disappeared by this time, even if the inclination to explore themes of politics, satire, and doctrinal theology in music was still live enough to seek a new outlet.Footnote ¹¹

What does indeed set ars nova motets apart from their predecessors is their ‘closed-ness’: their potential for integrity and unity of form, governed by a set of prevailing conventions, is what allows them to explore the principle of division (p. 225). And it is here – at the close of the final chapter and in the Epilogue – that the argument of The Monstrous New Art reaches beyond the fourteenth century and addresses (as the jacket text promises) matters ‘with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text–music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work’. There may be considerable debate about precisely how music can function as representative, but surely all can agree that music can depict change and difference. It can set up expectations and then thwart them meaningfully, and it can alter its course along any set of musical parameters (rhythmic, declamatory, textural and so on) to draw attention, highlight or elucidate. Thus, in the ars nova motet, ‘that vanguard genre of musical unity’ (p. 226), composers readily found ways for their music to depict ‘reversal, distortion, incompleteness, and excess . . . [i.e. the] defining features of the monstrous’ (p. 225).

Positioning the late medieval motet in a broader history of text–music relations, the Epilogue argues that we lack an adequate terminology to characterise the kinds of representation at work in these pieces. Guillaume Dufay’s 1436 motet Nuper rosarum flores has long featured prominently as a salient point in musical expression before the arrival of Renaissance word-painting, but number symbolism (as epitomised by Nuper rosarum’s structural correspondences to the architecture of the Florence Duomo) helps to define only some, but by no means all, meaningful text-setting in medieval music. Zayaruznaya advocates something that might be termed ‘form–idea relations’ (acknowledging the blurring of Platonic and Aristotelian vocabulary), a mode of representation in which the form is not abstract but relates to the ‘idea’ (or Latin materia) behind the composition: ‘what I suggest is that the forms of many ars nova motets are not “absolute,” but rather contingent; even eloquent’ (p. 231). Ultimately, this comes down to ‘level of zoom’: words and tones (at the forefront of Renaissance text expression) are too local, whereas forms and ideas seem to be much more promising points of departure for medieval motets. The analyses of motets that constitute the bulk of The Monstrous New Art exemplify the contention that ‘an entire composition might stand for something (materia), selectively magnifying its most characteristic features in the course of embodying them’ (p. 232), and the entirety of this final discussion must become required reading for anyone wishing to generate a historically sensitive analysis of medieval music henceforth.

In sum, The Monstrous New Art is not only a fascinating exploration of an exciting topic (the monstrous in ars nova music) but a book of much wider importance. Future work that addresses medieval motets, the analysis of any early music, and the question of how texts and music relate in the pre-Renaissance repertory will be much the richer for taking account of it. The text is copiously and helpfully illustrated,Footnote ¹² admirably lucid and highly pleasurable to read: though the analyses demand a lot from the reader because of their complexity and subtlety,Footnote ¹³ they produce ample rewards, and I look forward to introducing this book to advanced undergraduate and graduate student readers as a model of engaging and persuasive analytical writing.