Upper-Voice Structures and Compositional

Process in the Ars nova Motet

In the motets of Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and their

contemporaries, tenors are often characterized as the primary shaping
forces, prior in conception as well as in construction to the upper voices.
Tenors are shaped by the interaction of talea and color, medieval terms
now used to refer to the independent repetition of rhythms and pitches,
respectively. The presence in the upper voices of the periodically
repeating rhythmic patterns often referred to as “isorhythm” has been
characterized as an amplification of tenor structure. But a fresh look
at the medieval treatises suggests a revised analytical vocabulary: for
many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, both color and talea
involved rhythmic repetition, the latter in the upper voices specifically.
And attention to upper-voice taleae independently of tenor structures
brings renewed emphasis to the significant portion of the repertory in
which upper voices evince formal schemes that differ from those in
the tenors. These structures in turn suggest a revision of the presumed
compositional process for motets, implying that in some cases
upper-voice text and forms may have preceded the selection and
organization of tenors. Such revisions have implications for hermeneutic
endeavors, since not only the forms of motet voices but the meanings of
their texts may change, depending on whether analysis proceeds from
the tenor up or from the top down. Where the presumed compositional
and structural primacy afforded to tenors has encouraged a strand of
interpretation that reads upper-voice poetry as conforming to, and
amplifying, the tenor text snippets and their liturgical contexts, a
“bottom-down” view casts tenors in a supporting role and reveals the
poetic impulse of the upper voices as the organizing principle of motets.

Anna Zayaruznaya is interested in the cultural and compositional

contexts of late-medieval song. Her first book, The Monstrous New Art:
Divided Forms in the Late-Medieval Motet (Cambridge University Press,
2015), explores the roles played by monstrous and hybrid imagery in
fourteenth-century musical aesthetics. More recent publications center
on Philippe de Vitry (1291–1369), a poet and composer well known to
music historians as a pioneer in the development of musical notation.
Zayaruznaya received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010 and
teaches at Yale University, where she co-convenes the interdisciplinary
Medieval Song Lab. Her awards include the Van Courtlandt Elliott
Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, the Gaddis Smith
International Book Prize from the MacMillan Center at Yale, a project
grant from the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale, and a fellowship from
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Upper-Voice Structures
and Compositional
Process in the Ars nova
Motet

ANNA ZAYARUZNAYA
First published 2018
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zayaruznaya, Anna, author.
Title: Upper-voice structures and compositional process in the
ars nova motet / Anna Zayaruznaya.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2018. |
Series: Royal musical association monographs ; 32 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047511| ISBN 9781138302440
(hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780203730867 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motets—500–1400—History and criticism. |
Motets—500-1400—Analysis, appreciation.
Classification: LCC ML1402 .Z39 2018 | DDC 782.2609/02—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047511

ISBN: 978-1-138-30244-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-73086-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Palatino Linotype

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 Contents

List of music examplesvii

List of figuresix
List of tablesxi
Acknowledgmentsxiii
Note on music examples and naming conventionsxv

1 Introduction 1

2 Foundational tenors and the power dynamics of

compositional process 11

3 Talea and/as color23

4 A catalog of upper-voice structures 43

5 The hermeneutic stakes: reading form in

S’il estoit/S’Amours65

6 A new paradigm for motet composition: Colla/Bona

reconstructed85

Conclusion 105

Appendix: music-theoretical discussions of color and talea, c. 1340–1430109

Bibliography 145
Index153
 List of music examples

1.1 Vitry, In virtute/Decens, breves 1–60. Tenor taleae

aligned; significant isorhythm shaded 2
1.2 Vitry, In virtute/Decens mm. 1–60, arranged to align
upper-voice isorhythm (shaded) 5
3.1 Post missarum/Post misse, tenor as notated in I-Iv 115, fol. 8r 32
3.2 Post missarum/Post misse, triplum breves 53–9, 95–101,
and 137–43 as notated in I-Iv 115, fol. 7v 32
4.1 Machaut, Trop plus/Biaute (text omitted), arranged to
align upper-voice blocks; taleae shaded 53
4.2 In virtute/Decens arranged to align upper-voice blocks;
taleae shaded 55
4.3 Vitry, Cum statua/Hugo, arranged to align upper-voice
blocks; taleae shaded 56
4.4 Je voi/Fauvel, upper-voice blocks aligned 58
4.5 Flos/Celsa, mm. 1–84, arranged to align upper-voice
taleae (shaded) 60
4.6 Flos/Celsa, arranged to align upper-voice blocks;
taleae shaded 62
5.1 S’il estoit/S’Amours, tenor in original note-values
(ligatures expanded) 66
5.2 S’il estoit/S’Amours, tenor as sung (note-values reduced
4:1; measure numbers correspond to Exx. 5.3 and 5.4) 66
5.3 S’il estoit/S’Amours arranged according to tenor taleae;
tenor and upper-voice taleae shaded 71
5.4 S’il estoit/S’Amours arranged to align upper-voice
blocks; taleae shaded 77
5.5 S’il estoit/S’Amours, upper voices, mm. 1–12; original
in roman type, revisions necessary to excise
mm. 1–3 in italics 82
5.6 S’il estoit/S’Amours, upper voices, mm. 46–57; original
in roman type, revisions necessary to excise
mm. 49–51 in italics 82
6.1 Colla/Bona, tenor, repeating pitches and taleae marked
(ligatures expanded) 90
6.2 Colla/Bona, breves 64–75 97
6.3 Libera me de sanguinibus, F-Pn Lat. 10482, fol. 163v 99
6.4 Colla/Bona, upper-voice blocks aligned, taleae shaded 102
 List of figures

2.1 Table IV, “Relation Between Sections of Poems

and Taleae,” Frank Harrison, ed., Motets of French
Provenance, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth
Century 5 (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1968), 204 17
4.1 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut,
Hélas/Corde mesto (M12) 45
4.2 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut,
Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) 45
4.3 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut, Qui/Ha!
Fortune (M8) 46
4.4 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Tribum/Quoniam
(exclusive of a twelve-breve introitus) 47
4.5 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut,
Quant/Amour (M1, left) and Hareu/Helas (M10, right) 48
4.6 Upper- and lower-voice structures in Vitry,
Vos/Gratissima50
4.7 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Pusiex, Ida/Portio50
4.8 Schemes of periodic rhythmic repetition in the tenor
(left) and upper voices (right) of Flos/Celsa51
5.1 Gombosi’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours
(“Machaut’s Messe de Notre-Dame,” 221); Key: α = w h h
.
h h; β = h –∑ h w; = –∑ h68
5.2 Powell’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours
(“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 246) 68
5.3 Powell’s rendering of the Fibonacci hierarchy
and geometric construction in the tenor of S’il
estoit/S’Amours (“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 251) 69
5.4 Telescopic tenor in Boogaart’s analysis of S’il
estoit/S’amours (“Encompassing Past and Present,” 25;
spacing modified) 72
5.5 Four ways of parsing the notated tenor of S’il
estoit/S’Amours; GB-Ccc Fer, fol. 266r, image courtesy
of DIAMM 80
5.6 Melodic comparison between the tenor of S’il
estoit/S’Amours and fifteen chant sources, from Alice
Clark, “Concordare cum materia: The Tenor in the
Fourteenth-Century Motet” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton
University, 1996), 190. Reproduced with permission 84
6.1 Hypothetical compositional plan for Colla/Bona,
summarizing the combination of text-lines in triplum
(black circles) and motetus (white diamonds; hollow
diamonds represent untexted motetus passages) 98
 List of tables

1.1 French motets written c. 1315–75 whose upper-voice

forms differ from those of the tenors 7
3.1 Definitions of color and talea, c. 1340–1430 26
6.1 Duration of poetic lines in Colla/Bona95
 Acknowledgments

Facile comparisons between collaborative scientists and lone-wolf

humanists miss the enormous impact that peer-reviewers can have on
the shape and particulars of an argument. This book would not exist if
it had not been for the generosity of a dozen or so people of whom half
remain anonymous to me. I  know to thank Margaret Bent and Law-
rence M. Earp for reading multiple drafts, James Hepokoski for help-
ing shape the final version, Sylvia Leith for excellent edits, and Bonnie
Blackburn for her eagle eyes. For sending such stellar readers my way
and for their encouragement I thank W. Anthony Sheppard, Joy H. Cal-
ico, and Simon Keefe. Jacques Boogaart, Ardis Butterfield, Suzannah
Clark, Sean Gallagher, Thomas Kelly, Jesse Rodin, and Emily Zazulia
have all provided valuable feedback on this material at some point,
and the translations in the appendix benefitted from unpublished edi-
tions generously shared by Michael Scott Cuthbert and Jan Herlinger
and from the expertise of Andrew Hicks. I am grateful to Gillian
Steadman at Routledge for her patience and attention to detail during
the proofing stages.
As for the others: thank you, whoever you are, for engaging with
this work on its winding way from article to monograph. Your ques-
tions and concerns, your erudition, skepticism, and creativity have left
their mark on every page. One of you pointed to a “killer omission” in
an earlier draft: “The author simply must provide for readers the medi-
eval appearances of the term talea (talla) and discuss them in the context
of their original Latin music-theoretical sources . . . [it] might take up
only 3–4 pages at most.” It turned out to take up more space than that:
please see Chapter 3 and the Appendix, dear reader, and thank you for
the prompt.
Note on music examples and
naming conventions

The music examples in this book are not diplomatic transcriptions but
editions using unligated ars nova notation. Sources used are indicated
in the text. Dots of division are omitted where bar lines do their work.
Alteration, which doubles a note’s length, is indicated with a “+” above
the staff. In the pattern , the first semibreve is always longer (thus:
). Words have often been omitted for reasons of spacing, and in
some cases bold, box-tipped lines ) mark poetic line boundaries.
Those examples that are meant to convey the structure of an entire
motets at a glance will necessarily be too small for other purposes.
Motets are referred to throughout by the shortest reasonable incipit,
in the order Triplum/Motetus, as in, for example, Kügle, The Manuscript
Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 115: Studies in the Transmission and Composi-
tion of Ars Nova Polyphony (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1997).
The aim is not to ignore the existence of tenors but to avoid unwieldy
references, since a large number of motets is discussed here. Medieval
treatises referred to these motets by their motetus (before c. 1375) or
triplum incipits (after c. 1375), but never by their tenors’ texts. For more
on naming conventions, see Anna Zayaruznaya, “Form and Idea in the
Ars nova Motet” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2010), 17–27.
 1

Introduction
Consider the first half of Philippe de Vitry’s In virtute/Decens (Exam-
ple 1.1).1 Its lower voices are organized in a looping ten-breve
rhythmic pattern easily spotted when the music is arranged in ten-
breve systems: the tenor begins each system with two longs, the
contratenor starts a dotted long in the last breve-measure of each
system, and so forth. Such repeating patterns, whether identified by
the Latin word talea or the twentieth-century term “isorhythm,” are
a mainstay of fourteenth-century motet construction (much more on
terminology later).2 Scanning the motet’s upper voices for repeated
rhythms over those same ten-breve systems proves much less fruit-
ful. The triplum repeats no rhythms at ten-breve intervals, and the
motetus repeats only a single longa at the midpoint of each system
(shaded in the example).3 This, presumably, was what led Frank
Harrison to rate both triplum and motetus of In virtute/Decens as
F (“isoperiodic”) on the scale of A–G (from “isorhythmic” to “non-
isorhythmic”) that he used to tabulate “Isorhythm and Isoperiodic-
ity in Upper Voices” in his edition of fourteenth-century motets of
French provenance.4
But, while the upper voices accompanying odd-numbered tenor
taleae are indeed largely through-composed, there is a notable amount
of upper-voice rhythmic congruence during tenor taleae 2, 4, and 6. Or,

1
For confident attributions to Vitry, see Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets from
Fourteenth-Century France,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 109 (1982–3):
5–8, 18; and Anna Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval
Motet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 107–8, 131–8.
2
On “isorhythm,” see Margaret Bent, “What Is Isorhythm?,” in Quomodo cantabimus
canticum? Studies in Honor of Edward H. Roesner, ed. David Butler Cannata et al. (Mid-
dleton: American Institute of Musicology, 2008), 121–42. I use the term “isorhythm”
here in Bent’s restricted sense, to describe rhythms in any voice repeated exactly
and periodically within a motet or section of a motet; for more on terminology, see
Chapter 3.
3
Examples 1.1 and 1.2 follow the edition in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 237–42.
The lower voices use the same talea (   ) but with the contratenor starting after five
breves.
4
See the evaluations of the motet no. 18 in Tables II and IV, Frank Llewellyn Harrison,
ed., Motets of French Provenance, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 5 (Monaco:
Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1968), 202, 204. The assignment of “E” (“isorhythmic in hocket
passages”) to part 1 and “F” (“Isoperiodic”) to part 2 must be an accidental reversal, since
part 2 has hockets, whereas part 1 does not. Table IV is reproduced as Figure 2.1 below.
Example 1.1 Vitry, In virtute/Decens, breves 1–60; rhythms recurring at ten-breve intervals are shaded
 Introduction

put another way: the cycles of rhythmic repetition in the upper voices
are twice as long as those in the tenor, with several rhythmic passages
recurring every twenty breves (see Example 1.2, with twenty-breve sys-
tems). Re-arranged thus, the triplum and motetus of In virtute/Decens
would deserve a C—Harrison’s category for “isorhythmic in part,
with variants.” And there is more at stake than good marks, because
In virtute/Decens is not alone: it belongs to a significant subset of ars
nova motets whose upper voices are organized according to structures
different from those observable in their tenors. The present study docu-
ments these differences and considers their implications for analysis
and interpretation.
It is not news that motets’ upper voices and tenors do not always
have the same periodic structure. The presence of these longer upper-
voice units in the first section of In virtute/Decens was already rec-
ognized by Heinrich Besseler when he tabulated the forms of all the
ars nova motets known to him in the 1920s.5 From Besseler’s tables
onward, the literature contains plenty of references to units some-
times called “Großtalea,” or “supertalea”—blocks of music in the
upper voices of motets whose congruence with each other is marked
by periodically repeating rhythms and whose iterative cycles differ
in length from (and are usually longer than) the taleae of the tenor.
There are remarks about these upper-voice groupings in Besseler’s
footnotes and Ursula Günther’s “asides”;6 Friedrich Ludwig’s edi-
tions and Jacques Boogaart’s analyses of Machaut’s motets make fre-
quent use of them;7 Karl Kügle has engaged with some of the formal
irregularities they entail;8 and in at least one case—Margaret Bent’s
pioneering analysis of Vitry’s Tribum/Quoniam—such upper-voice

5
Heinrich Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II: Die Motette von Franko
von Köln bis Philipp von Vitry,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 8 (1927): 222n9. Bes-
seler’s evaluation of the motet’s second section is not accurate; see note 23 on p.  54
(Chapter 4).
6
See notes 4–5, 7–8, 12–16, and 18–19 to the table in “Studien zur Musik des Mit-
telalters II,” 222–4. Interestingly, Besseler indicates the presence of hockets in his main
table as though they were a property of tenor rather than of upper-voice construction.
Ursula Günther makes brief mention of upper-voice structures in many of the motets
discussed here in “The 14th-Century Motet and its Development,” Musica Disciplina 12
(1958): 30, 37.
7
Friedrich Ludwig, ed. Guillaume de Machaut: Musikalische Werke, Publikationen älterer
Musik 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1926–43); Jacques Boogaart, “O series summe rata:
Die motetten van Guillaume de Machaut; De ordening van het corpus en de samenhang
van tekst en muziek” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utrecht, 2001).
8
Although he does not explicitly invoke the possibility that upper-voice blocks
defined by partial isorhythm might be of different lengths than the tenor taleae under
them, Kügle has drawn attention to the results of such organization, noting, for exam-
ple, that in the first half of Colla/Bona, “phrase joints occur at the beginning  .  .  . of
every second talea statement”; The Manuscript Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 115: Studies in
the Transmission and Composition of Ars Nova Polyphony (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval
Music, 1997), 98.

4
Example 1.2 Vitry, In virtute/Decens mm. 1–60, arranged to align repeating upper-voice rhythms; rhythms recurring
at ten- and twenty-breve intervals shaded
 Introduction

structures have been put on a par with tenor structures in describing

the form of the whole.9 Bent’s approach has been especially influen-
tial on the field and crucial in the development of the present argu-
ment. Significant for present purposes is that Bent described the three
longer periods in the upper voices of Tribum/Quoniam as a “counter-
isorhythmic structure” superimposed on the “isorhythmic” tenor,
and framed as an exceptional aspect of that particular motet closely
tied to its meaning.10 In this book the rhythmic correspondences that
delineate upper-voice blocks in motets like Tribum/Quoniam and In
virtute/Decens set the terms of engagement for formal analysis. Rather
than interpreting upper-voice forms as working against (“counter”)
the structuring strategies most visible in tenors, I posit that tenor
taleae might productively be seen, in some cases, as fitting into (or
working against) the block structures in the upper voices. In what
follows I  build upon much of the work that has been done in the
analysis of individual motets to suggest that upper-voice structures
might have an even greater role to play as a compositional tool in the
broader repertory.
Table 1.1 gives a list of fourteenth-century French motets whose
upper voices are built of blocks articulated through rhythmic repetition
that differ in length from, or are significantly shifted in position relative
to, their tenor’s taleae. These motets will be analyzed below.
Of the fifteen works listed, two (Je voi/Fauvel and Tribum/Quoniam)
survive in the Roman de Fauvel, finished before c. 1320. The rest belong to
the French ars nova corpus of c. 1325–1360 as represented by Machaut’s

9
Bent sees the textual contents of the two upper-voice quotations and the borrowed
chant tenor as together determining the motet’s form, arguing that privileging the tenor’s
structure in Tribum/Quoniam “will give only subsidiary attention to the amazing inter-
locked [upper-voice] tripartite structure, with its own internal identities, that is counter-
pointed against the two identical tenor color statements,” “Polyphony of Texts and Music
in the Fourteenth-Century Motet: Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta latronum/Merito
hec patimur and Its ‘Quotations’,” in Dolores Pesce, ed., Hearing the Motet: Essays on the
Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 92. The salience of upper-voice structures in Tribum/Quoniam was also noted by
Ernest Sanders: “While the modal pattern of the early motet [Tribum/Quoniam] takes up a
total of six longae, the taleae are determined by the design of the upper voices . . . The fact
that the tenor consists of two colores is of no structural significance. Only in the motetus
is the versification congruous with the musical structure,” “The Medieval Motet,” Gat-
tungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, ed. Leo Schrade, Wulf
Arlt, and Higini Anglès (Bern: Francke, 1973), 558.
10
“Polyphony of Texts and Music.” Neither Bent’s edition (ibid., Example 4.1 on p. 90),
nor her schematic diagram (Figure  4.1 on p. 91) arranges the motet in three periods,
even though this is the form in which the various shadings of isorhythm and isomelism
would align. Arguably a discussion of the supertalea as a phenomenon would undermine
the analysis, since the “grand hemiola of threefold form arranged over a twice-stated
tenor melody” privileges the twice-stated tenor melody (hence the layout of Figure 4.1),
and the analysis of the texts focuses on the significance of the numbers three and two
(“Tribum. . . . secundum” in the triplum, p. 85). See also the account of “thrice two blocks
of music arranged over twice three identical places in the tenor” (p. 92).

6
 Introduction

Table 1.1 French motets written c. 1315–75 whose upper-voice forms differ

from those of their tenors

Motet Composer Analysis below

Amours/Faus Semblant (M15) Machaut Figure 4.2

Colla/Bona (V9) Vitry Example 6.4
Cum statua/Hugo (V8) Vitry Example 4.3
Flos/Celsa ?Vitry Figure 4.8, Examples 4.5 and 4.6
Hareu/Helas (M10) Machaut Figure 4.5, right
Hélas/Corde mesto (M12) Machaut Figure 4.1
Ida/Portio Edigius Figure 4.7
In virtute/Decens Vitry Example 4.2
Je voi/Fauvel Anon. Example 4.4
Quant/Amour (M1) Machaut Figure 4.5, left
Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8) Machaut Figure 4.3
S’il estoit/S’Amours (M6) Machaut Example 5.4
Tribum/Quoniam (V3) ?Vitry Figure 4.4
Trop plus/Biauté (M20) Machaut Example 4.1
Vos/Gratissima (V7) Vitry Figure 4.6

first twenty motets and the repertory of Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare

MS 115. Out of this repertory of 52 motets, the thirteen discussed here
constitute a quarter—a significant fraction, though by no means the
majority.11 Many of the structures under consideration have been noted
before, while some are described below for the first time. Bringing
them together in one place reveals the range of possible relationships
between tenor and upper-voice cycles of repetition. But, more than this,
as a group the analyses below suggest that in a significant number of
ars nova motets upper-voice structure is to some extent independent
of tenor taleae. In such cases, and perhaps more broadly, I will suggest
that upper-voice structures might well have been decided upon before
any tenor was chosen.
This is undoubtedly a counter-intuitive claim. After all, tenors
are the most regularly patterned voices of ars nova motets, and are
the voices that determine the pitch content of the whole to a great
extent, given the prevalence of consonant sonorities in the reperto-
ry.12 It might seem difficult to imagine a compositional process in
which upper-voice pitch content would have been determined before
a tenor melody was selected and laid out—although recent analyses of

11
This number excludes Les l’ormel/Main and Clap/Sus robin, the two ars antiqua motets
in Ivrea. See Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 83, 154. This survey does not include fragmen-
tary motets or those surviving in fragmentary sources such as F-CA MS B 1328. Closer
scrutiny of those repertories might reveal further examples.
12
Note, however, that Justin Lavacek challenges the tenor’s role as determining
upper-voice pitches and counterpoint in some of Machaut’s motets: “Contrapuntal Con-
frontation and Expressive Signification in the Motets of Machaut” (Ph.D diss., Indiana
University, 2011).

7
 Introduction

thirteenth-century motets that combine pre-existing melodic refrains

with chant tenors suggest that just this kind of thing did happen,
with tenor rhythms being designed, or pitches being adjusted, to
accommodate the upper-voice material.13 But, even allowing that all
or most upper-voice pitches would have been composed after a tenor
was in place, much formal and rhythmic planning could have hap-
pened before any pitches were settled upon. As a number of ana-
lysts have pointed out, motets contain constellations of interlocking
and interdependent musical and textual structures: the forms and
content of the texts, the dimensions of isorhythmic or partially iso-
rhythmic blocks, the length and placement of individual phrases in
the upper voices, and the overlaps and nonoverlaps between rests in
various voices.14 None of these parameters pertains to pitch, and yet
they all have immense importance for the finished product. To rel-
egate such decisions to a realm of so-called “pre-compositional plan-
ning” would be to imply that real composition begins with pitch.15
But given the importance of rhythmic practice to this repertory (an
importance that, I will argue in Chapter 2, is even more fundamen-
tal than has hitherto been recognized), it is worth entertaining the
notion that tenor pitches need not have been decided upon at the
outset of composition.
In focusing primarily on rhythmic repetition, I neither advocate for a
view of ars nova motets as fundamentally mathematical, absolute struc-
tures nor imply that the observation of such structures should signal
the end of analysis. On the contrary: in this musico-poetic genre par
excellence, formal analysis has both structural and hermeneutic impli-
cations.16 The second chapter of this study chronicles and interrogates
the idea that the structures of motets are grounded in the structures
of their tenors. While it has often been refuted in individual cases, this
idea is nevertheless frequently invoked as a norm, whether explicitly
or implicitly. This rests, I suggest, on a conception of a compositional
process that begins with tenor selection and organization and then

13
See Catherine Bradley, Plainsong Made Polyphonic: Compositional Process in the Thir-
teenth Century (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
14
Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music” and “Words and Music in Machaut’s ‘Motet
9’,” Early Music 31, no. 1 (2003): 363–88, inter alia; Boogaart, “O series summe rata”; Kügle,
The Manuscript Ivrea; Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques in the Four-Part
Isorhythmic Motets of Philippe de Vitry and His Contemporaries, 2 vols. (New York: Garland,
1989).
15
Paul Doornbusch summarizes his own attitude as well as those of fellow compos-
ers Richard Barrett and Gerard Pape thus: “Pre-composition? I  never do it, for me it’s
all composition”: “Pre-composition and Algorithmic Composition: Reflections on Disap-
pearing Lines in the Sand,” Context 29 & 30 (2005): 48.
16
A number of studies have demonstrated the relevance of upper-voice structures to
hermeneutic analysis of ars nova motets; see especially Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and
Music,” Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I: Analogy of Ideas in Text and Music of
Machaut’s Motet 6,” Muziek & Wetenschap 3 (1993): 3–23 (discussed below), and Zayaruz-
naya, The Monstrous New Art.

8
 Introduction

proceeds to the upper voices. Because in this scenario tenor selection

is seen as having both semantic and formal implications, claims about
the order of composition have in turn governed the kinds of evaluation
and interpretation to which ars nova motet texts have been subject.
Chapter 3 turns to medieval music-theoretical sources in search of
an analytical vocabulary. While the terms color and talea are usually
understood to refer to the independent, periodic repetition of pitch and
rhythm, respectively, in motet tenors, I suggest that in the fourteenth
century both terms more often referred to rhythmic repetition, and that
talea especially was used to describe repeated upper-voice rhythms.
The pertinent upper-voice rhythmic structures are documented in
Chapter 4, progressing from simpler to more complicated relationships
between upper voices and tenors. Chapter 5 turns to the hermeneutic
implications of such structures, engaging with several prior analyses
of Machaut’s S’il estoit/S’Amours (Motet 6) to demonstrate the ways in
which assumptions about the structural primacy of tenors can influ-
ence interpretation. The final chapter offers a new paradigm for motet
composition exemplified by a hypothetical reconstruction of the crea-
tion of Vitry’s Colla/Bona.
In Colla/Bona, a compositional order in which upper-voice texts were
composed first, then upper-voice structures laid out, and finally a tenor
chosen to fit these structures provides the best explanation of the fin-
ished work. I suggest further that such compositional processes need
not have been limited to those motets in which they can be most easily
gleaned. They may even have been a standard way of going about the
process of creating motets. And if this is the case—or even might rea-
sonably be the case—then giving consideration to this subset of works
promises to inflect our understanding of the entire repertory.

9
 2

Foundational tenors and

the power dynamics of
compositional process
If there has not yet been an investigation of upper-voice “blocks” as a phe-
nomenon of motet composition, the lacuna does not result from any will-
ful omission. Rather, it is a side-effect of the scale of most recent studies on
ars nova motets, which tend to focus on the individual work, or on small
groups of related works, in order to give these dense compositions the
space their exegesis requires. Where analysis is focused on just one or a few
related motets, the presence of similar structuring procedures elsewhere
might seem beside the point. And, yet, the analysis of individual works is
usually situated against generic norms, whether stated or implied.
In the present chapter I wish to draw out a series of beliefs about
these norms. But doing so is rife with rhetorical pitfalls, since, in a lit-
erature made up of case studies, norms are most often invoked in the
context of showing how the motet in question repudiates them. And,
across studies, the same authors who invoke them in one context are
likely to have shown in another that they do not apply. None of this is
problematic, and in selecting passages from existing scholarship that
articulate particular patterns of thought I do not intend to cherry-pick,
or to suggest that these passages fully encapsulate the writers’ views.
The same scholars have elsewhere written eloquently about nonnor-
mative works, and the only overwhelming field consensus at present
is that each motet is different. What I  chronicle in this chapter, then,
is not a field consensus. It is, however, a robust idea that has surfaced
frequently in discussions of motets in general, both in older and in more
recent scholarship—an idea that raises interesting and important ques-
tions about compositional process and hermeneutic angles of approach.

At first glance, the late medieval evidence suggests that motets were
normally composed from the tenor up. Writing in the last quarter of
the thirteenth century, and thus at least several decades before most of
the motets in the present study were composed, Johannes de Grocheio
famously compared the tenor of a polyphonic composition (whether
motet, hocket, or conductus) to a building’s foundation and to the
body’s skeletal frame, because “the tenor is that part on which all the
others are founded, just as the parts of a house or a building on their
 Foundational tenors

foundation.”1 Since the tenor “regulates” the other parts and “gives
them quantity,” Grocheio recommended that it be written first:

He who wants to compose . . . ought first to order, or to compose, the tenor and
to give it mode and measure. For the more important part ought to be formed
first, because through their mediation the others are formed afterwards. Just as in
the generation of animals, nature first forms the principal members, namely the
heart, liver, brain, and through their mediation the others are formed afterwards.2

Interestingly, it is not the tenor’s pre-existence in plainchant that is

important to Grocheio, who goes on to explain that in his formulation
“to order” applies to the motet and hocket with their pre-existing ten-
ors, while “or to compose” pertains to the conductus, whose tenor is
newly made. What matters is the compositional order: “once a tenor
is composed or ordered, one ought to compose or order above it the
motetus,” followed by the triplum, and so forth.3
This unambiguous account is apparently echoed by Egidius de
Murino, whose mid-fourteenth-century De modo componendi tenores
motettorum is the only surviving detailed treatment of compositional
process for ars nova motets. (A partial edition and translation can be
found in the Appendix, text II.) Murino instructs his reader to select
and rhythmize a tenor, then to add a contratenor (if there is to be
one), and finally to write the upper voices. This account seems to
point toward a continuity of practice between the ars antiqua and ars
nova, implying that, a half-century after Grocheio, motet composition
still began with tenor selection.4 But there is one telling difference

1
“Tenor autem est illa pars supra quam omnes aliae fundantur. Quemadmodum
partes domus vel aedificii super suum fundamentum,” Grocheio, Ars musice, ed. and
trans. Constant J. Mews, John N. Crossley, Catherine Jeffreys, Leigh McKinnon, and
Carol J. Williams. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 20.2.
2
“Et eas regulat et eis dat quantitatem,” ibid., 20.2; “Volens autem ista componere,
primo debet tenorem ordinare vel componere, et ei modum et mensuram dare. Pars enim
principalior debet formari primo. Quoniam ea mediante postea formantur alie: Quemad-
modum natura in generacione animalium primo format membra principalia. puta. Cor.
Epar. Cerebrum. Et illis mediantibus alia post formantur,” ibid., 21.1, translation modi-
fied slightly.
3
“Tenore autem composito vel ordinato debet supra eum motetum componere vel
ordinare,” ibid., 21.2. Insofar as a motetus is a voice specific to motets, this formulation
implies that some motet tenors might also be newly composed.
4
Because Murino warns that his instructions are intended for the education of
children, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson rightly warns that “to accept any of his recom-
mendations as evidence of the practice of the skilled composers . . . would seriously
hinder the building up of an accurate picture of fourteenth-century isorhythmic pro-
cedures” unless the instructions happen to directly reflect what happens in their
surviving motets, Compositional Techniques, 24. A  third pertinent account, the Ars
(musicae) of Johannes Boen, focuses on the formation of the talea, but does not situ-
ate this step within a larger compositional process, so that it is unclear where it
falls in regard to upper-voice compositional planning. Boen’s evidence is discussed
in Chapter 3. The dating of Murino’s treatise is uncertain, but his inclusion in the

12
 Foundational tenors

between these two accounts. While Grocheio instructs the would-be

composer to begin by composing or shaping a tenor voice, Murino
gives his reader a selection criterion that has been often cited in stud-
ies of this repertory: “take a tenor from some antiphon or respon-
sory or another chant from the antiphoner, and the words should be
suited to the materials [et debent verba concordare cum materia] out of
which you wish to construct the motet” (Appendix, II.1). Scholars
have sometimes read these instructions as consistent with Grocheio’s
earlier foundational metaphor, interpreting them as evidence that,
as Ursula Günther put it, “in contrast to the songs, whose invention
begins with the upper voice, the motets of the Ars Nova, like those of
the previous century, start out with a Tenor.”5 But this reading over-
looks Murino’s clear indication that the invention should begin with
something else—the materia—that precedes the choice of tenor. And
much hangs, indeed, on our interpretation of what this pre-existing
materia might have been.
The word itself, materia, is unhelpfully elusive: it can mean substance,
topic, subject matter, even building material. In 1989, Daniel Leech-
Wilkinson interpreted it as “the message of the upper-voice texts.”6 In
recent scholarship, the idea that materia is the general topic of a motet’s
upper voices is widely accepted, and thus ars nova motet composition is
often characterized as beginning with this conceptual choice, and then
moving to tenor selection and organization.7
But occasionally Murino’s instructions have been read to imply that
tenor choice defined, rather than stemmed from, the materia. In a 1993
analysis of Machaut’s S’il estoit/S’Amours (Motet 6), Jacques Boogaart
glossed Murino as saying that the composer defined his material in the
course of selecting a tenor: “according to Egidius de Murino . . . the com-
poser must first define the materia with which the work deals by choosing a

list of singers in the motet Musicalis/Scientie, written while both Vitry and Muris
were still alive, suggests that he was active at mid-century; see Richard H. Hoppin
and Suzanne Clercx, “Notes biographiques sur quelques musiciens français du XIVe
siècle,” in Les colloques de Wégimont II, ed. Paul Collaer (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1959),
65–67.
5
Günther, “The Fourteenth-Century Motet,” 29. See similar sentiments voiced more
recently in Anne Walters Robertson, “Remembering the Annunciation in Medieval
Polyphony,” Speculum 70 (1995): 287.
6
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 21. I will suggest a more precise defini-
tion for Murino’s materia in Chapter 6.
7
For example, Margaret Bent, “The primary factor that led a composer to choose
a tenor for a motet was to suit the symbolic, ritual or topical significance of its
attached words to the subject of the texts of the upper parts (whether or not these
had already been composed),” “Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9,” 372; see
also Jacques Boogaart, “Speculum mortis: Form and Signification in Machaut’s Motet
He Mors/Fine Amour/Quare non sum mortuus,” in Machaut’s Music: New Interpreta-
tions, ed. Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 14.

13
 Foundational tenors

suitable fragment from plainchant.”8 And to Anne Robertson, writing two

years later (1995), what is “evident [from Murino’s treatise] is that a cer-
tain amount of knowledge was embedded a priori into a composition on a
cantus firmus simply by virtue of the choice of tenor.”9 In these readings,
materia is defined when the tenor chant is chosen, rather than preceding
and dictating the choice of tenor. The problem for interpretation, as Alice
Clark points out, is that materia is a vague term in an easily missed aside:

The tenor is . . . the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic point of origin for the motet,
though it is in fact preceded by the motet’s materia, on whose basis it is chosen. In
his sketchy account, it is easy to overlook the statement “concordare cum mate-
ria,” and perhaps even Egidius is more interested in talea and color formation than
in tenor selection, but he makes it clear that such selection is not a random act.10

Clearly, materia precedes the tenor. And yet, given the fleeting nature of
the reference and the fact that “Egidius does not . . . specify just how the
tenor is to relate to the matter of the motet,” let alone what that “mat-
ter” might be, it is easy to short-circuit whatever dependency Murino
might be alluding to by framing the tenor’s text as the motet’s materia
and thus its point of origin. (We will return to Murino’s materia again in
Chapter 6 to see how the upper-voice structures examined later in this
book can help nuance our understanding of his account.)
Whatever role materia might play in the choice, a tenor is chosen.
From this point on, a range of modern accounts—textbook as well as
scholarly—describe the composition of ars nova motets as having begun
with tenors and then progressed upward.11 The tenor melody, stated
once or several times, is rhythmicized according to a repeating pattern

8
Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance,” 5. Boogaart interprets the passage differently
in “Speculum mortis,” 14; see note 13 below. See also Edward Roesner, who implies a
similar process in writing about a late thirteenth-century motet, obliquely referencing
Murino’s materia: “The tenor ordinarily provides the overall foundation for the design,
musical content, “Subtilitas and Delectatio: Ne m’a pas oublié,” Cultural Performances in
Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regaldo, ed. Eglal Doss-Quinby et al.
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2007), 27.
9
“Remembering the Annunciation,” 287. Robertson variously interprets Murino as
indicating bottom-up composition and a more flexible approach: “Composers worked
from the bottom up; that is, they took a segment of chant and used it as a scaffold for
the added upper voices. This practice was summed up by music theorist Egidius de
Murino,” “Remembering the Annunciation,” 287; but “for Egidius a motet grows from
top down and from bottom up simultaneously,” Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context
and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 146.
10
Alice V. Clark, “Concordare cum materia: The Tenor in the Fourteenth-Century Motet”
(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1996), 6.
11
What follows is a synthesis of the compositional process often invoked or evoked,
of which further specific instances are discussed below. Its most recent iteration is to be
found in Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2005), 228–32: “We can . . . imagine how a composer would
have gone about creating such a composition [as Vitry’s Douce/Garison]: he would take a
tenor from his mental inventory, organize it, supply it with a harmonic framework, add
rhythmic patterns for the upper parts, and create texts for them.”

14
 Foundational tenors

(talea) that either persists for the course of the motet or speeds up in a
second section (owing to diminution, mensural transformation, or reno-
tation in smaller note values). Upper voices are then added to this pat-
terned tenor, which serves as a “scaffold” or “foundation” for them.12 In
this process the tenor is, as Jacques Boogaart puts it, “the most impor-
tant voice of the motet with respect to the musical structure.”13 Upper
voices might contain some recurring rhythms, though not usually as
strict as tenor’s taleae, and their cycles are usually understood to be
keyed to the tenor’s repetitions. More than this: the telos of upper-voice
isorhythm is sometimes identified as making tenor structures more
audible.14 Tenor structures are thus both germinal and fundamental
to the whole. In Clark’s formulation, “what all the procedures [along
the spectrum from partial to complete upper-voice isorhythm] have
in common is that they use the tenor’s rhythmic structure, reflected and
sometimes magnified by upper-voice rhythmic repetition, to create a more
or less audible musical structure.”15 It is undoubtedly the case that iso-
rhythm and catchy melodic material can be found around tenor talea
joins, as Clark and Bent have both shown.16 But I wish to draw atten-
tion to the power dynamics invoked by this account: here the upper
voices reflect or magnify the tenor’s repetitive structure, not their own
or “the motet’s.”
The notion that the structures of ars nova motets are grounded in the
structures of their tenors has had a range of implications. As it happens,
upper-voice rhythmic repetition is not the only element that has been

12
See above, n. 9.
13
In the course of framing an analysis of Machaut’s He Mors/Fine Amour (Motet 3),
Boogaart invokes both Murino and Grocheio in a clear articulation of a power dynamics
that is at once structural and semantic: “Egidius de Murino, one of the very few con-
temporary authors to discuss motet composition, confirms that a motet has ‘a subject.’
He recommends that the composer first choose a tenor whose words are ‘in accordance
with the subject-matter about which you wish to make the motet.’ The tenor is also the
most important voice of the motet with respect to the musical structure, of which, as
Johannes de Grocheio stated around 1300, it forms the ‘bones’ and ‘foundation,’ defining
the outlines of the whole work. The most direct approach to the motet, therefore, is via
the tenor,” “Speculum mortis,” 14.
14
For example, Ernest Sanders suggested in 1980 that “rhythmic correspondences
between successive [upper-voice] phrases or phrase groups [were put in] evidently to
lend emphasis to the work’s structure” (“Isorhythm,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, 1st ed., ed. Stanley Sadie [London: Macmillan, 1980], 9:351), and his
account may be compared with Lavacek’s more cautious 2011 speculation: “it may be
that the compositional decision [to use complete upper-voice isorhythm] was used to
make the complex formal structure of isorhythm more audible,” “Contrapuntal Con-
frontation” 12. See also his broader characterization of the genre: “It was stylistic of the
medieval French motet that all added voices be composed in relation to and so amplify
the tenor voice”—a characterization his project challenges as regards counterpoint, but
not form; ibid., iv.
15
Clark, “Listening to Machaut’s Motets,” The Journal of Musicology 21 (2004), 491
(emphasis added).
16
Clark, ibid.; Bent, “Words and Music,” 375.

15
 Foundational tenors

measured against the tenor’s rhythmic cycles: the structures of upper-

voice texts have faced similar treatment. In his edition of the Ivrea and
Chantilly motets, for instance, Harrison, whose isorhythmic rankings
have already been mentioned in the introduction, also included a table
entitled “Relation Between Sections of Poems and Taleae” (reproduced
in Figure 2.1). Here he assigned a letter grade from a+ to d to each text
of each motet, based on “the degree of coordination between poetic and
musical design.”17
Although Harrison conceded that such “value-symbols . . . admittedly
cannot be completely objective,” his belief in the usefulness of the exer-
cise presupposes a structural primacy accorded to tenors. Problematic
here is not the idea that poetic structure relates to overall structure—
indeed it does so fairly often. Rather, it was Harrison’s assumption that
tenor structure alone is responsible for a work’s “musical design” that
produced some low grades for motets that, as I will argue below, dis-
play remarkable levels of coordination.
In the same way that the textual structures of the upper voices have
been viewed as either reflecting or failing to reflect the tenor’s struc-
tures, their textual contents have also been evaluated through the inter-
pretive lens of the tenor. Since most motet tenors come from plainchant,
readings of Murino that allow materia to reside preponderantly in the
choice of tenor often tilt the hermeneutic balance to produce religious
interpretations of ars nova motets. Analyses in this vein may relegate the
upper-voice texts to accessory status, calling on them to support inter-
pretations which have their basis in the tenor. This is often the case in
Robertson’s readings, where “the tenor . . . assumes a crucial role in the
interpretation of a motet: it holds the key to certain aspects of meaning
in the work . . . and it may help explain the relationship of the voices
to one another.”18 It is therefore not surprising that the (mostly secu-
lar) upper voices play only a liminal role in her analyses of Machaut’s
Motets 1–17 in Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, where she notes that “the
tenors do fundamentally shape and ultimately guide” her interpretative
approach.19 The result has attracted some criticism: Mark Everist has
pointed to “ad hoc interpretative strategies” in Robertson’s approach
to upper-voice texts, while Boogaart describes her as “reading the love
motets upside down,” with the result that “many of the French texts are
analyzed not much deeper than their general message.”20

17
Harrison, Motets of French Provenance, xii.
18
“Remembering the Annunciation,” 287.
19
Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 82.
20
Everist, “The Horse, the Clerk, and the Lyric: The Musicography of the Thirteenth
and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 130 (2005): 139; Boo-
gaart, “Machaut and Reims,” review of Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and
Meaning in His Musical Works, by Anne Walters Robertson, Early Music 32 (2004): 606. For
further contextualization and discussion of Robertson’s argument, as well as accounts of
various scholarly responses to it, see Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secre-
tary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 285–90.

16
 Foundational tenors

Figure 2.1 Table IV from Harrison, Motets of French Provenance, 204. Letters in

the fourth column refer to a key given on p. 202: A—isorhythmic; B—
isorhythmic with significant variants; C—isorhythmic in part, with
variants; D—isorhythmic in section in diminution; E—isorhythmic
in hocket passages; F—isoperiodic; G—non-isorhythmic

In principle, of course, readings that include careful consideration

of tenor texts and their contexts need not give short shrift to the upper
voices. For example, Bent’s analysis of Machaut’s Motet 9 dwells on the
tenor in some detail but takes the upper-voice texts as its point of depar-
ture, explicating their sense, structure, and approaches to text-setting in

17
 Foundational tenors

turn.21 Sylvia Huot, who characterizes a sacred tenor as “the explicit

link between devotional and secular discourses,” sees it as incumbent
on the analyst to look at each motet from two angles: “a given motet
must . . . be read according to two different interpretive contexts: that of
the vernacular lyric tradition exemplified in the upper voices, and that
of Scripture and liturgy.”22 Depending on the context chosen, the result
might be an allegorical, spiritualized reading of the upper voices’ secu-
lar texts on the one hand or a secularized, even parodic rendition of the
tenor’s chant excerpt on the other. The tenor may suggest an analogy
between spiritual and courtly love, but “our interpretation of this anal-
ogy . . . depends on whether the courtly or the devotional context is
seen as dominant.”23
In practice, however, the idea that sacred tenors have explanatory
power for the meaning of secular texts has become the favored one,
while the opposite premise—that secular texts would secularize or
even satirize their tenors—remains largely unexplored. Furthermore,
while analyses frequently devote time to explaining how the upper
voices mesh with the content and liturgical context of tenors, the pos-
sibility that a particular tenor’s text might be ill-suited to the message
of its upper voices, or might need to be read in a way not consistent
with its most obvious meaning, has not, to my knowledge, been enter-
tained.24 This is partly because tenor texts, often only a few words long,
can be easily bent in many directions.25 Furthermore, these snippets

21
Bent, “Words and Music.” See also Boogaart’s study of M3, which carefully reads the
upper-voice texts despite a framing that privileges the tenor (see note 13, above).
22
Huot, “Patience in Adversity: The Courtly Lover and Job in Machaut’s Motets 2 and
3,” Medium Aevum 63 (1994): 223; see also her Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The
Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1997).
23
“Patience in Adversity,” 223.
24
Lavacek draws attention to “times when [Machaut’s] adorning [i.e., upper] voices
boldly reinterpret the tenor” in the contrapuntal realm, such that the upper-voice pair
“occasionally usurps control” from the tenor, which “conventionally provides the com-
positional foundation in the genre,” “Contrapuntal Confrontation,” iv, 15. He does not,
however, question the tenor’s compositional primacy—reasonably, since his analysis
focuses on vertical sonorities rather than the formal dimensions at issue here. For the
thirteenth-century repertory, Huot explores the interplay of tenor snippets and upper-
voice texts, noting that “a transposition of the sacred model into the language and format
of vernacular lyric” may at times have “parodic overtones,” but analysis tends to shows
tenors and upper-voice texts to be better matched than it might first seem, highlighting
“the tenor’s crucial role in the poetic economy of the motet: it underpins the texts as well
as the melodies of the upper voices,” Allegorical Play, 4–5.
25
For example, Huot points out that “deliver me,” the tenor of Hélas/Corde mesto
(Machaut M12), “easily admits of both a courtly and a devotional reading,” “Patience
in Adversity,” 234. While tenor labels are sometimes referred to as “incipits,” this is not
accurate: they do not necessarily fall at the beginning of their source chant, nor do they
often stand in for more borrowed material. And, while tenor labels have wider contexts,
so do the upper voices—indeed, all words can be explored in ways that elucidate broader
cultural contexts.

18
 Foundational tenors

come with biblical as well as liturgical contexts, which offer a range of

extra associations and potential connections. But, more than this, the
tenor’s perceived structural supremacy forestalls any such questioning:
as long as the tenor is the foundation, the starting place, the “melodic,
harmonic and rhythmic point of origin for the motet,” and “the idea at
the base of the whole construction,” its suitability is beyond reproach.26
If some modern accounts of motet composition adopt Grocheio’s
foundation metaphor rather than investigating the nature of Muri-
no’s materia, it may also be due to the compelling implicit symme-
try between the progress of music history and a bottom-up order
of composition for individual works. Plainchant is the oldest mate-
rial, and thus composers must have begun with it. The repetition of
rhythm independently of melody occurred first in the modal patterns
that organize the tenors of thirteenth-century motets and only later
appeared in upper-voice periods. Thus it might follow that periodi-
cally recurring rhythms should have first been applied to the tenors of
ars nova motets and only later to their upper voices, a little at a time.27
As Leech-Wilkinson notes, “historically, [upper-voice] isorhythm
spread outwards from its first occurrences at phrase-ends and hocket
passages.”28 And it is certainly true that the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries present us with the largest number of motets in
which all notes are accounted for by rhythmic repetition.29 If ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, then in music history and in a single motet
(which here acts as a microcosm) “isorhythm” begins in the tenor and
then moves upwards.
When we recall, finally, that a reason commonly given for the pres-
ence of upper-voice isorhythm is that it makes the tenor’s rhythmic
repetitions more audible, something of a contradiction emerges. On
the one hand, upper-voice isorhythm has interested scholars, who have
used it for defining and dating, exalting or condemning compositions
that have seemed to showcase at times an admirable degree—at times
an excess—of structure and planning.30 On the other hand, the sup-

26
Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance,” 5; Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 6.
27
See Ursula Günther’s datings of motets based on the extent of isorhythm in their
upper voices in “The 14th-Century Motet and its Development”; see also Margaret Bent’s
critique of this approach in “What is Isorhythm?,” 127–8.
28
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 48. A similar idea is expressed by Sand-
ers: “It was felt necessary to introduce . . . strophically recurring isorhythmic passages
into the upper voices. Such isorhythmic parallelisms at first crystallized mainly around
phrase endings,” Sanders, “Isorhythm,” 352.
29
The term “pan-isorhythm” was coined by Willi Apel in order to describe this stage;
see his “Remarks about the Isorhythmic Motet,” in Paul Collaer, ed., Les colloques de
Wégimont II: L’ars nova – Recueil d’études sur la musique du XIVe siècle (Paris: Belles Lettres,
1959), 139. See also Bent’s discussion of this “evolutionary progression” in “What Is Iso-
rhythm?,” 127–8.
30
Guillaume de Van described a compositional ethos in which the “smallest details
were foreordained, and to which any sort of lyric sentiment was as foreign as to the

19
 Foundational tenors

posed purpose of all this tightly controlled compositional material is

to highlight the repetition of rhythmic patterns in the tenor—­repetition
which in and of itself was by no means new in the fourteenth century.31
The highlighting of structure becomes an end in itself when this struc-
ture is imbued with both compositional and historical primacy.
The present study serves as a direct challenge to the notion that
upper-voice isorhythm in ars nova motets serves to magnify the ten-
or’s structure. In the wake of Bent’s analysis of Tribum/Quoniam, and
building also upon the rather long history of literature analyzing
upper-voice groupings in the works of Machaut, I propose that upper-
voice isorhythm be viewed primarily as the articulation of upper-voice
form—a form into which the tenor’s repeating patterns may or may
not fit, depending on the work in question. Though it is at once subtle
and to some extent obvious, this shift of emphasis can have significant
consequences.
Yes, Grocheio compares the tenor of a motet to the foundation of a
building, and by virtue of their placement at the bottom of the contra-
puntal texture tenors are without doubt foundational to motets in some
sense. But this fact alone does not necessarily attest to any special onto-
logical quality. For the fifteenth-century architectural theorist Leon Bat-
tista Alberti, the foundation does not even properly constitute a part of
the structure: it is only a precondition for it, and possibly—where the
landscape permits—not even that.32 At the risk of taking the metaphor
too far, we might note that foundations are neither prior in conception
to nor able to stand in formally for the edifices built upon them. An
entire building must be thought through before the foundation can be
laid; knowing the “general theme” of the future edifice’s use is hardly
enough. And the elusive materia that preceded the tenor’s selection may
have included any number of significant musical and semantic param-
eters that would prove to have a direct impact on the choice of chant
and eventual text–music relations.

numbers that determined the form and dimension of the work,” ed., Guglielmi Dufay
Opera Omnia, Corpus mensurabilis musicae 1–2 (Rome: American Institute of Musicol-
ogy, 1947–8), vol. 2, i, cited in Bent, “What Is Isorhythm,” 121. See also Jacques Chailley’s
comparison between ars nova motets and the music of Pierre Boulez, in Paul Collaer, ed.,
Les colloques de Wégimont II: L’ars nova—Recueil d’études sur la musique du XIVe siècle (Paris:
Belles Lettres, 1959), 145; cit. and trans. Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 2–5, 18–19.
31
Sanders comments on this discrepancy: “Isorhythm is often defined with reference
only to the tenor taleae (recurring rhythmic units) of 14th-century motets [although] it is
the growth of isorhythm in the upper voices of 14th-century motets that is characteristic
and significant,” “Isorhythm,” 352.
32
“The foundations, unless I am mistaken, are not part of the structure itself; rather
they constitute a base on which the structure proper is to be raised and built. For if an
area could be found that was thoroughly solid and secure . . . there would be no need to
lay down foundations before raising the structure itself,” Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art
of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1988), 61.

20
 Foundational tenors

Nowhere is the tenor’s foundational role more open to question than

in the works under consideration in the present study: works in which
rhythms recur in the upper voices at different rates than they do in the
tenor. Individually they provide rich analytical fodder, showcasing a
number of the ways in which distinct but compatible structures may
relate to one another in a polyphonic repertory. But taken as a group
they have the potential to complicate and enrich received accounts of
ars nova compositional processes by throwing into question the identity
of the tenor talea as the basic compositional building block of motets.

But, before turning to the motets and their structures, there is a matter
of terminology to address. The terms “isorhythm” and “isorhythmic,”
which were coined and frequently used in the twentieth century to
describe periodically recurring rhythms in the tenors and upper voices
of ars nova motets, have lately been rendered problematic. In a semi-
nal study entitled “What Is Isorhythm?” Bent questioned whether the
prefix “iso-” (“the same”) is suited to naming processes that are more
often transformational than simply repetitive, or “-rhythm” to describ-
ing phenomena that also affect pitch.33 Noting that medieval theorists
did not have a catch-all word, Bent did not offer a substitute term,
instead recommending the use of the medieval color and talea.34 This
is a productive approach as far as tenors are concerned, since it shifts
our attention from a presumed constancy of treatment to the many dif-
ferent kinds of manipulation—melodic, temporal, graphical—to which
these voices are subject. But, whereas “isorhythm,” as a generalized
term, has often been used to describe recurring rhythms in both the ten-
ors and the upper voices (as in Harrison), color and talea are often per-
ceived as tenor-specific. Bent, for instance, defines them in one instance
as “the melodic and rhythmic articulation/segmentation of the tenor
cantus firmus.”35 How, then, might we speak of upper-voice structures in
historically resonant ways? This question leads me in the next chapter
to reexamine the surviving medieval discussions of color and talea. It
appears that, already in their own time and even more so in the ensu-
ing centuries, the relationship between these two terms and their per-
tinence to upper voices were subjects of debate and misunderstanding.

33
Bent, “What Is Isorhythm?” and ead., “Isorhythm,” in Grove Music Online.
34
Bent, “What Is Isorhythm,” 123.
35
Ibid.

21
 3

Talea and/as color

The Latin word talea, literally meaning a cutting (as of a plant) or a
rod or staff, is used and defined variously by music theorists over the
course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, always as a companion
term to, or a subset of, color (literally “embellishment” or “ornament”).
Scholars chronicling the history of both terms for encyclopedias and
lexicons have repeatedly drawn attention to the relative instability
of their medieval usage, and even to the fact that they were appar-
ently interchangeable; yet, despite this acknowledged murkiness, in
modern usage talea stably refers to the periodic repetition of rhythm
independently of pitch, in contrast to color, the repetition of pitch inde-
pendently of rhythm.1 The purported symmetry of the two terms and
their respective emphasis on rhythm and pitch have proven useful for
analysis and instruction, and thus the causes of variance in the medi-
eval sources have not been subjected to extended scrutiny.
Yet it should surprise us that two terms, of which one refers to pitch
and the other to rhythm, could have been used interchangeably. And
indeed a fresh reading of the treatises paints a rather different pic-
ture. In this chapter I  argue that the majority of fourteenth-century
theoretical sources, as well as a number of fifteenth-century witnesses,
agree that color refers not to the repetition of melody independently of
rhythm but to the repetition of rhythms and of pitches together. While
the modern usage of color as the repetition of melody independently of
rhythm does appear occasionally in the treatises, it can be character-
ized as a minority opinion and might even stem from a misreading of
an important early definition attributed to Johannes de Muris.
These treatises also offer insight into the locus of talea. While today
both talea and color are most often applied to the tenors of motets (and to

1
As Bent explains, color and talea “now designate tenor melodic and rhythmic units
respectively . . . although then [i.e. in the Middle Ages] they were less clearly distin-
guished,” “Isorhythm” in Grove Music Online; Sanders and Lindley make a similar con-
trast between medieval instability of usage and modern consensus: “While medieval
writers were far from unanimous in their use of ‘talea’ and ‘color’, modern musicology
has been influenced by the definitions that Johannes de Muris . . . ascribed to ‘some musi-
cians’: ‘A configuration of pitches and its repetitions are called color; a rhythmic configu-
ration and its repetitions are called talea’,” “Color” in Grove Music Online. On the varied
medieval usages of both terms see also Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 15–24.
While the discussion that follows is in agreement with some aspects of these existing
accounts, my readings of Muris and Boen differ, with far-reaching consequences for the
overall narrative.
 Talea and/as color

musical spans defined by tenor repetitions),2 I will argue that, for those
who first coined and used the terms (c. 1340–1360), talea was as much
an upper-voice as a tenor phenomenon. Furthermore, some ambiguous
wording on this point preserved in the Libellus attributed to Johannes
de Muris led fifteenth-century commentators to assert more clearly that
for them, too, both talea and color occur in upper voices. In the aggre-
gate, then, medieval discussions of color and talea bolster the premises
on which the present analytical project rests by drawing renewed atten-
tion to rhythm, and especially to upper-voice rhythmic repetition.

Before turning to the fourteenth-century evidence, it is worth saying

a few words about the functions of color as a music-theoretical term in
the later thirteenth century. Both Garlandia (c. 1260) and Anonymous
IV (after 1280) used the word as a synonym for pulcritudo (beauty),
Garlandia writing of dissonances sometimes being placed before
imperfect consonances “for the sake of the color or the beauty of the
music” (causa coloris sive pulchritudinis musicae), and Anonymous
IV, who knew Garlandia’s treatise, speaking of longs employed “on
account of the color or beauty of the melody” (ratione coloris vel pulcritu-
dinis melodiae).3 The bridge between these more general usages and the
repetition-focused definitions of the fourteenth century can be found
in a later reworking of Garlandia’s treatise in BnF lat. 16663 (copied
1272–1304), which concludes with an added passage on color, com-
plete with music examples. After defining color in a way that empha-
sizes beauty in consistency with Garlandia’s usage (“color is the beauty
of a sound or that which is heard, through which the sense of hearing
is pleased”), the author goes on to specify that this beauty is achieved
in four ways:4

1 through the arrangement of sound or melody (in sono ordinato);

that is, through various kinds of patterned and repetitive melodic
ornamentation;

2
For example, Sanders defines talea in NG2 as “A medieval term usually understood to
denote a freely invented rhythmic configuration, several statements of which constitute
the note values of the tenor of an isorhythmic motet (or of its first section, if diminution
is later applied to the tenor).”
3
Johannes de Garlandia, De mensurabili musica, ed. Erich Reimer (Wiesbaden: F.
Steiner, 1972), X.22; Fritz Reckow, ed., Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4 (Wiesbaden,
1967), 88, 3.
4
“Color est: pulcritudo soni: uel obiectum auditus,” Johannes de Garlandia, De musica
mensurabili positio, TML (www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/13th/GARDMP_MPBN1666),
accessed 28 August 2017; trans. Stanley H. Birnbaum, Garlandia, De mensurabili musica
(Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1978), 53–4. See also the sensitive
gloss of this passage in Roesner, “Subtilitas and Delectatio.” Guillaume Gross deploys the
thirteenth-century definitions of color analytically (treating the later version in BnF lat.
16663 as the work of Garlandia) in order to investigate rhythmic and melodic repetition

24
 Talea and/as color

2 through the flowering of a sound or pitch (in florificatione vocis); that

is, the rapid reiteration of the same pitch (the example gives groups
of four semibreves per note, these being the smallest note-values c.
1300);
3 through repetition in the same voice (repeticio eiusdem uocis) of a
kind used in rondelli and vernacular songs; that is, through the use
of refrains;5
4 through voice exchange in polyphonic music.

The diversity of devices grouped here under the term color is remark-
able, though repetition does apply in each of these four categories:
repetitive melodic ornamentation in the first instance, repetition of both
pitch and note-shape in the second, repetition of musico-poetic phrases
(refrains) between and within song voices in the third, and repetition
of rhythmized musical units across voices in the last. Later, fourteenth-
century definitions continue to foreground repetition as essential to
color but narrow its scope to focus on repetition of pitch and/or rhythm
within a single voice.

The definitions of Anonymous V, Muris, and “Some Singers”

A chronological listing of pertinent treatises written between c. 1340
and 1430 that define color or both color and talea, with summaries of
the definitions given, can be found in Table 3.1. This table is keyed to
texts and translations in the Appendix.6 Let’s begin with the minority
opinion.
The medieval definitions of talea and color that most clearly accord
with modern usage—in effect, the most striking evidence of support
of it—are laid out in two pithy “conclusions” written during the last
quarter of the fourteenth century by Coussemaker’s Anonymous V, the
author of an Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris (Appendix,

in organum: “Organum at Notre-Dame in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Rhetoric

in Words and Music,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 15 (2006): 92–108.
5
See the discussion of refrains as color in Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medi-
eval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 288–9; and Christopher Page, “Tradition and Innovation in BN fr. 146: The
Background to the Ballades,” Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey
(Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 387.
6
For a much later discussion of the differences between various definitions of color
and talea, with quotations, see the 8 October 1529 letter from Giovanni del Lago to Gio-
vanni Spataro, paragraphs 11–18 in Bonnie J. Blackburn et al., A Correspondence of Renais-
sance Musicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 384–91, 395–400. It is telling that some
hundred years after the last theoretical witness in my Appendix, and less than two hun-
dred after the terms were first defined, Spataro and Del Lago were already puzzled by
the different theoretical definitions they encountered.

25
Table 3.1 Definitions of color and talea, c. 1340–1430

Treatise, date Summary of definition(s) given and attribution, if any

I. Muris, attrib. Ars practica (1) Color is a passage of similar note-shapes repeated several times in the same voice (Muris’s
mensurabilis (a.k.a. Libellus), c. usage)
1340 or later
(2) Color and talea are subsets of (1), where color is a repetition of the same pitches (to a repeated
series of note-shapes) and talea a repeated series of note-shapes with different pitches (credited
by Muris to “some singers”)

II. Murino, De modo componendi A tenor is color-ized when it contains repeating series of figurae; Color-izing motets when composing
tenores motetorum, mid- a voice above the tenor involves setting out each section in the same note-shapes as the next
fourteenth century

III. Boen, Ars, before 1367 Color is a comparability of note-shapes through resemblance

IV. Pipudi, De arte cantus (last (1) Broadly defined, color is when the same pitches, or the same (or comparable) note-shapes are
quarter, fourteenth century) repeated multiple times in the same voice

(2) In a narrower sense, color is when the same pitches are repeated, even if they are of different
note-shapes, and talea is when the same note-shapes are repeated, even if they are of differing
pitches

V. (?)Goscalcus, Third Berkeley (1) Color is a passage of the same or similar note-shapes repeated several times in the same voice
Treatise, c. 1375
(2) Color and talea are subsets of (1); color is when the same pitches are repeated, even if with
different note-shapes; and talea is when similar note-shapes are repeated, even if on different
pitches (attributed to “some singers”)
VI. Anonymous V, Ars cantus Talea is when notes are repeated with the same note-shapes but different pitches; color is when the
mensurabilis, c. 1375–1400 same pitches are repeated with different note-shapes

VII. Notitia del valore delle note del Color is a rhythmic passage repeated to different pitches; talea is the same thing as color, but it
canto misurato, c. 1400 divides tenors into sections
VIII. Prosdocimus, Expositiones (1) Color is a repeated rhythmic passage; talea is the same thing, therefore not needed as a term
tractatus pratice cantus (credited to Muris)
mensurabilis Johannis de Muris,
c. 1404 (2) In color there is a repetition of similar pitches and not of similar note-shapes, with nothing
between repetitions; in talea there is a repetition of similar note-shapes and not of similar
pitches, with nothing between repetitions (credited by Muris to “some singers,” as interpreted
by Prosdocimus)

(3) Color is a repeated passage of similar note-shapes and similar pitches with some material
intervening between repetitions; talea is a passage of similar note-shapes repeated back-to-back
(attributed by Prosdocimus to some of his own contemporaries)
IXa. Prosdocimus, Tractatus practice Color is a passage of similar note-shapes and similar pitches repeated several times in the same
cantus mensurabilis, 1408 voice, in the same order, with something intervening between repetitions; talea is a passage
of similar note-shapes repeated several times in some voice, in the same order, and without
anything intervening between repetitions
IXb. Prosdocimus, Tractatus pratice (1) Color (or talea, which is the same thing) is a passage repeated several times with similar note-
cantus mensurabilis, after 1408 shapes in some voice in the same order (attributed to Muris)

(2) Color is a passage of similar pitches repeated in some voice; talea is a passage only of similar
note-shapes repeated in some voice (attributed to “certain musicians” of Muris’s time)

(3) In color there is a repetition of similar pitches and similar note-shapes at the same time with
or without intervening material between repetitions; in talea there is repetition of similar note-
shapes without anything intervening (credited to “some moderns” by Prosdocimus)

(Continued)
Table 3.1 Continued

Treatise, date Summary of definition(s) given and attribution, if any

IXc. Prosdocimus, Tractatus pratice (1) Color (or talea, which is the same thing) is a passage of similar note-shapes and rests repeated
cantus mensurabilis, after 1408 several times in the same voice and in the same order and without anything intervening
(attributed to Muris)
(2) Color is a passage of similar pitches and rests repeated several times in the same voice, in the
same order, and with nothing intervening; talea is a passage of similar note-shapes and rests
repeated several times in the same voice, in the same order, and with nothing intervening
(attributed to “certain other musicians” contemporary to Muris)
(3) Color in music is a certain passage of similar pitches and similar note-shapes and rests (should
there be any) repeated several times in some voice in the same order, with or without interposed
material; talea is a certain passage only of similar note-shapes and rests (should there be any)
repeated several times in some voice in the same order, with or without anything intervening
(credited to “some moderns”)
Xa. Prosdocimus, Tractatus pratice (1) Color and talea are the same thing: a passage of similar note-shapes or similar pitches, or similar
practicae cantus mensurabilis note-shapes and pitches, found multiple times in the same voice (Muris is cited as an authority;
ad modum Ytalicorum, 1412 the distinction some others made between color and talea, which he reports, is recorded but not
redaction endorsed)

Xb. Prosdocimus, Tractatus pratice (1) Color and talea are the same thing: a passage of similar note-shapes, or similar pitches, or similar note-
cantus mensurabilis ad modum shapes and similar pitches, repeated multiple times back-to-back
Ytalicorum, second redaction,
c. 1425–1428 (2) But nevertheless all singers call it color when only pitches are repeated and talea when only
note-shapes are repeated, in both cases without intervening material between repetitions
XI. Ugolino, Declaratio musicae (1) Color is a passage of note-shapes repeated in the same voice (attributed to Muris)
disciplinae, c. 1430
(2) Color is a passage of note-shapes repeated with the same pitches; talea is a passage of note-
shapes repeated on different pitches (Ugolino’s interpretation, reported as attributed by Muris
to “certain singers”)
 Talea and/as color

text VI).7 The first is that “it is said to be talla when the same notes are
repeated with the same note-shapes (figuris) but different pitches (voci-
bus)”; the second that “color is when the same pitches are repeated but
with different note-shapes” (VI.2–3).8 As an example of talea the reader
is referred to Rex/Leticie, whose tenor sings five cycles of a repeating
rhythm to a twice-stated chant, so that every iteration of the cyclically
repeated rhythm is set to different pitches.9 Color is demonstrated by a
version of the tenor of Ida/Portio, in which four statements of a chant
snippet are stated in increasingly short notes in the proportions 6:4:3:2.
Thus, each repeated snippet of melody is set to a different rhythm. By
taking both of his examples from tenors, Anonymous V can be read as
implying that color and talea are both to be found only there. It is easy
to see how this definition’s clear distinction of melodic and rhythmic
repetition might appeal to musicologists, as it would seem to prefig-
ure the mid-twentieth-century separation of the two under total seri-
alism. However, this definition turns out to be unpopular within the
fourteenth-century literature: the more pervasive usage of the terms is
strikingly different.
The highly influential Libellus cantus mensurabilis, attributed to
Johannes de Muris and usually dated to the 1340s, contains what is
likely the earliest surviving account of both color and talea (Appen-
dix, text I).10 Probably written several decades before Anonymous V’s
account, the Libellus is a key document with regard to this question
because so many later treatises rely on it. According to its conclud-
ing section, entitled “De colore,” “a passage of similar note-shapes

7
See the Appendix for bibliographic information. Further references to the Appendix
will be in-line. Translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
8
Here and throughout, figura is translated as “note-shape” (it could also be rendered
as “glyph” or “grapheme”) and should be understood to refer to durations but not pitch.
Pitches are always referred to as vox. Nota is used flexibly in contexts where either pitch
or rhythm might be repeated, and is therefore equivalent to the modern “note,” and so
translated. When Boen wants to indicate the number of discrete pitches in a plainchant,
he uses corpora notarum—literally, the bodies of notes (II.4). While it can be tempting
to equate processus figurarum with the modern term “rhythm,” the same figurae can be
rendered to yield different durations, and this is especially true in motet tenors. See the
discussion of S’Amours/S’il estoit below and Bent’s invocation of “homographism” in
“What Is Isorhythm,” 122–33, passim. See also Emily Zazulia, Where Sight Meets Sound:
The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing, in preparation.
9
The motet identified as “Rex Johannes” is presumably Rex/Leticie, whose triplum
begins “Rex Karole, Johannes genite,” as noted in C. Matthew Balensuela, ed. and trans,
Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris, Greek and Latin Music Theory 10 (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 58. See editions in Günther, ed., The Motets of
the Manuscripts Chantilly, Musée condé, 564 (olim 1047) and Modena, Biblioteca estense, a. M.
5, 24 (olim lat. 568), Corpus mensurabilis musicae 39 (Rome: American Institute of Musi-
cology, 1965), no. 5; and Harrison, Motets of French Provenance, 141–8.
10
On the date, sources, and authorship of the Libellus see most recently Karen Des-
mond, ‘‘Texts in Play: The Ars nova and Its Hypertexts,” Musica Disciplina 57 (2012):
90–4.

29
 Talea and/as color

repeated several times in the same voice is called color” (I.1).11 Confus-
ingly, this definition of color seems to be a match for Anonymous V’s
talea, a concordance that has led to the notion that color and talea were
used interchangeably. But this is not quite right. What makes things
complicated is that, uniquely in the Libellus, Muris documents multiple
usages for the same term—his own, and another he attributes to “some
singers” (nonnulli cantores).12 His full statement is as follows:13
2
Unde color in musica vocatur similium figurarum unius processus pluries
repetita positio in eodem cantu. 3Pro quo nota, quod nonnulli cantores ponunt
differentiam inter colorem et tallam: nam vocant colorem, quando repetuntur
eedem voces, tallam vero, quando repetuntur similes figure et sic fiunt diversa-
rum vocum. 4Que differentia, licet servetur in quampluribus tenoribus moteto-
rum, non tamen servatur in ipsis motetis. 5Exempla patent in motetis.
2
In music, a passage of similar note-shapes repeated several times in the
same voice is called color. 3Concerning this, take note that some singers make a
distinction between color and talla: for they call it color when the same pitches
are repeated, but talla when similar note-shapes are repeated and thus [the
note-shapes] occur on different pitches. 4This distinction, although it is pre-
served in quite a few motet tenors, is not preserved in the motet [upper] voices.
5
Examples can be found in motets.

Each sentence in this dense passage calls for explication and com-
mentary. In sentence 2, as we have seen, color is defined as a repeat-
ing passage of figurae, or note-shapes—roughly equivalent to what we
would call a repeated rhythm. In sentence 3 (“Pro quo nota . . .”), Muris
reports that some musicians use two terms for his one, distinguishing
between them as follows: it is color when pitches are repeated, and talea
when note-shapes are the only element subject to repetition, such that
the same note-shapes occur on different pitches each time (I.3). It is pos-
sible to read these definitions as agreeing with those of Anonymous V,
as Sanders and Bent have done.14

11
It is clear in context and from the repertory that here and in all further related pas-
sages the similarity evoked by similium figurarum unius processus is a similarity between
rather within iterations of a given color. That is, a passage is repeated in similar note
shapes, rather than being made up of note-shapes similar to each other.
12
In the section on imperfection a similarly worded formulation is more specific:
quidam cantores, puta Gulielmus de Mascandio et nonnulli alii, Christian Berktold, ed., Ars
practica mensurabilis cantus secundum Iohannem de Muris: Die Recensio maior des sogenannten
“Libellus practice cantus mensurabilis” (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften;
C. H. Beck, 1999), 25. Whether this is the same group as the nonnuli cantores of the section
on color is impossible to determine.
13
For bibliographic information see Appendix, text I.
14
“Modern musicology has been influenced by the definitions that Johannes de Muris,
the first to mention talea (c1340), ascribed to ‘some musicians’: ‘A configuration of pitches
and its repetitions are called color; a rhythmic configuration and its repetitions are called
talea’,” Sanders, “Talea”; “Johannes de Muris . . . added that musicians commonly distin-
guished ‘color’ as the repetition of the same pitches to different rhythms and ‘talea’ as the
repetition of the same rhythms to different pitches,” Bent, “Isorhythm.”

30
 Talea and/as color

But I suggest that Muris’s words imply that, for some singers, color
was a repetition of pitches and rhythms. Careful consideration of sen-
tence 4 (“Que differentia . . .”) leads toward this interpretation. There
Muris notes that, although the distinction made by the cantores (that
is, the distinction between a color with repeating pitches and a talea in
which only the rhythms repeat) can be observed in many tenors, it does
not hold in the upper voices of motets (ipsis motetis, I.4). That is, the
singers’ color and their talea can only be distinguished from each other
in tenors, while in the upper voices they are identical.15
In order to make sense of this, we must remember that the singers’
talea is a subset of Muris’s color. The latter’s broader category houses all
repeated rhythmic passages, and it is only in motet tenors that repeating
note-shapes appear sometimes in conjunction with repeated pitches
and sometimes not. For instance, in the tenor of the Ivrea motet Post
missarum/Post misse the borrowed chant notes are sung twice, while the
repeated rhythmic passage that structures the tenor is stated four times
(labeled a, b, c, and d in the diplomatic facsimile in Example 3.1). Thus
rhythms repeat with different pitches (when we compare sections a
and b) and also with the same pitches (when we compare section a with
section c, or b with d). Hence the distinction between the singers’ color
and talea can be seen in tenors. In the upper voices, on the other hand,
rhythmic repetition usually occurs without repetition of pitch—as is
clear in Example 3.2, which compares three rhythmically analogous
triplum passages from the same motet. This repetition of rhythms on
different pitches is what the singers call talea but what Muris still calls
color—his word for all rhythmic repetition. (We can also see in both
examples what the word similis is doing in these definitions: the shapes
in the repeating rhythmic passages are not always visually the same
because of the ligatures but the underlying note-shapes represented—
the ligated figurae—are identical.)
Keeping all this in mind, we can understand the Libellus passage as
follows: for Muris (sentence 2), color is the repetition of figurae—that is,
of note-shapes, the graphical manifestations of rhythm (or, better still,
of the underlying conceptual shapes represented by the actual shapes
on the page). Some singers divide what he calls color into two subcat-
egories, calling repeated rhythmic passages color when not only figurae

15
It is clear that in the distinction repeatedly made between the tenors of motets
(tenores motetorum) and moteti ipsi, the latter—literally “motets themselves” or “motets
proper”—must be understood in the sense of “the motetting voices themselves” and
hence “the upper voices” (as in Sanders, “Talea”). This distinction might seem odd given
that tenors are part of motets, but it stems from the fact that motetus initially referred to
the motetus voice and later to the genre (hence the Fauvel index’s headings, which label
the three-voice motets motez a treblez et a tenur[es] (motets/motetuses with tripla and ten-
ors) and the two-voice works motez a tenures sanz trebles (motets/motetuses with tenors
and without tripla). For more on this distinction between moteti ipsi and tenores moteto-
rum, see Zayaruznaya, “Form and Idea in the Ars nova Motet,” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University, 1996), 17ff.

31
 Talea and/as color

Example 3.1 The tenor of Post missarum/Post misse as notated in I-Iv 115, fol. 8r.
Brackets mark four iterations of the same rhythm

Example 3.2 Three triplum passages from Post missarum/Post misse as notated

in I-Iv 115, fol. 7v

but also pitches are being repeated, but talea when only the note-shapes
repeat (sentence 3). Muris’s “color” is thus broader than the singers’
color and contains both their color and their talea:

Johannes de Muris: color

(repeated figurae)

color talea
“nonnulli cantores”: (on same pitches) (on different pitches)

Understood thus, there is not an equivalence between Anonymous

V and the Libellus’s singers: the former defines color as the repetition of
pitches independently of rhythms; the latter define color as the repeti-
tion of pitches and rhythms.
This reading makes sense of the lack of symmetry in the singers’
definition: it is “talla when similar note-shapes are being repeated and
thus they occur on different pitches (et sic fiunt diversarum vocum),” but
there is no et sic fiunt diversarum figurarum (“thus they occur with differ-
ent note-shapes”) appended to the singers’ usage of color, because that
would be incorrect: here the pitches and the rhythms both repeat. It is
also crucial, given the broader focus of the present study, to note that
this early definition makes clear in sentence 4 that the repeated rhythms
that we, along with some fourteenth-century cantores, call talea, appear
in upper voices as well as in tenors.
We find Muris’s preferred usage of color taken up in De modo com-
ponendi tenores motettorum, the treatise by Egidius de Murino already

32
 Talea and/as color

introduced in Chapter 2 as the source of our only hint about materia

and tenor selection. Throughout his text Murino uses the verbs colorare
and ordinare to refer to the process of rhythmicizing tenors (“And so
take this tenor, and you will arrange and color-ize it [ordinabis et colora-
bis],” II.2). Both words also appear in the annotations to the exemplary
tenors in the treatise. The first of these is made up of perfect maximas
and rests:

“This tenor,” explains Murino, “is color-ized, since all the [figurae] are
alike, and it is called a tenor ordinatus because there is no mixture in it
except for the rests” (II.14). In contrast, the next tenor, which combines
colored and black maximas, is characterized as mixtus rather than ordi-
natus but still color-ized (tamen est coloratus, II.16).
Reading these examples against the first two in imperfect modus
(II.18–19) confirms that ordinatus applies to tenors that are entirely
made up of one length of note (and of rest, if there be any): tenors con-
sisting of all longs, all breves, etc. “Regular” is thus a good transla-
tion for this word in Murino’s usage.16 As for colorare, it is clear that
its domain is rhythmic, and that it applies to upper voices as well as
tenors. Indeed, the treatise’s first colorare relates to the triplum voice,
which we are instructed to compose in sections, “and when you com-
pose a section . . . this section should be set out in the same note-shapes
as the first section, and as the next section; and this is called color-izing
motets” (II.6).
The proposed interpretation of Muris’s color, amplified by Murino’s
instructions, helps us to understand another early discussion of rhyth-
mic repetition in Johannes Boen’s Ars (before 1367). His account of tenor
construction defines color as “the comparability of some note-shapes (ali-
quarum figurarum) through some resemblance” (III.2). Here again color is
a rhythmic—or, better, a notational—phenomenon, focused on figurae.
For this reason, Boen comments near the end of his discussion that “color
is more obvious to sight than to hearing” (III.11).17 There is no mention
of pitch here, and note-count is the only aspect of what modern schol-
arship calls color to make an appearance, invoked when Boen instructs

16
If it seems silly to have a word for this, given the relative simplicity and rarity of
tenors made up only of one note-value, the implication is probably that the initial regula-
tion of a melody involves putting something nonmensural (plainchant) into mensural
notation for the first time. Perhaps this involves an intermediate step, whether written or
imagined, of converting all pitches to longs or breves.
17
Boen also uses a verbal form, colorare, to describe the process of rhythmizing a given
chant.

33
 Talea and/as color

the reader to see “how many distinct pitches (corpora notarum—literally

“note-bodies”) you have, which you wish to color-ize” (III.5).
That Boen’s color seems to be our modern talea—a repeated rhythmic
pattern—while the word talea is nowhere to be found in his account has
been perplexing to his recent interpreters. Some have concluded, for
instance, that Boen must have reversed the meanings of the two terms, or
that that by “colorare” he means something other than “to organize into
repeated passages of note-shapes.”18 But Boen’s use of the term is in line
both with Muris’s and with that of the singers Muris mentions: since the
discussion is of tenor rhythmicization, color is the proper term for repeated
rhythmic passages, and colorare for the organization of a tenor by such pas-
sages.19 Later still, the same terminology survives in the Notitia del valore
delle note del canto misurato (c. 1400; Appendix, text VII), which defines color
as a rhythmic phenomenon, specifying that it is a passage of notes repeated
several times with different pitches and that talea is the same thing as color.
The remaining pertinent discussions of color and talea are all glosses
on, or paraphrases of, the Libellus and are subject to the challenges of
interpreting the ambiguous wording of what we might call “Some Sing-
ers’ Distinction.” Two concise and roughly contemporary treatments
survive in Pipudi’s De arte cantus from the last quarter of the fourteenth
century (Appendix, text IV), and the third Berkeley treatise, a para-
phrased, updated version of the Libellus possibly written by someone
named Goscalcus and copied c. 1375 (Appendix, text V).20 Both writers
first define color as a standalone term: for Pipudi, it is a repetition of
note-shapes that stand for the same underlying rhythms or of the same
pitches (color . . . dicitur quando eaedem voces vel eaedem significatae figu-
rae in eodem cantu plures repetuntur, IV.1); and Goscalcus hews close to
Muris, defining color as “a passage of the same or similar note-shapes
repeated several times in the same voice” (earumdem vel similium figu-
rarum unius processus pluries repetita posicio in eodem cantu, V.1). Then
both go on to define color and talea as paired terms, color indicating
repeated pitches and talea repeated figurae, in line with Anonymous
V and with modern usage (IV.1–2, V.3–5). What is interesting about
these two definitions is their clear reliance on Muris—evident from
the general shape of both definitions (first defining color, then color and

18
For the former, see Bent, who writes that “Boen . . . reverses the normal meanings
of the terms, using color for rhythm and talea for melody”; “What Is Isorhythm,” 140n11;
for the latter, see Leech-Wilkinson, who suggests that Boen “distinguishes between
arranging the number of repetitions of an isorhythmic Tenor (colorare) and setting the
notes within those repetitions to rhythms (ordinare),” Compositional Techniques, 16. I read
Boen’s ordinare as a non-technical term invoked to explain the process of rhythmizing; see
Appendix, II.8–10.
19
Besseler understands colorare in this vein, “Studien II,” 210.
20
On the relationship of Goscalcus’s treatise to the Libellus see Oliver B. Ellsworth, The
Berkeley Manuscript (University of California, Music Library, MS. 744) (olim Phillipps 4450)
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 5–6; on Pipudi, see the forthcoming work
by Karen Cook.

34
 Talea and/as color

talea together) and from the similar concluding statements about the
distinction between color and talea being visible in tenors (et ista dif-
ferentia servatur in pluribus tenoribus motetorum, IV.2; que differencia licet
in quampluribus motetorum tenoribus observetur, V.6). These two defini-
tions in essence serve as a rhetorical intermediary between the Libellus
and Anonymous V, showing how we can get from Muris’s ambiguous
wording to the usage commonly accepted today.

Fifteenth-century readers of Muris:

Prosdocimus and Ugolino
By far the most extended surviving meditations on color and talea
come from the pen of Prosdocimus de Beldemandis (d. 1428), who
discussed the terms on at least six occasions between c. 1404 and
c. 1425–1428 (Appendix, texts VIII–Xb). It is fascinating to see an
author wrestling over several decades with the same terms, and
more can be said about the various definitions that Prosdocimus
provides than space allows for here. Especially interesting are the
opportunities presented by those texts that have multiple redactions
(IXa–c, Xa–b), and I hope that the materials collected in the Appen-
dix will be mined for what they tell us not only about shifting ter-
minology, but about this especially meticulous theorist’s habits of
thought and revision.
Prosdocimus’s earliest surviving definitions of color and talea occur
at the end of his Expositiones tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis Johannis
de Muris, an extensive commentary on the Libellus that reveals much
about how Prosdocimus was reading Muris. His extensive discus-
sions present three sets of definitions—two that he perceived to be
from Muris’s time and one other from his own. While his reading of
Muris’s first definition presents no problems (VIII.1–12), I suggest that
Prosdocimus, too, misunderstood Some Singers’ Distinction, since he
defines the singers’ color in a way that is inconsistent with the logic of
Muris’s own text. Because he clearly signals his acts of interpretation
and interpolation, we can follow his thought process when he instructs
the reader to supply the words solum . . . et non figure similes to Muris’s
vocant colorem quando repetuntur voces similes:
They call it color when similar pitches (supply: “only, and not similar note-
shapes”) are repeated, but (supply: “they call it”) talea when similar note-shapes
(supply: “only, and not similar pitches”) are repeated, and thus the note-shapes
occur on different pitches (VIII, 17).

As I suggested above, this interpretation seems to be in error, since

both color and talea involve rhythmic repetition for Muris’s singers.
Interestingly, Prosdocimus goes on to offer a third set of definitions
attributed to some of his own contemporaries (aliqui moderni), which
he sees as mediating between the two offered by Muris: “in color there
is a repetition of similar pitches and similar note-shapes, but in talea

35
 Talea and/as color

there is a repetition only of similar note-shapes” (VIII, 24; see also IX,
13–17). This is in fact the same meaning of talea that the Libellus, in my
reading, attributed to “some singers.” Once we allow that in his own
second definition Prosdocimus has misinterpreted Muris’s words, an
unexpected continuity in the usage of both terms emerges between his
own time and that of Muris.
One important difference between motets in Muris’s time and
later ones is that upper voices became more and more suffused
with rhythmic repetition—in many cases to the point of what has
been called “pan-isorhythm” (see Chapter  2, note 29). The newer
definitions offered by Prosdocimus take this into account. In the
Expositiones tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis he specifies that the
rhythmic-melodic repetitions of color as defined by his contemporar-
ies occur with extra, nonrepeating material between iterations, while
taleae repeat back-to-back (his wording is cum aliquo medio and absque
medio, respectively, in VIII.26–7). Later he changes his mind about
the issue of intervening material. For example, color may or may not
have something intervening between statements in IXb.19 but taleae
must be back-to-back; in IXc both color and talea can be cum or sine
medio, but in Xb.6 both color and talea must be sine medio. Some of this
variation may be a function of different kinds of repetitions encoun-
tered in French and Italian motets.21 But, apart from this issue of what
occurs between repetitions, all three redactions of Prosdocimus’s
treatise on French practice, Tractatus practice cantus mensurabilis, are
consistent with the Expositiones. At varying lengths and with varying
degrees of detail, the theorist reports that his contemporaries define
color as a repetition of pitches and rhythms, and talea as the repetition
of rhythms only.22

21
We may look to later Italian motets such as O proles Hispanie (attrib. Ciconia), whose
sole surviving upper voice is a series of rhythms repeated back-to-back (two taleae with
nothing intervening), and which also contains similar pitches and rhythms in measures
5–9 and 46–59—what we would call “isomelism”—precisely fitting the definition of
color espoused by the moderni in VIII.26: unus processu similium figurarum atque similium
vocum repetitus pluries in medio alicuius cantus secundum eundem ordinem et cum aliquo medio
(color is a passage of similar note-shapes and similar pitches repeated several times in
the middle of some voice, in the same order, and with something intervening [between
repetitions]). See Laurenz Lütteken, “Isomelism,” Grove Music Online. For O proles His-
panie, see Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark, eds., The Works of Johannes Ciconia, PMFC
24 (Monaco: Éditions de L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1985), no.  21 (pp.  110–11). On differences in
construction between fourteenth-century French and Italian motets, see Bent, “The
Fourteenth-Century Italian Motet,” L’ars nova italiana del Trecento: Certaldo VI (Certaldo:
Edizioni Polis, 1984), 85–125.
22
This is the only set of definitions given in the autograph’s first redaction, Appendix
text IXa; compare with IXb.13–21 and IXc.8–16. Apart from the question of cum and sine
medio, the only significant difference between these three redactions is the mention of
rests in the final one, where the words et pausarum are somewhat automatically (in IXc.6,
illogically) added to each definition.

36
 Talea and/as color

In the first, 1412, version of the Tractatus practicae cantus mensurabilis

ad modum Ytalicorum, Prosdocimus insists that color and talea are syno-
nyms but gives three ways of understanding them as distinct:

there is one kind [of color or talea] in which there is repetition only of simi-
lar note-shapes, and another kind in which there is repetition only of similar
pitches, and a third can be added, which is that in which there is a repetition of
similar pitches and similar note-shapes at the same time.
(Xa.1)

In the second redaction of the Tractatus (c. 1425–1428), he once again

enumerates these three kinds (Xb.2) but ultimately signals a rift
between theory and practice:

It should be known that these two nouns, color and talea, convey one and the
same thing, differing only in name, just as the two nouns presbiter and sac-
erdos . . . and although this is the case, nevertheless it is commonly believed
among all singers that they call it color when only similar pitches are repeated,
but talea when only similar note-shapes are repeated.
(Xb.3, 6)23

The stated goal of this later redaction is to incorporate certain innova-

tions and new ideas that reached the author after the treatise’s initial
drafting in 1412. It is not clear whether the revisions are descriptive or
aspirational, since Prosdocimus writes, on the one hand, that he has
“changed certain things which, as a consequence of further acquaint-
ance with this practice, seemed to me should be changed” but that, on
the other hand, “if you prefer the Italian notation in current use, go back
to my first treatise on the Italian practice, the one I wrote before this,
and there you will find your purpose answered.”24 The fact that Pros-
docimus implies that his contemporaries err in their beliefs (although
this is the case . . . nevertheless it is commonly believed) suggests that
we can see the problematic modern consensus about color taking root
here. Indeed, if we replace “all singers” with “all musicologists” then
this excerpt from the second redaction serves as an apt summary of the
present chapter on color and talea.
A welcome confirmation of the proposed scenario—one in which the
singers’ talea and their color both involve rhythmic repetition—comes
from Ugolino of Orvieto’s Declaratio musicae disciplinae of c. 1430.
Although temporally he is even further separated from ars nova prac-
tices than was Prosdocimus, Ugolino proves to be a more careful reader
of the Libellus. Reminding us that color is a repetition of note-shapes
(XI.8), he reasons that “this repetition can be carried out with similar

23
I am grateful to Michael Scott Cuthbert for his observation that this passage repre-
sents a difference between the first and second redactions.
24
Prosdocimus de Beldemandis, A Treatise on the Practice of Mensural Music in the Italian
Manner, ed. and trans. Jay A. Huff (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1972), 58.

37
 Talea and/as color

note-shapes on the same pitches and with similar note-shapes on differ-

ent pitches” (XI.9) and concludes that “certain singers called repetition
of the very same pitches by similar note-shapes color, but the repetition
of different pitches by similar note-shapes talea (XI.10).” Accordingly,
Ugolino paraphrases Some Singers’ Distinction as follows:

Note that some singers make a distinction between color and talea: for they call
it color when pitches (also similar in note-shapes) are repeated, but talea when
similar note-shapes are repeated (and not similar pitches), and thus the note-
shapes occur on different pitches.
(XI.11; see also XI.12–13)

Presumably because this definition concords with contemporary usage

as he perceives it, Ugolino does not offer a third version of things.
In sum, the contemporary accounts turn out to be more in agree-
ment than previously thought, and they tend to define color in terms
of rhythmic repetition that also involves the repetition of pitch. To
be sure, Anonymous V, Pipudi, and Goscalcus figure as fourteenth-
century witnesses to the sense of color current in the twentieth century,
but they are the odd sources out, and I believe that their pitch-only color
is a phantom born of misreading an ambiguous phrase in the Libellus.
In this regard it should finally be noted that Anonymous V appends to
his two conclusions a final sentence that strongly implies that color is in
part rhythmic even for him: “Such is color in music, and this can occur
in perfect or imperfect modus, tempus, and prolation” (VI.4).25

The preponderance of this evidence leads me to avoid using color as

a synonym for “tenor melody” below, even as it points toward a sub-
tle reevaluation of analytical priorities. Recall that Margaret Bent has
cited the existence of two terms—color and talea—as “a starting point
for developing a more responsive analytical vocabulary to redress
the rhythmic bias” of the modern term “isorhythm.”26 In that context,
color defined as melodic repetition has served as evidence of a “twin
structuring role of melody” in the ars nova motet repertory, undermin-
ing analyses “where rhythm is wrongly emphasized at the expense
of the melodic component.”27 Re-conceptualizing color and talea as
different flavors of rhythmic repetition moves the spotlight back to
rhythm, while keeping the analyst sensitive to moments when melodic
and rhythmic repetition occur together. As for repetitions of melody
without rhythm—repetitions of the base chant—while these occur at

25
The appearances of color in the canons of Du Fay’s O gemma, lux and Billart’s Salve
virgo virginum (cited in Bent, “Isorhythm”) do not make it clear which conception of the
word is being invoked, since in both cases the chant repeats under the same figurae and
thus the melodic and the rhythmic-melodic notions of color both apply. Taille in the canon
of the Chantilly motet Alpha/Cetus refers to a rhythmic unit.
26
“What Is Isorhythm,” 123.
27
Ibid.

38
 Talea and/as color

structurally significant moments, the analyses below suggest that they

are less likely than previously thought to have a primary structuring
role. I would argue that rhythm—or, rather, the repetition of figurae, of
note-shapes—is indeed privileged in the majority of fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century discourse around motet structures. That Muris does
not find it useful to make a distinction between rhythmic-melodic rep-
etition (the Singers’ color) and purely rhythmic repetition (the Singers’
talea), favoring instead a single term that is purely rhythmic (his color),
underlines the extent to which we are dealing a phenomenon that is
rhythmic first and foremost.
It is also clear from the theoretical sources that talea does not reside
in tenors exclusively. As noted above, Muris’s comment about Some
Singers’ Distinction only being visible in tenors implies that repeated
passages of note-shapes (his colores, the Singers’ taleae) can appear
in all voices of motets. This too is a sentiment easily misinterpreted.
Whereas the original wording makes clear that the difference between
talea and color was limited to tenors, Prosdocimus and Ugolino seem
to conclude that in Muris’s time only tenors were the site of color and
talea. But in the course of their commentaries both confirm that in their
own time talea and color are to be found in all voices (VIII.36–7, XI.20).
Once again, our retrospective view allows us to glean a continuity
between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: talea was never limited
to tenors.
Finally, the treatises invite us to ask what nature of thing talea and
color are, and how they relate to the structures we can observe. That is:
is it consistent with medieval usage to speak of “a talea” as we so often
do? Or are “talea” and “color” mass nouns? (As will become evident,
my motivation in asking this question is not to police modern usage but
rather to seek further insight into the compositional process by illumi-
nating the relationship between periodic structures and their signify-
ing aspects.) In the Libellus, color is “a passage repeated several times”
(processus pluries repetita) in the same voice (I.2); in Boen, it is a “com-
parability of note-shapes” (aliquarum figurarum . . . comparabilitas, III.2).
In Anonymous V, talea and color are the observable result of repetition:
“it is said to be talla when the same notes are repeated” (VI.2). From
the Notitia onwards, and no doubt under the influence of the Libellus,
color and talea are processus repetitus. It is perhaps the frequency of the
word processus that led Sanders to suggest that “most medieval writers
defined talea as a process of repetition,” but the cognate is a false one.
In translating I have preferred “a passage,” which preserves the impor-
tance of sequence (many of the definitions stress that the note-shapes
are restated in the same order) and hints at temporality but does not
render the repeated rhythms themselves a process.28

28
Other possible renditions of processus in this context would be “a progression,” “a
succession,” or “a series.”

39
 Talea and/as color

Perhaps the most helpful analogy is that which, looking back to

thirteenth-century usage, links musical color with “luster” or “orna-
ment,” likening it to the rhetorical figure or embellishment (color rheto-
ricus) of repetitio. Prosdocimus explains:

Color in music derives from a certain similarity to a rhetorical figure (color retho-
ricum) called repetitio, for just as in this rhetorical color there is the repetition of
the same word several times, so too in musical color there is a repetition several
times of similar note-shapes, or of similar pitches, or of similar note-shapes and
pitches at the same time; it is in this respect that opinions differ.
(IXb.3/IXb.17; see also Xa.3/Xb.4)

And here we must read color, this “figure” or “embellishment,” not

in the derogatory sense of something unnecessary—not as “mere”
embellishment—but as a lustrous, gleaming, variegated quality that
medieval thinkers posit as requisite for natural as well as artificial
beauty. The rhetorical colores—the tropes and figures of speech—are
the site of rhetorical beauty and efficacy, and, as Aquinas puts it, “those
things are said to be beautiful which have a splendid color” (unde quae
habent colorem nitidum, pulchra esse dicuntur).29 This is clearly also how
Ugolino understands the word: “Indeed music is color-ized, that is, dec-
orated, by such embellishment (tali colore), through which it appears
beautiful to the eyes of those who look upon it and the ears of those
who listen to it” (IX.6; color here is rhythmic).
In cases where an entire voice consists of repeated material—most
tenors and some upper voices—rhythmic color and talea become syn-
onymous with, and were thus used to designate, phrases delineated by
the repetition. The author of the Notitia explains that taleae divide ten-
ors into sections (V.3), so that a given voice may have two or three taleae
of specific durations (V.4–6). This language mirrors modern usage. But
in voices whose note-shapes only repeat occasionally color and talea are
embellishments—they are the icing on the cake, we might say, but so
applied that they help to articulate the cake’s structure (and make it
more delicious). Here I believe that talea would have referred to the
repeated passages, rather than the period articulated by repetition. An
observation such as “there is a twenty-breve talea repeated every thirty
breves in the triplum” would seem to be consistent with the Singers’
usage, as would “the motetus voice has more taleae (is more taleaic)
than the triplum.” That is to say, talea (or color in Muris’s preferred
usage) seems to be synonymous with the modern term “isorhythm” in
the sense in which it has often been employed.30 This implies that high-
lighted passages in Figure 1.2 are examples of color (in Muris’s usage)

29
Summa theologiae, 1.a.39.8. See also Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the
Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 186–7.
30
On the earliest uses of the terms “isorhythm” and “isorhythmic” by Ludwig and Bes-
seler see Bent, “What Is Isorhythm,” 123–6 and Earp, “Isorhythm,” in A Critical Compan-
ion to Medieval Motets, ed. Jared Hartt (Boydell and Brewer, 2018). I thank Lawrence Earp

40
 Talea and/as color

or talea (in the usage of some singers). While none of the definitions
explicitly states that talea must repeat periodically, in practice it is evi-
dent that significant stretches of repetition do occur at regular intervals
in all of the voices in which they appear.
In sum, as long as all (or most) note-shapes recur, there is no need
to differentiate between talea as a series of repeated notes and talea as
a span within which notes repeat. And, if tenor organization controls,
or is identical with, cycles of repetition in the upper voices, then refer-
ring to taleae in the upper voices is unproblematic. But when repeated
sequences of note-shapes recur at different rates in the upper voices
than they do in the tenor, there is a need for terminology that is both
flexible and precise. Georg Reichert used the term “Großtalea” for
upper-voice periods that, like those in In virtute/Decens, encompass
multiple tenor taleae, and Jacques Boogaart “supertalea.”31 In addition
to using talea in a sense that, I would suggest, departs from the medi-
eval meaning of repeated note-shapes (since none of these voices is
wholly taleaic), both terms evoke upper-voice phrases that are longer
than those in the tenor; they are thus less useful in describing situa-
tions in which the upper voices exhibit shorter cycles (as in Flos/Celsa,
discussed in Chapter 4). In still other cases, we will see that the musi-
cal spans articulated by repeated rhythms are the same length in the
tenor and the upper voices, but the cycles of repetition are out of
phase. The German Phasendifferenz and English “staggered phrasing”
and “phrase overlap” have been used to describe such relationships,
though not all examples of Phasendifferenz point to salient upper-voice
structures that differ from tenor ones.32 In this study I use the neutral
“block” to designate polyphonic spans of music that are articulated
by, but not fully made up of, taleae. In this I subscribe to the Singers’
Distinction, though with no disrespect to Muris: color has so firmly
been linked with melodic repetition over the course of the last century
that to use it now to describe repeated series of note-shapes would be
counterproductive.

for sharing this work with me prior to publication and with it his translation of Besseler’s
rich and challenging study.
31
Georg Reichert, “Das Verhältnis zwischen musikalischer und textlicher Struktur in
den Motetten Machauts,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 13 (1956): 202; Boogaart, “O series
summe rata,” 1:107.
32
Reichert, “Das Verhältnis,” 205; Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” 562; Leech-Wilkin-
son, Compositional Techniques, 1989. Kügle uses both “phase differential” and “phrase dif-
ferential,” The Manuscript Ivrea, 99–100, 105, 109.

41
 4

A catalog of upper-voice
structures
Analytical figures and examples
Two kinds of figure are used below to illustrate a range of upper-
voice structures. The first is a schematic diagram that represents
the relative dimensions and alignment of upper-voice blocks and
tenor taleae. Tenor statements in original note values (integer valor)
are indicated in these diagrams by straight lines (———), diminution
and similar procedures by wavy lines (﹏﹏), and the boundaries of
taleae and blocks by vertical strokes(|). Thin horizontal lines sep-
arate these sections where they are vertically stacked in the dia-
grams, as a reminder that upper-voice rhythmic correspondences
occur only within sections and not between them. Measure num-
bers are included to the right of each diagram to allow comparison
with available editions.
Most editions of Ars nova motets mark taleae and cycles of melodic
repetition in tenors using Roman numbers for the former and letters
for the latter. Where the repeat of the tenor melody also falls at a
talea break, this results in alphanumeric labeling, so that AII would
be the second talea of the first melodic statement, BIII the third talea
of the second statement, and so forth. Sometimes editors switch
from Roman to Arabic numerals to describe tenor taleae in diminu-
tion. Since upper-voice periodic construction adds an extra layer of
complexity, I through-label tenor taleae without regard for which
statement of the melody they belong to, though the traditional dis-
tinction between Roman and Arabic numbering is preserved, so that
II is the second tenor talea in a motet’s first section (in which the
tenor sings in integer valor, or original note values), and 3 is the third
tenor talea in diminution. Greek letters refer to successive upper-
voice blocks made salient by taleae, which are labeled according to
their section (α only in a unipartite work, α and β in a motet with
two sections, etc.)
The second kind of figure is a paradigmatic music example, in which
a score for an entire motet or motet section is arranged so as to vertically
align like rhythms and allow the reader to see as much of this similarity
as possible in one glimpse. This approach characterizes recent distri-
butional analyses but is also consonant with older editorial practices
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

such as Ludwig’s, and with medieval ars memorativa.1 In these exam-

ples I have often left out text in order to facilitate this alignment. In
some cases bold, box-tipped lines ( ) mark poetic line-boundaries.
Taleae are shaded. In choosing what to shade I have usually set the bar
at rhythms lasting a breve or more that repeat exactly in the majority
of blocks within a given section, with plicated breves considered to be
breves. However, it is worth noting that a composer’s decision about
whether, for example, to use or in a particular instance, or the
choice between and , may have been largely dependent on melodic
and contrapuntal considerations, so that for the purposes of analyzing
recurring rhythms these pairs may be considered like each other, and
markedly different from hockets, stretches of longer notes, or rests. This
is also the level on which scribal variants are most likely to occur in this
repertory. Such variation—whether scribal or authorial—may be why
the most of the theorists define talea (and rhythmic color) as passages of
“similar” rather than “identical” note-shapes, and why Goscalcus spec-
ifies “the same or similar note-shapes” (earundem vel similium figurarum,
Appendix V.2).2 Also interesting is that Ugolino twice makes a distinc-
tion between repetition of “the very same pitches” (earundem vocum)
and repetition with “similar note-shapes” (per similes figuras, XI.9–10).
If his word choice is deliberate, it implies that repeated series of note-
shapes need only be similar, rather than identical, to count as taleae. In
other words, adjacent periods in the examples below are usually even
more rhythmically similar to each other than the shading suggests.

Upper-voice blocks spanning multiple tenor taleae

Prompted no doubt by the layout of Ludwig’s editions, Georg Reichert’s
1956 study of structural relationships between text and music in
Machaut’s motets was the first to explore what he termed Großtalea. He
observed that the sections delineated by repeated upper-voice rhythms
in Hélas/Corde mesto (Motet 12) and Amours/Faus Semblant (Motet 15)
encompass several tenor taleae.3 It was in discussing Hélas/Corde mesto

1
Oft-cited examples of paradigmatic analysis include Jean-Jacques Nattiez, first in
Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique (Paris: U.G.E., 1975); and Kofi Agawu in Music
as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008). See also Nicolas Ruwet, Langage, musique, poésie (Paris: Seuil, 1972), from which the
reprinted “Méthodes d’analyse en musicologie” (pp.  100–134; originally Revue belge de
musicologie 20 [1966]: 65–90) is introduced and translated by Mark Everist as “Methods
of Analysis in Musicology,” Music Analysis 6 (1987): 3–36. For paradigmatic analyses of
medieval music, see ibid., 4–5 and Everist, “Motets, French Tenors, and the Polyphonic
Chanson ca. 1300,” The Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 365–406. On compositional struc-
tures and medieval mnemonic practice, see Busse Berger, Medieval Music.
2
Anonymous V is again an exception here, referring to eisdem figuris and eedem voces
(IV, 2–3).
3
“Das Verhältnis,” 203.

44
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Figure 4.1 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut, Hélas/Corde mesto

(M12)

Figure 4.2 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut, Amours/Faus Sem-

blant (M15)

that he coined his term to describe the phenomenon: “Every such

‘Großtalea’ covers three tenor periods and coincides exactly with one
course of the tenor melody which sounds a total of three times.”4 While
the tenor talea repeats nine times, the upper voices repeat their longer
block three times (see Figure 4.1).5 Reichert locates the raison d’être of
this superstructure to the motetus text, which is split into three stro-
phes, “and each of these strophes is now made the basis of a longer
period (Großperiode) with a consistent overall arrangement.”6
A similar connection exists between upper-voice text structure and
taleaic superstructure in Machaut’s Amours/Faus Semblant. This time,
the triplum is in control. While the motetus consists of four groups of
three lines with rhyme scheme abc—groups reflected in the tenor’s four
taleae—the triplum is divided into two long (nineteen-line) strophes,
and the polyphonic musical setting exhibits the most marked rhyth-
mic replication between the material corresponding with tenor taleae
I and III, and II and IV (see Figure 4.2). These blocks are particularly
stark (though unmarked in Ludwig’s and Schrade’s editions): the
upper-voice material accompanying tenor taleae II and IV—but not I or

4
Jede solche ‘Großtalea’ umfaßt drei Tenorperioden und deckt sich genau mit einem Ablauf der
Tenormelodie, die insgesamt dreimal erklingt (= 3 ‘Colores’), ibid., 202.
5
Measure numbers in Figure 4.1 refer to Leo Schrade, ed., The Works of Guillaume de
Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 2–3 (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-
Lyre, 1956), 2:147–50.
6
Und jede dieser Strophen ist nun in gleichbleibender Gesamtdisposition zur Grundlage der
Großperiode gemacht, “Das Verhältnis,” 202.

45
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Figure 4.3 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut, Qui/Ha! Fortune (M8)

III—contains hockets, and hockets are the most likely part of an ars nova
motet to be taleaic.7
In both of these motets by Machaut, and in the first section of In
virtute/Decens (Example 1.2 above), upper-voice blocks encompass sev-
eral tenor taleae (three in Hélas/Corde mesto; two in the others). This is
the most common relationship between upper- and lower-voice struc-
tures in those cases where they do not coincide, and it is observable in
several more motets. Machaut’s Qui/Ha! Fortune (Motet 8) consists of
four blocks, each of which encompasses three repetitions of the tenor’s
talea (see Figure  4.3).8 In Tribum/Quoniam, twelve tenor taleae divide

7
Measure numbers in Figure 4.2 refer to Schrade, The Works of Guillaume de Machaut,
157–9. Ernest Sanders, Ramón A. Pelinski, Agostino Ziino, and Karl Kügle have all men-
tioned the bipartite arrangement of the upper voices in Amours/Faus Semblant, and Mar-
garet Bent and Jacques Boogaart have carried out analyses linking the work’s structure
with ideas expressed in its texts. See Sanders, “The Medieval Motet,” 558n257; Pelinski,
“Zusammenklang und Aufbau in den Motetten Machauts,” Musikforschung 28 (1975): 69;
Ziino, “Isoritmia musicale e tradizione metrica mediolatina nei mottetti de Guillaume de
Machaut,” Medioevo Romanzo 5 (1978): 450. Besseler makes no mention of the upper-voice
structure in the footnotes to his chart, but his characterization of the triplum and mote-
tus as streng isorhythmisch suggests that he observed the blocks, “Studien zur Musik des
Mittelalters II,” 222n10, 223. More extensive analyses of the motet’s form are available in
Bent, “Deception, Exegesis, and Sounding Number in Machaut’s Motet 15,” Early Music
History 10 (1991): 20–2 and Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 1:144–6. As Bent has noted,
the upper-voice taleae of Motet 15 are also highly repetitive within the space defined by
tenor taleae (see the shading in “Deception, Exegesis,” 16–19, Example 1). Hélas/Corde
mesto (Motet 12) is thus a more representative example of block construction, in that the
upper-voice taleae are considerably more reflective of their own repetitive scheme than
they are of the tenor’s.
8
Measure numbers in Figure 4.3 refer to Schrade, The Works of Guillaume de Machaut,
2:134–6. The upper-voice form is noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters
II,” 224n19, Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 412–13, and Sand-
ers, “The Medieval Motet,” 558. See also Boogaart, “O series summe rata,” 1:134, and Maria
Hałaburda, Fortuna in weltlichen mehrstimmigen Kompositionen des 14. und frühen 15. Jahr-
hunderts (Holzerlingen: Hänssler-Verlag, 1999), 110, 218. Schrade’s edition (The Works of
Guillaume de Machaut, 134–6) indicates only the upper-voice blocks for this motet, labe-
ling them as though they were taleae. In this he follows Ludwig, who however indicates

46
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Figure 4.4 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Tribum/Quoniam (exclusive of a

twelve-breve introitus)

into three groups of four to fit under three longer blocks in the upper
voices (see Figure 4.4).9
Upper-voice blocks unfolding over multiple tenor taleae are also used
in several motets with diminution sections, where two different tenor
talea lengths are already in play. In some cases, blocks are present in
both sections of the motet, so that the proportions between the integer
valor and diminution sections of the tenor are mirrored in the upper
voices. This is the approach Machaut took in both Quant/Amour (Motet
1) and Hareu/Hélas (Motet 10). In the former, the tenor talea length in
the second section is one-third of that in the first section (six breves
as opposed to eighteen), while, in the latter, the tenor talea originally
spans twelve breves and then shortens to six. In both cases the upper-
voice blocks are double the length of the tenor’s, preserving the propor-
tions between sections: 3:1 in Quant/Amour, and 2:1 in Hareu/Hélas (see
Figure 4.5).10
Vitry’s Vos/Gratissima exhibits the same strategy. Its tenor and con-
tratenor have six taleae in its first section and seven-and-a-half in its

in his editorial notes that the upper voices are made up of four periods of nine longs each:
im Tenor T. 1–3, 4–6 und 7–9 rhythmisch gleich sind, Guillaume de Machaut, 3:32. The idea
of internally repetitive tenor taleae is of course supported by 13th-century motets with
tenors organized by modal rhythm.
9
The upper-voice form is noted in Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,”
194 and 223n12. Bent’s analysis in “Polyphony of Texts and Music” takes into account,
but does not privilege, this arrangement; see note 10 on page 6 (Chapter 1). Measure
numbers in Figure  4.4 refer to Bent’s edition (ibid., p.  90); note that these measures
encompass longs rather than breves. See also the discussion and analysis, identifying
three upper-voice periods and an internally repetitive tenor that “clearly derives from
thirteenth-century practice,” in Sarah Fuller, The European Musical Heritage, 800–1750
(New York: Knopf, 1987), 103.
10
These structures were observed by Besseler in “Studien II,” 224n18. Measure num-
bers in Figure  4.5 refer to Schrade, The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, 108–11, 141–3.
Schrade’s edition ignores the tenor taleae in both motets and arranges the voices accord-
ing to the upper-voice blocks, in which he follows Ludwig, who mentions the tenor’s
repetitions in his notes but organizes his edition according to upper-voice structures,
Guillaume de Machaut, 3:2–5, 37–40. Only Boogaart indicates both levels of organization,
calling the tenor taleae Ia, Ib; IIa, IIb, etc.; “O series summe rata,” 1:253–4, 2:604–8. Otto
Gombosi also noted that in Quant/Amour “the tenor of each talea is a double period,”
“Machaut’s ‘Messe Notre-Dame’,” Musical Quarterly 36 (1950): 220.

47
Quant/Amour Hareu/Hélas

(mm. 1–36) (mm. 1–24)

| block α1
tenor talea I | talea II | | block α1
tenor talea I |talea II |
(mm. 37–72) (mm. 25–48)
|block α2
talea III talea | IV | | block α2
talea III |talea IV |
(mm. 73–108) (mm. 49–72)
| block α3
talea V | talea VI
| | block α3
talea V |talea VI |

talea 1 talea 2
|β1 (mm.|109–20) | talea 1 talea 2
|β1 (mm.| 73–84) |
talea 3 talea 4 talea 3 talea 4
|β2 (mm.|121–32)| |β2 (mm.| 85–96) |
talea 5 talea 6 talea 5 talea 6
|β3 (mm.| 133–44)| |β3 (mm.| 97–108)|
Figure 4.5 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Machaut, Quant/Amour (M1, left) and Hareu/Helas (M10,
right)
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

second, while the upper voices are grouped into three larger sections
followed by four shorter ones, the last of which is truncated (see Fig-
ure 4.6).11 Similarly, the tenor taleae of Ida/Portio by Egidius de Pusiex
are half the length of its upper-voice blocks. This motet is quadripartite,
with successive diminution in the proportions 6:4:3:2, and each section
consists of four taleae set to two blocks (see Figure  4.7).12 The upper-
voice rhythmic repetition is so prevalent that Harrison organized this
work according to the upper-voice blocks in his edition, making no
mention of the tenor taleae.13
This is as good a place as any to add that, though I have opposed
upper voices to tenors (like Muris and his commentators), it is by no
means impossible for a motetus and a triplum to evince schemes of rep-
etition that differ from one another. In Ida/Portio the triplum is taleaic
in each of its four sections, but the motetus only in sections α and β.
And in Colla/Bona, discussed below, the big blocks of section α are
most salient in the motetus, with its long untexted stretches, while the
triplum has some rhythms during this span that recur at the same rate
as the tenor’s taleae. The kinds of structural differences observed above
between the tenor and the upper voices may thus be present between
upper voices, though typically to a lesser extent.

More intricate upper-voice arrangements

In the multipartite Quant/Amour, Hareu/Helas, Vos/Gratissima, and
Ida/Portio, all sections of each motet are constructed with the same
approach, so that the upper-voice blocks, though not the same length
as the tenor taleae, reflect the proportions of the tenor’s diminution. But
a number of motets have blocks only in some sections, leading to more
dynamic relationships between cycles of rhythmic repetition in the
tenor and upper voices. The tenor talea of Flos/Celsa, attributed to Vitry,
consists of a twenty-four-breve pattern sung three-and-a-half times in
the first section, then again three-and-a-half times in diminution (see
the left side of Figure 4.8).14 This results in three sizes of tenor phrase:

11
Measure numbers in Figure 4.6 refer to Leo Schrade, ed., The Roman de Fauvel; The
Works of Philippe de Vitry; French Cycles of the Ordinarium Missae, Polyphonic Music of the
Fourteenth Century 1 (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956), 76–81.
12
Noted by Besseler, who further pointed out that the motetus ceases to be isorhythmic
before the triplum does, “Studien II,” 222n8. Measure numbers in Figure 4.7 refer to Har-
rison, Motets of French Provenance, 24–9. On Egidius, see below, 105n2.
13
Ibid., 24–9, 193.
14
Flos/Celsa has been assigned to Vitry by Leech-Wilkinson and Kügle based on struc-
tural and stylistic considerations; Leech-Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 11; Kügle, The
Manuscript Ivrea, 124–5. Tribum/Quoniam is connected with Vitry through a marginal
comment in one of his books, as discovered by Andrew Wathey, “Myth and Mythogra-
phy in the Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” Musica e storia 6 (1998): 95–7 (though it should
be noted that the comment could have been written just the same if Vitry knew the motet
very well but it was not his work). Vos/Gratissima is attributed to Vitry in the Quatuor prin-
cipalia. Cum statua/Hugo includes the composer’s name in its triplum text, and Colla/Bona,

49
 upper voices: |block α1 | mm. 1–30
lower voices: |talea I | talea II |
|block α2 | mm. 31–60
|talea III | talea IV |
|block α3 | mm. 61–90
|talea V | talea VI |

|block β1
|talea 1 | talea 2 | mm. 91–108

|block β2
|talea 3 | talea 4 | mm. 109–26

|block β3
|talea 5 | talea 6 | mm. 127–44

|partial block β1
|talea 7 | talea 8 | mm. 145–59

Figure 4.6 Upper- and lower-voice structures in Vitry, Vos/Gratissima

|
upper voices: block α1
tenor: talea I |talea II | mm. 1–36

|block α2
talea III |talea IV | mm. 37–72

|block β1
talea 1 |talea 2 | mm. 73–96

|block β1
talea 3 |talea 4 | mm. 97–120

|block
talea i
γ1
|talea ii | mm. 121–38

|block
talea iii
γ2
|talea iv | mm. 139–56

|block δ1| |
talea1 talea 2
mm. 157–68

|block δ2| |
talea 3 talea 4
mm. 169–80

Figure 4.7 Upper-voice and tenor structures in Pusiex, Ida/Portio

 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Tenor taleae: Upper-voice blocks:

|α1
|I (mm. 1–24)|
} α2
(mm. 1–12)
(mm. 13–24)|
|α3
| II (mm. 25–48) |
} α4
(mm. 25–36)
(mm. 37–48)|
|α5
| III (mm. 49–72) | } α6
(mm. 49–60)
(mm. 61–72) |
|half-talea IV | |α7 (mm. 73–84)|

|1 | |β1 (mm. 85–96) |

|2 | |β2 (mm. 97–108) |
|3 | |β3 (mm. 109–20) |
|half-talea 4| |β4 (mm. 121–6) |

Figure 4.8 Schemes of periodic rhythmic repetition in the tenor (left) and upper
voices (right) of Flos/Celsa

twenty-four breves (tenor taleae I–III), twelve breves (tenor half-talea

IV and taleae 1–3), and six breves (tenor half-talea 4). In the integer valor
section, and only there, the upper voices are arranged in blocks half
the length of the tenor’s taleae (see the right side of Figure 4.8).15 This
means that when the tenor moves into diminution the upper-voice
phrases do not change length, though they do start singing a fresh set
of rhythms enlivened by hockets. The tenor’s rhythm seems to have
been designed with such division in mind. As Kügle noted, the full
pattern—  —splits into two halves of twelve breves ending
in rests: and .16 This design suggests that the organization
of the upper voices might already have been in the composer’s mind
when he fashioned the tenor talea. And, as we shall see shortly, these
upper-voice schemes of repetition mesh well with the structures of the
texts. A rather detailed compositional plan for the motet might well
have been in place before the composer turned to the chant repertory
for a tenor melody of appropriate length and subject matter and began
to color-ize it.

long attributed to Vitry on stylistic grounds, finds further support from the circulation of
its text in manuscript anthologies where it is combined in several ways with references to
Cum statua/Hugo (Wathey, “The Motets of Philippe de Vitry and the Fourteenth-Century
Renaissance,” Early Music History 12 [1993]: 141–2). On In virtute/Decens, see note 1 on
page 1 (Chapter 1).
15
Noted by Besseler, “Studien II,” 222n7. Measure numbers in Figure 4.8 refer to Har-
rison, Motets of French Provenance, 42–5.
16
Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, 100.

51
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

In all the motets so far analyzed, talea breaks in the tenor regularly
coincide with block boundaries in the upper voices. But there are other
cases in which the two cycles are less aligned. One striking example of
this is Machaut’s Trop plus/Biaute (M20). Here the tenor is sung as a ron-
deau, its two sections repeated in the order ABAAABAB, where A spans
seven breves and B five. The upper voices, on the other hand, are organ-
ized in two full and one partial seventeen-breve blocks marked by
regularly spaced hockets in all three and further taleae toward the end
of the first two blocks (see the shading in Example 4.1).17 Because the
number seventeen is not salient in the tenor’s organization, the taleae
are usually limited to the upper voices. Each of the three hockets, for
example, is placed over a different section of the rondeau.18
Lawrence Earp has recently offered a hermeneutic explanation for
the discrepancies between the motet’s two structural schemes. The
tenor, as per its text, is not at all certain whether he has a sweetheart
but remains loyal nevertheless (je ne sui mie certeins d’avoir amie, mais je
sui loyaus amis). And “in a structural sense,” Earp suggests,

the tenor is “uncertain” because the overall form is that of the rondeau . . . while
at the same time the “isorhythmic” articulation of the larger form in the upper
voices employs . . . segments of equal length, that is, they are loyal.19

This is certainly provocative, though the last talea is only seventeen

breves long if the final longa in the upper voices stretches to three
breves, and there is no prevalent perfect modus to suggest this, while
the tenor’s notation argues against it. More to the point, Earp’s inter-
pretation allows the tenor’s text to wield explanatory power over both
formal schemes in the motet: it dictates the “overall form.” Arguably,
upper-voice taleae of a set length with hockets do not need explanation.
The counter-posing of the two independent repetitive schemes may well
be the motet’s main event—its materia—but this would not be likely to
emerge from a compositional order in which the tenor was chosen first.20

17
Example 4.1 is transcribed from GB-Ccc Fer, fols. 279v–280r, reproduced in Earp
et al., The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript (Oxford: DIAMM, 2014), 2:279v–280r. Note
that in the frequently occurring rhythm (the first two semibreves are perfect (see the
cautionary dots of perfection at its first occurrence in motetus m. 3); this syncopation is
rendered incorrectly in Ludwig’s and Schrade’s editions.
18
As noted by Sanders, The Medieval Motet, 564. Bent has written of “three irregularly
placed blocks of complete isorhythm in all three parts, at mm. 8–11, 25–28, and 42–45”
(“What Is Isorhythm?,” 13), but the only exact matches between all three voices are
between measures 8–10 and 42–4. Besseler and Ludwig both described Trop plus/Biauté
as “nicht isorhythmisch” (Besseler, “Studien II,” 224; Ludwig, Guillaume de Machaut, 72).
See also Dame/Fins cuers (Machaut Motet 11), in which the song tenor’s structure is not
matched by the upper voices, which, although they do not divide into discernible blocks,
have three taleaic hocket sections (the passages beginning in breves 32, 61, and 92).
19
Earp, The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript, 1:34.
20
Earp does not suggest that the tenor was chosen first. While the tenor and upper-voice
structures run independently of each other, they are compatible because the tenor’s final
section, BAB, equals seventeen breves, as noted in Jacques Boogaart, “L’accomplissement

52
Example 4.1 Machaut, Trop plus/Biaute (text omitted), arranged to align upper-voice blocks; taleae shaded
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

A more ad hoc variance between tenor and upper-voice structures can

be gleaned in a pair of motets by Vitry.21 The tenor of In virtute/Decens is
organized by an exceedingly simple ten-breve tenor talea (   ) stated
fouteen times over two cursus of the twenty-one-note chant melody.22
But the upper voices are shaped by a different impulse. As we already
saw in Examples 1.1 and 1.2 above, the first section features blocks that
are twice the length (twenty breves) of the tenor talea. After this point,
the motet features three more sets of blocks (β), of which the first over-
laps by four breves with the last block of α (see Example 4.2). These sec-
tions are quite distinct: β is highly taleaic, and γ and δ contain hockets.
Cum statua/Hugo uses a longer tenor talea lasting fifteen breves
(   ) that is stated nine times over three cursus of a twenty-four-
note chant. The upper voices, on the other hand, are organized in three
pairs of blocks of two different lengths: fifteen breves in sections α and δ
and thirty breves in β; a further span of fifteen breves (γ) has no upper-
voice taleae and stands outside of the repetitive scheme (see Example
4.3).23 In addition to the upper-voice taleae, which are especially promi-
nent in the slow hockets that open the piece and the fast hockets that
conclude it, passages of rhythmic-melodic color (as Some Singers called
it) can be heard near the beginning of the blocks in sections α and β,
further tying these pairs together and distinguishing them from later
sections (see the boxes labeled x, x’, y, and y’ in Example 4.3).
It would be impossible to perceive the complicated upper-voice
form of either Cum statua/Hugo or In virtute/Decens by looking at its
tenor. And yet the structures are significant: I  have recently argued
that these rather stark confrontations between simple tenors and
complicated upper-voice structures stem from the texts, which treat
multipartite entities.24 Borrowing from the opening of Horace’s Ars
poetica, In virtute/Decens describes a four-part chimera which has the
head of a woman, the neck of a horse, feathers, and a fishtail. And
in Cum statua/Hugo, the bulk of the triplum voice is concerned with
a piecemeal biblical statue with a head of gold, a chest of silver, a
belly of brass, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. Thus both motets

du cercle: observations analytiques sur l’ordre des motets de Guillaume de Machaut,”

Analyse musicale 50 (2004): 54–60. Matching the upper-voice periods to a rondeau-shaped
tenor would have been an option—on earlier motets which do this, see Everist, “Motets,
French Tenors, and the Polyphonic Chanson.”
21
For what follows, see Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 70–131.
22
The same talea shapes the contratenor at a five-breve delay.
23
Examples 4.2 and 4.3 follow the texted editions in Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New
Art, 237–42 (In virtute/Decens) and 245–9 (Cum statua/Hugo). Besseler’s way of articulating
the shape he perceived in In virtute/Decens was the formula “3½ (>) 07,” (“Studien II,”
p. 222, column 4 of the table) where “(>)” refers to free diminution of the tenor (which
does not take place) and “0” indicates the presence of hockets in the final seven taleae.
Meanwhile, a note appended to this formula clarifies that “Nur Oberstimmen isorhyth-
misch”—that is, the tenor’s taleae are not salient for the analysis.
24
Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 70–131.

54
Example 4.2 In virtute/Decens arranged to align upper-voice blocks; taleae shaded
Example 4.3 Vitry, Cum statua/Hugo, arranged to align upper-voice blocks; taleae shaded
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

demonstrate fragmentation in their upper-voice forms while thematiz-

ing it their texts.
If In virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo are extreme in the intricacy
and specificity of their upper-voice block structures, the principles
on which they are built sit well within the range of procedures doc-
umented above. Like Amours/Faus Semblant, they use blocks that are
twice as long as the tenor’s talea—but do so only some of the time. Like
the motets with tenor diminution, they feature blocks of two different
sizes—but they have no diminution.
Two further examples, one early and one late, suggest still other
modes of interaction between competing structures. The short motet
Je voi/Fauvel is built on a texted tenor that repeats rhythm and melody
four times (again the Singers’ color!), but the upper voices shape the
work in the image of their texts, which are rondeau variants in the form
ABaabAB. Their opening and closing spans AB, which are melodically
and rhythmically identical, are coterminous with the tenor’s first and
fourth colores, but the middle two six-longa tenor colores underpin three
four-long phrases in the upper voices, in accordance with the aab lines
(see Example 4.4).25 And, in the final section of the musicians’ motet Sub
Arturo/Fons, the upper-voice taleae are out of sync with the tenor: their
periods consist of 10.5 breves of C· (sixty-three minims), while the tenor
takes up sixteen breves in C (sixty-four minims). Thus the tenor begins
one minim into block γ2 and two minims into block γ3.26
Sub arturo/Fons is part of a later generation of motets—not transmit-
ted in either Trémoïlle or Ivrea, it survives in Chantilly and even Bolo-
gna Q15.27 As such, its structure might be viewed as a culmination of
the approaches under scrutiny here. But, together with Je voi/Fauvel and
the other motets discussed so far, it serves as a reminder that tenor
and upper-voice taleae may not be aligned. Could such unalignment
take place even where the upper-voice and tenor periods are of the
same length? This question takes us into a realm of conjecture, since, if

25
Example 4.4 follows Paris, Bibliothèque nationale (hereafter F-Pn) français 146, fol.
9v, and the text edition in Armand Strubel, ed., Le roman de Fauvel (Paris: Librairie géné-
rale française, 2012), 248. F-Pn 146 uses undifferentiated semibreves, and dotted lines
indicate notes which would be minims in following decades. For more on this notational
conversion see Edward H. Roesner, François Avril, and Nancy Freeman Regalado, eds.,
Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain: A Reproduction in Facsimile of
the Complete Manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français 146 (New York: Broude
Brothers, 1990), 33–4.
26
This is not reflected in Günther’s edition (The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly, 52)
but it is in Harrison’s Motets of French Provenance, 176–7, and Bent’s Two 14th-Century
Motets in Praise of Music (Newton Abbot, Devon: Antico Edition, 1977), 1–7. See also the
discussion in Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 131n41 (note is on 142).
27
On the dating of Sub Arturo/Fons see most recently Margaret Bent, “The Earliest
Fifteenth-Century Transmission of English Music to the Continent,” in Essays on the His-
tory of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell: Sources, Style, Performance, Historiography,
ed. Emma Hornby and David Maw (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), 86–8.

57
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Example 4.4 Je voi/Fauvel, upper-voice blocks aligned

something is looping, who is to say where its cycles begin and end? But
most upper-voice blocks are not identical but only similar in part. And
these similarities may begin to appear at different points in different
voices. For example, the opening and closing measures of a motet are
less likely to be taleaic in the upper voices than corresponding meas-
ures in internal sections, no doubt because passages meant to begin

58
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

and end a piece differ functionally from those internal to it.28 But is it
possible that openings or closings may occasionally constitute material
that is, by design, not subject to repetition?
An affirmative response is suggested by Flos/Celsa. As noted above,
its first three-and-a-half tenor taleae are split in half to support seven
upper-voice blocks equivalent in length to the periods in diminution
that follow (diagramed in Figure  4.8, above). But this arrangement
does not adequately account for some features of the section. To begin
with (and unsurprisingly), the opening eleven breves of the motet
have no upper-voice taleae (see Example 4.5).29 Thereafter, upper-
voice taleae are clustered mostly at the beginning of each tenor talea—a
somewhat unusual circumstance since upper voices are more likely to
be so embellished toward the end of a block.30 Finally, the line-ends of
the upper-voice texts are misaligned with the tenor’s talea breaks (the
beginnings and ends of text lines are marked with box-tipped black
lines below the triplum and motetus in Example 4.5). Though the
text-setting is consistent (four triplum lines and one motetus line per
block), the final syllable of each group of lines falls always at the begin-
ning of the next talea—a circumstance that earned Flos/Celsa’s triplum
and motetus a C+ and a C on Harrison’s report-card (see Figure 2.1,
item 7).31
Much of what is irregular about these line-ends exemplifies the
phenomenon Reichert termed Phasendifferenz in Machaut’s motets.
Machaut’s upper-voice phrases, and indeed those of many ars nova
motets, tend to end with long notes followed by rests (see triplum
mm. 9–10 and motetus mm. 13–15 in Example 4.5). In cases where
tenor taleae also end with rests (e.g., the two final tenor breves in
each system of Example 4.5), an exact coordination of phrase- and
talea-ends would occasion too much stasis. Instead, Reichert pointed
out that Machaut preferred to stagger his rests.32 This led to diver-
gences from rhythmic repetition at the beginnings and ends of
motets or motet sections: in the former, the phase-differential is being
set up (that is, some voices delaying to give others a head start—
Anfangsdehnung); in the latter, the voices that had pushed ahead slow
down while the ones farther behind rush to catch up.33 Reichert also

28
See also the discussion of Reichert’s Phasendifferenz below and Clark’s “last-time
exceptions” in “Listening to Machaut’s Motets,” 505–7.
29
Examples 4.5 and 4.6 follow F-Pn Nouvelles acquisitions latines 2444 (hereafter F-Pn
2444), fol. 49r, with two exceptions: m. 65, where the triplum B in Ivrea, Biblioteca Capito-
lare, MS CXV (hereafter I-IV 115), fol. 9v, is preferable to the A in F-Pn 2444; and triplum
m. 116, where the breve rest is missing in F-Pn 2444. For an edition with text, see Har-
rison, Motets of French Provenance, 42–5.
30
As noted in Günther, “The 14th-Century Motet,” 31 and Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable
Balance, Part I,” 13–8.
31
Harrison, Motets of French Provenance, 204 (Table IV, item 7).
32
Reichert, Das Verhältnis, 204–5.
33
Ibid., 206–10.

59
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Example 4.5 Flos/Celsa, mm. 1–84, arranged to align upper-voice taleae (shaded)

noted that, whether as a result of such devices or simply by conven-

tion, upper-voice rests present in later taleae are sometimes absent in
the first.34 This too can be observed in both the triplum and motetus
openings of Flos/Celsa.

34
Ibid., 210.

60
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Phasendifferenz is quite common, both in Machaut’s oeuvre and beyond

it. Reichert finds it to be a laudable quality—evidence of careful planning
on the composer’s part. What I suspect elicited Harrison’s disapproval
in the case of Flos/Celsa—and what interests me here—is not the Phasen-
differenz alone but its interaction with the tenor half-taleae that end both
sections. Harrison labeled only the tenor’s structure in his edition, thus
presumably the motet’s form as he perceived it was that represented on
the left side of Figure 4.8. This form of 3.5+3.5 would indeed seem to relate
poorly to the upper-voice text structures: a triplum of thirty-six mono-
rhymed octosyllabic lines and a motetus of ten decasyllables with a rhyme
scheme of ababbcbcbc. While a thirty-six-line triplum would divide easily
enough into six (the number of full tenor taleae), it is numerically unrelated
to seven. The ten-line motetus is even more mystifying in this regard.
But if we view the rhythmic noncongruence of the opening two
measures with subsequent blocks not simply as a product of con-
vention or Phasendifferenz but as a clue that they stand outside of the
scheme of repetition, we can shift the upper-voice blocks by two breves
with respect to the tenor. Now the triplum and motetus line-ends in
the integer valor section correspond with upper-voice cycles, and the
end of each period is marked by several breves of upper-voice talea
(see Example 4.6 section α). The internal divisions and repetitions
highlighted here are closely aligned with line-ends, and thus arguably
prominent in the experiences of composing, performing, and hearing
the work. Since the two-breve shift does not seem to continue into the
diminution section, I have proposed in Example 4.6 that measures 85–6
function in both parts of the motet—that sections built using its two
different sets of taleae overlap slightly.35 Finally, the two measures that
stand outside of the structure at the beginning of the motet invite us
to see the motet’s last six breves not as a partial block (as Figure  4.8
would have it) but as ad hoc closing material. Neither an analysis nor a
pre-compositional plan needs to take account of every note, and there
are many examples in the repertory of final longs and opening introi-
tus sections—including tutti sections—that stand outside of the tenor’s
schemes of repetition.36 It would in fact seem that the very decision to
include partial tenor talea repeats like those in Flos/Celsa could have
been made in order to facilitate these internal looping blocks framed by
more rhythmically independent openings and closings.

35
Kügle has described the same phenomenon in terms of shifting phrase differential
between the upper voices, The Manuscript Ivrea, 100. This rhythmic link between sections
might well have been planned in the construction of the tenor talea, in that the longa that
opens the diminished tenor talea (being the diminished version of the maxima that begins the
tenor’s integer valor talea) corresponds with tenor longs found at the ends of alternate blocks
in the integer valor section (e.g. mm. 13–14, 37–8, and 61–2). This longa is the only rhythmic
value that is shared between the original and diminished versions of the tenor’s talea.
36
On these sections, see Zayaruznaya, “[I]ntroitus: Untexted Beginnings and Scribal
Confusion in the Machaut and Ivrea Manuscripts,” Digital Philology 5 (2016): 47–73.

61
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

Example 4.6 Flos/Celsa, arranged to align upper-voice blocks; taleae shaded

The most salient aspect of this new scheme is a division of the motet
into ten blocks of equal length, rather than three-and-a-half twenty-
four-breve taleae followed by three-and-a-half twelve-breve ones.
These ten blocks correspond to the ten-line motetus, and the triplum
fits regularly enough into them: four of its lines are set in each of the
first six blocks (α1–α6), and three in the next four (α7–β3). The spe-
cific line-boundaries at the beginning and end do not obey this struc-
ture, and that is not surprising—endings and beginnings are special,
and not just for Machaut; Phasendifferenz has a lot to do with it in this
case. What I wish to stress is that focus on upper-voice cycles of repeti-
tion reveals the close relationships between musical (both upper- and
lower-voice) and textual structures. These relationships suggest a high
level of pre-compositional planning of the sort that gets high marks
from both Harrison and Reichert, and should command the respect of
any analyst.

62
 A catalog of upper-voice structures

The analysis of Flos/Celsa undertaken above may affect editorial anno-

tations but it does not radically alter our understanding of the motet’s
text or music. It results from pushing breves around for what might be
termed “purely analytical aims.” But formal analysis is rarely innocent
of extramusical implications. Not only can analytical perceptions rely-
ing on a particular understanding of a work’s form affect judgments
about its quality, but they can also figure prominently in hermeneutic
endeavors. In Chapter 5, which examines conflicting accounts of a sin-
gle motet, the stakes are no less than the satisfaction of desire and the
efficacy of hope.

63
 5

The hermeneutic stakes:

reading form in
S’il estoit/S’Amours
The idea that upper-voice structures may on occasion help to govern
those of the tenor opens up new possible avenues of interpretation,
even as it may also challenge arguments grounded in the conviction
that the tenors necessarily wield a primary shaping force over motets.
Machaut’s S’il estoit/S’Amours (Motet 6), frequently discussed in the
scholarly literature, serves as a productive example of the differences
that can result from reading a motet from the bottom up versus from
the top down. Since all existing analyses of S’il estoit/S’Amours begin
with the tenor, we will begin there as well, before turning to the alter-
native approach.
The tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours is structurally unusual in several
respects. It consists of twenty-nine notes written out once in the sources
and followed by a repeat. Those notes are organized into taleae encom-
passing nine notes each (see Example 5.1).1 Since twenty-nine does
not divide evenly by nine, the written tenor includes three full taleae
and a partial fourth consisting of two breves and an imperfect long
rest. Fragmentary taleae exist in other motets—we have already seen
them in Flos/Celsa and Vos/Gratissima—but tend to be more substantial,
taking up at least half the length of a full talea. By contrast, the extra
“bits” in S’il estoit/S’Amours have struck commentators as unbalanced,
“lopsided, chopped off, irregular, and inadequate.”2 The dangling bit
of talea at the end of the tenor entails not only formal but notational
irregularities. Although all three voices of S’il estoit/S’Amours are in
perfect modus, the tenor as written is one breve short of a perfection,
such that its repeat begins on the third breve of a modus grouping. This
results in mensural transformation between the initial statement and its
repetition, because different breves are altered the second time through
(see the bottom of Example 5.1).3 Though the written note-shapes do

1
Examples 5.1–5.6 follow GB-Ccc Fer, fols. 265v–266, reproduced in Earp et al., The
Ferrell-Vogüé Manuscript, 2:265v–266. For editions with text see the bibliography in Earp,
Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 371.
2
Newman W. Powell, “Fibonacci and the Gold Mean: Rabbits, Rumbas, and Ron-
deaux,” Journal of Music Theory 23 (1979): 242.
3
Bent is mistaken in suggesting that this example of “mensural transformation with-
out diminution” leads to a modus change, so that “the second [tenor statement] is in
 Example 5.1 S’il estoit/S’Amours, tenor in original note-values (ligatures expanded)

Example 5.2 S’il estoit/S’Amours, tenor as sung (note-values reduced 4:1; measure numbers correspond
to Exx. 5.3 and 5.4)
 The hermeneutic stakes

not change, then, they yield different rhythms the second time around,
resulting in a work that is bipartite without either diminution or tenor
renotation.4 This mensural difference also means that the second state-
ment of the notated tenor is one breve shorter than the first. Example
5.2 gives the tenor as sung (reduced 4:1); the line-break in the example
falls at the repeat sign in the tenor.
The tenor’s apparent lopsidedness and its combination of whole and
partial taleae served as a call to analysis in 1950 for Otto Gombosi and
again in 1979 for Newman Powell. Both argued that, despite appear-
ances to the contrary, the entire tenor is symmetrical around breves
49–51 (the measure across the line-break in Example 5.2). Gombosi
focused on the sounding rhythms of the tenor, achieving symmetry by
interpreting some rhythmic cells, but not others, as retrograde in the
second half, in a not altogether methodical manner (see Figure 5.1).5
Powell, inspired by this analysis, went even further.6 Focusing on the
periodic structure of the tenor as defined through a new paradigmatic
analysis, he allowed these same central measures to count twice, as
both the last in a grouping of fifteen breves closing the first half of the
motet, and the first in a grouping of fifteen breves beginning the sec-
ond half (see the central bracket in his analysis, reproduced below as
Figure 5.2). For Gombosi, the establishment of symmetry in the tenor
was an end in itself, while for Powell it served a larger argument about
numerical and geometric instantiations of the Fibonacci sequence in S’il
estoit/S’Amours. The importance of symmetry to the latter’s endeavor
is forcefully brought home by several geometric figures analyzing the
tenor, of which the culminating one is reproduced as Figure 5.3. Obvi-
ously it is not possible to follow such figures without their attendant
arguments, but the importance of proving the tenor to be symmetri-
cal is visually clear from the format of both. Also clear is that neither
Gombosi nor Powell took the upper voices of the motet into account in
arguing for this symmetry—a circumstance no doubt resulting from
the primacy traditionally afforded to tenors.

imperfect modus with unaltered breves” (“What is Isorhythm,” 131); the modus remains
perfect.
4
Günther has argued that “the work may be considered unipartite rather than bipar-
tite” (“The 14th-century Motet,” 30); Bent suggests the helpful term “homographic” as a
descriptor of the tenor’s unity. See also objections to Günther’s claim in Apel, “Remarks
about the Isorhythmic Motet,” 143; Sanders, “The Mediaeval Motet,” 562–3n279; and
Bent, “What is Isorhythm?,” 131.
5
“Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221. Günther, in “The 14th-century Motet,” calls
the analysis “somewhat forced,” 30n16. The section Gombosi calls α has to be in retro-
grade in second half, but β does not. See also Wolfgang Dömling’s critique of Gombosi’s
approach in “Isorhythmie und Variation: Über Kompositionstechniken in der Messe
Guillaume de Machauts,” Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 28 (1970): 26n9.
6
“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 242–52. Earp has described this approach as “Gom-
bosi’s suggestions carried to an extreme,” Guillaume de Machaut, 371.

67
 The hermeneutic stakes

Figure 5.1 Gombosi’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours (“Machaut’s

Messe de Notre-Dame,” 221); Key: α

Figure 5.2 Powell’s analysis of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours (“Fibonacci and

the Gold Mean,” 246)

But the disposition of the upper voices above this shifting founda-
tion also poses some questions. Ludwig, and Schrade following him,
described the upper-voice form of S’il estoit/S’Amours as consisting of
two halves organized into three fifteen-breve spans each followed by
fragmentary taleae lasting three breves in the first half and six in the
second (see Example 5.3).7 Under his scheme, the second section of the
motet—the fourth full talea, system 5 in Example 3.5—begins on the last
two breves of the notated tenor. Arranged thus, the motet is tantaliz-
ingly asymmetrical.
Many analysts have also taken notice of the dynamic relationship
between upper-voice and tenor structures: the triplum’s phrases end
three breves later than the tenor taleae through the first tenor statement
but not thereafter. Reichert explained the tenor’s fragmentary taleae as a
product of this Phasendifferenz, suggesting that the three “excess” meas-
ures at the end of the first tenor statement are there to accommodate
the lagging triplum text, which would otherwise have had to be com-
pressed into a small space; for this reason the fourth talea “is broken off
after three measures, that is, exactly with the completion of the strophe,
at which point the first talea of the new color begins.”8 But Phasendiffer-
enz is common enough, and in most other cases the straggling voices do

7
On Schrade’s dependence on Ludwig in editorial matters, see Earp, Guillaume de
Machaut, 281.
8
“Damit ist aber eine vierte Talea eröffnet, die freilich schon nach drei Takten, nämlich
genau mit Beendigung der Strophe, abgebrochen wird, worauf die erste Talea des neuen
Color einsetzt,” Reichert, “Das Verhältnis,” 208. Reichert calls this compensatory strat-
egy, which we will see below in the final measures of the motetus of S’il estoit/S’amours,
“Texthäufung.” Earp also noted that the “staggered phrasing [of the triplum text] is com-
pensated by a talea fragment of three breve measures at the end of the integer valor section
and at the end of the diminution section [sic],” Guillaume de Machaut, 371.

68
Figure 5.3 Powell’s rendering of the Fibonacci hierarchy and geometric construction in the tenor of S’il
estoit/S’Amours (“Fibonacci and the Gold Mean,” 251)
Example 5.3 S’il estoit/S’Amours arranged according to tenor taleae; tenor and upper-voice taleae shaded
 The hermeneutic stakes

Figure 5.4 Telescopic tenor in Boogaart’s analysis of S’il estoit/S’amours

(“Encompassing Past and Present,” 25; spacing modified)

simply rush through their final lines to catch up. It is the unusual com-
bination of Phasendifferenz with irregular and incomplete tenor taleae in
S’il estoit/S’Amours that begs for further comment.
In an analysis published in 1993 and updated in 2001, Jacques Boo-
gaart tackles these formal problems by bringing the structure—and
meanings—of the upper voices into play. Although conceding that
the symmetry shown by Gombosi’s and Powell’s analyses “is doubt-
lessly there,” Boogaart finds in the motet “an intriguing pattern which
is almost, but not quite, in balance and seems to forbid any idea of
symmetry.”9 Especially at issue for him are the differing lengths of the
written tenor’s two realizations. As for the upper voices, Boogaart notes
that upper-voice taleae may have different boundaries from those in the
tenor: “one can speak of the taleae in triplum or motetus, only keeping
in mind that there may be a small phase-difference between the tenor
taleae and those of the upper voices, i.e. their endings or beginnings
may slightly overlap.”10 And yet it is the very tension between upper-
voice and tenor phrase endings that drives his analysis: “the stanzas do
not conform exactly to the tenor taleae, which, ideally, they should.”11
As a solution, Boogaart proposes a scheme by which tenor taleae are
“telescoped”—that is, the tenor’s repeating rhythmic cells are actually
six longs in duration, not five, but there is overlap of one longa between
them (see Boogaart’s diagram, reproduced as Figure 5.4).12 Because of
this telescoping, a number of passages in the tenor play a double role:
in both halves, “the ends of taleae I and II are simultaneously the begin-
nings of taleae II and III, respectively.”13 This takes care of some of the
irregularity, in that there is no longer a fragmentary fourth talea at the

9
“Love’s Unstable Balance,” 4.
10
Ibid., 12.
11
Ibid.
12
Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and their Function in
Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music History 20 (2001): 25.
13
“Love’s Unstable Balance,” 13.

72
 The hermeneutic stakes

end of the first tenor statement. But the final talea of the piece stretches
longer still than the others, heightening the sense of imbalance.14
Boogaart turns to the texts of the upper voices to explain this lin-
gering asymmetry, characterizing them as addressing the concepts
of excess and imbalance in courtly terms. The triplum predicts that if
Love gave him “just a little more than is just” (un tout seul plus que droit,
l. 13) of burning desire, he could not endure it without his lady’s help.
And the motetus, Boogaart points out, also complains that Love makes
him suffer too much, and that even if Love ultimately smiles upon his
suit with joy, he must first have to endure more desire than he might
wish (plus qu’il ne voudroit).15 This commentary on excess is, Boogaart
argues, played out in the motet’s form and encapsulated in the final
lines of both voices:

[In the] thirteenth line of the motetus, whose first twelve lines are evenly
divided over the motet, the declamation is suddenly rushed on the words
“S’Amours le fait trop languir” (“if Love lets him languish too much”). On the
other hand, in the triplum the last two syllables read: -paire, “equal” (belonging
to the word repaire, “abode”). Thus, by the excess, the proportions of the motet
are restored to an imaginary equality: plus que droit [more than proper] turns
out to be paire.16

In sum, texts and music together provoke “a permanently instable state

of balance” in which stability is only imaginary, achieved through the
hypothetical “telescoped” taleae.17
Although the upper voices play an important role in Boogaart’s pro-
vocative reading, they are called upon to answer questions posed by
the tenor, its irregular form, and their failure to conform to it. As a
result, Boogaart allows the tenor’s imbalances to bias his reading of the
text: paire from repaire is something of a strain, and the texts, consid-
ered together as a whole, can hardly be characterized as being “about”
excess or imbalance in any broad sense (as we shall see shortly).
Another tenor-centric understanding of S’il estoit/S’Amours emerges
from the pen of Anne Robertson, who begins not with that voice’s talea
but with the liturgical context of the chant from which it is drawn:
“Motet 6 strongly projects the tone of the liturgy from which the tenor

14
Boogaart argues that this structure was intended to be audible, playing a trick on
a listener or singer who initially expects an eighteen-breve talea but “observing gradu-
ally how the tenor proceeds, [is led] to come slowly to the conclusion that the talea ends
sooner than expected,” “Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 18. If we believe Johannes Boen
that color (in his purely rhythmic sense) is “more obvious to sight than to hearing” and
note his advice “against excessive fussiness or intellectual expense about it [color] in this
matter, lest it detract from the melody and give the eye occasion to be rebuked by the ear
on account of the sound,” we might well question the listener’s ability and inclination to
follow the tenor’s patterns (Appendix, III.11).
15
“Love’s Unstable Balance,” 6–9.
16
Boogaart, “Encompassing Past and Present,” 26.
17
Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance,” 23.

73
 The hermeneutic stakes

Et gaudebit cor vestrum emanates. The Resp. Sicut mater consolatur is

used during Advent, a time that symbolizes not fulfillment, but wait-
ing, expectation, and preparation.”18 The future tense of the snippet’s
text, “And your heart will rejoice (gaudebit),” leads Robertson to suggest
that the courtly lover of the motet “currently lives in a state of desire,”
and that the piece maintains an “overriding sense of yearning.”19 Nota-
bly, the liturgical lens does not privilege a message of excess and equal-
ity but rather of an as-yet-frustrated union with the beloved.
But what if we begin with the upper-voice texts? What are they about
on their own terms? Both triplum and motetus are consolatory in nature,
counseling that the joys of love are worth waiting—and suffering—
for. The motetus delivers this message in an impersonal, clerkly tone,
reminding the listener that suffering is necessary because Love would
demean herself if she gave in too quickly to the entreaties of lovers.
Honorable women will hold themselves aloof at first, but eventually
great suffering leads to great joy:20

S’Amours tous amans joïr

au commencement faisoit,
son pris feroit amenrir,
car nulls amans ne saroit
 5 les grans deduis qu’on reçoit
en damme d’onnour servir.
Mais cil qui vit en desir,
et bonne Amour l’aperçoit,
en a plus qu’il ne voudroit
10 quant joie li veut merir.
Et pour ce nuls repentir
de bien amer ne se doit
s’Amours le fait trop languir.

[1–6:] If Love made all lovers rejoice from the start she would diminish her
own worth, because no lover would know the great pleasure one receives from
serving a lady of honor. [7–10:] But he who lives in desire—and good Love
glimpses it—will have more of it than he even wished for when joy wants to
reward him. [11–13:] And thus no one should repent of loving well if Love
makes him suffer greatly.

The triplum speaks in the first-person voice of the lover, offering what
appears to be a lament. The first half of the text, ll. 1–9, suggests that
he is unlucky in love; ll. 10–13 heighten the drama, depicting him in a
prison tortured by his burning desires, but the twist at the end reveals

18
Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 124.
19
Ibid., 124, 126.
20
Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies lyriques, ed. Vladimir Chichmaref (Paris, 1909), 493–4,
capitalization adjusted. I am grateful to Ardis Butterfield for discussing these texts with
me and for improving my translation.

74
 The hermeneutic stakes

that the travail is in the past, and was worth it. Just at the moment when
the lover could not have borne any more, his lady rescued him:21

S’il estoit nuls que pleindre se deüst

pour nul meschief que d’Amour receüst,
Je me devroie bien pleindre sans retraire,
car quant premiers me vint enamourer,
5 onques en moy hardement demourer
ne vost laissier de ma dolour retraire;
mais ce qui plus me faisoit resjoïr
et qui espoir me donnoit de joïr
en regardent, sans plus dire ne faire,
10 fist departir de moy; puis en prison
elle me mist, où j’euç ma livrison
d’ardans desirs qui si m’estient contraire
que, s’un tout seul plus que droit en eüsse,
je sçay de voir que vivre ne peüsse
15 sans le secours ma dame debonnaire
Qui m’a de ci, sans morir, respité.
Et c’est bien drois, car douçour en pité
et courtoisie ont en li leur repaire.

[1–10:] If there were anyone entitled to complain of any calamity he endured

from Love, I should certainly complain without reserve, since when at first I fell
in love, she nowise wished to let the boldness to tell of my sorrow remain in
me; but she caused to part from me that which made me rejoice the most and
which gave me hope of taking pleasure in gazing upon it, without saying or
doing any more; [10–13:] then she put me into prison, where I have had my
provision of scorching desires which were so harmful that, if I should have had
just one bit more of them than is just, [14–18:] I know truly that I should not
have survived without the help of my gracious Lady, who reprieved me from
this without death. And that’s as it should be, since courtesy and sweetness in
compassion have their dwelling in her.

In a move not unusual for Machaut, both voices are united in their
message, while differing in tone and perspective. The motetus gives us
the moral, capped off with a pithy proverb-like summary; the lover in
the triplum serves as the reinforcing exemplum, speaking from experi-
ence.22 The latter’s story serves as anecdotal confirmation of the abstract
point made by the former: that if lovers will only wait, they will be

21
Ibid., 493, with capitalization adjusted and preferring “m’estient” to Chichmaref’s
“mestient” in l. 12.
22
The bibliography on Machaut’s literary personae is vast; the locus classicus is Kevin
Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1984). For a similar arrangement of voices in a motet—a motetus that describes a
courtly predicament and a triplum that enacts it—see Zayaruznaya, “ ‘She has a Wheel
that Turns . . .’: Crossed and Contradictory Voices in Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music His-
tory 28 (2009): 185–240.

75
 The hermeneutic stakes

rewarded.23 Boogaart’s emphasis on excess as a main theme is not

incompatible with the texts understood thus, since they do show how
an excess of desire will be rewarded with an excess of joy.24 Robertson’s
summary of unfulfilled yearning, on the other hand, would seem to be
less tenable from a purely textual perspective. While she suggests that
“Love holds [the triplum] in the midst of burning desire, which only
the lady can, and evidently sometimes does, assuage” (123), the logic
behind the combination of clerical and courtly perspectives presented
by the upper voices clearly implies that, although Love had once held
the lover in desire, this condition was corrected when the lady rescued
him. Only thus can the motetus not be made a liar when he promises
ultimate joy. In my reading the tenor snippet is in agreement with the
motetus, echoing the consolation his clerical stance offers to all lovers—
a consolation of which the lover in the triplum is living proof. In short,
by the end of the motet any “overriding sense of yearning” has been
overcome, and the motet as a whole promises that desire will indeed be
sated for all lovers who first submit to suffer at Love’s behest.
Of course, such a reading is by no means incompatible with an Advent
tenor, nor is it the only possible interpretation of these dense upper-voice
texts. What I wish to emphasize here is that the meanings of the upper-
voice texts emerge as different depending on whether we imagine that
the tenor shapes them or is shaped by them. And the same can be said of
their musical form. There are several signs that the layout of Example 5.3
is not fully representative of the upper-voice structure. Unusually, tenor
taleae 2 and 3 begin mid-hocket, whereas normally hockets are found
toward the ends of tenor taleae and in any case do not cross talea joins.
Even more unusual is the hocket missing from the first talea. Although
we might expect the beginning of a motet to be exempt from isorhythm,
we expect even more strongly that hockets should be taleaic—that when
a hocket occurs it occurs in all cycles within a given section.25 This circum-
stance suggests that the first three breves of S’il estoit/S’Amours stand out-
side its looping upper-voice scheme. After three breves region α begins,
its upper-voice blocks retaining the tenor’s talea length of fifteen breves
but shifted by three breves with respect to it (see α1–α3 in Example 5.4).
These three fifteen-breve taleae, and the brief opening that precedes
them, account for all but the final two-breve rest in the notated tenor. In
breves 49–51, which Gombosi and Powell singled out as the center of the

23
As noted in Boogaart, “Love’s Unstable Balance,” 9.
24
However note that Boogaart takes motetus l. 9 to be speaking of an excess of desire,
not joy (“Love’s Unstable Balance, Part I,” 8), where I read this line as indicating instead
an ultimate excess of joy. In contrast, the triplum does indeed speak of an excess of desire,
in what Boogaart shows is a reference to a chanson by Perrin d’Angicourt, “Encompass-
ing Past and Present,” 23–4.
25
Günther, “The 14th-Century Motet,” 31. Cf. Amours/Faus Semblant (M15), where the
absence of a hocket in mm. 7–9 of the first tenor talea, but its presence in the correspond-
ing measures of the second tenor talea (mm. 37–9), is a symptom of upper-voice block
construction.

76
Example 5.4 S’il estoit/S’Amours arranged to align upper-voice blocks; taleae shaded
 The hermeneutic stakes

work, this rest is joined by the first note of the tenor’s second iteration in
order to complete the longa. The centrality of this passage is empirical: it
follows forty-eight breves of music and is followed by forty-eight more. It
is also structural, since within this span the tenor bridges the notated mate-
rial and its repetition. I suggest that this longa stands as a bridge between
sections α and β, belonging to neither. Like the external opening meas-
ures, this reading is supported by upper-voice rhythms. Comparing mm.
49–51, 64–6 and 79–81 (the beginnings of systems 5, 6, and 7 of Example
5.3) we find taleae in the latter two spans that do not occur in mm. 49–51.
Allowing that mm. 49–51 are, as Gombosi first suggested, “a transi-
tion,” the second part of the motet, like the first, features a three-breve
differential between upper-voice blocks and tenor taleae.26 Blocks β1,
β2, and β3 in Example 5.4 each last fifteen breves and feature hock-
ets toward the end, where we would expect them. Three more breves
remain after the end of β, notated as final longs in the upper voices and
a breve followed by an imperfect long rest in the tenor.27 This material,
too, stands outside of the repetitive scheme, as final longs sometimes
do. When defined by the upper voices, then, the motet’s structure is
elegantly balanced, and may be summarized as 3+(3×15)+3+(3×15)+3.
This balanced form conforms especially well to the triplum text as
declaimed. In Example 5.3, the line-boundaries lag behind the tenor
taleae; in Example 5.4 the blocks articulate the triplum’s poetic struc-
ture. The text’s divisions according to tenor taleae and upper-voice
block boundaries are as follows (talea ends marked |, block ends ‖):28

S’il estoit nuls que pleindre se deüst

Pour nul meschief que d’amour receüst,
Je me devroie bien pleindre| sans retraire, ‖ 1| α1‖
Car quant premiers me vint enamourer,
Onques en moy hardement demourer
Ne vost laissier de ma|dolour retraire; ‖ 2| α2‖
Mais ce qui plus me faisoit resjoïr
Et qui espoir me donnoit de joïr
En regardent, sans plus di|re ne faire, ‖ 3|4 α3‖
Fist departir de moy; puis en prison
Elle me mist, où j’euç ma livrison
D’ardans desirs qui si mestient con|traire‖ 5| β1‖
Que, s’un tout seul plus que droit en eüsse,
Je sçay de voir que vivre ne peüsse
Sans le secours ma dame debon|naire‖ 6| β2‖
Qui m’a de ci, sans morir, respité.
Et c’est bien drois, car douçour en pité
Et courtoisie ont en li leur re|pai‖re. 7|8 β3‖

26
Gombosi, “Machaut’s Messe Notre-Dame,” 221.
27
The rests must remain unperformed and a fermata placed on the tenor’s final note,
since an unsupported fourth in the upper voices would otherwise result.
28
Machaut, Poésies lyriques, 2:493.

78
 The hermeneutic stakes

It is not surprising that upper-voice structures should conform to

upper-voice texts.29 Yet it is worth noting that they do indeed conform
to something, given the normative discourse that has at times sur-
rounded the relationship between upper-voice and tenor form.
Are these blocks exclusively an aspect of the upper voices? The
notated tenor certainly comprises three cycles of a pattern, and a lit-
tle bit more. But whether these extra “bits” fall at the beginning, hang
at the end, or do some of each is in no way indicated. No matter how
we divide the tenor, some part of it must be external to a fully repeti-
tive scheme. Where the repetition occurs—and where the “extra bits”
lie—is entirely in the eye of the beholder (see Figure 5.5). I submit
that the upper-voice rhythmic congruencies and phrase-ends of S’il
estoit/S’Amours are most productively viewed not as shifted with regard
to the tenor but as clarifying or even defining its structure. A shift cer-
tainly takes place between the first and second part of the motet: in sec-
tion α, the blocks begin on the rests following the tenor’s second note,
and the first note to sound within a block is note 3 (Figure 5.5, option b);
in section β, the blocks begin on note 2 of the tenor (Figure 5.5, option
c); never, it seems, do they begin on note 1. In retrospect the decision to
equate the beginning of the tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours with the begin-
ning of its first full talea is arbitrary.30
Reconfiguring the motet’s form according to the clues contained in
its upper-voice taleae has subtle but telling hermeneutic implications.
As we saw, the perceived conflict between the tenor and upper-voice
periods served as a starting point for Boogaart, who made a case for
a kind of imaginary symmetry that represents the elusiveness of the

29
In Machaut’s oeuvre this case is already persuasively laid out in Reichert, “Das
Verhältnis.” Reichert observes that one of the two upper-voice texts is usually more
related to the overall form, and that more often it is the triplum, which, being longer,
has a more specific stanzaic structure (p. 201). But we saw that in Flos/Celsa it was the
ten-line motetus that matched the ten full taleae, whereas the long, undifferentiated
monorhymed triplum was able to be divided in various ways. See also Bent’s discus-
sion of the motetus of Fons/O livoris (M9), “Words and Music in Machaut’s ‘Motet 9’,”
378–80.
30
Another work in which it might be worth asking where the tenor taleae begin and
end is Machaut’s He! Mors/Fine amour (M3), which is usually understood as having three
full and a fourth partial talea in each half (3x22 breves + 12 breves in the first section,
3x11 breves + 5 breves in the second). Boogaart notes the presence of an unusually large
phase-difference in the first part of the motet, where the triplum’s phrases end five breves
before the tenor’s, and has drawn attention to various ways in which the motet’s first
(undiminished) section can be understood formally, depending on whether we privilege
the tenor or upper-voice phrasings; “Speculum mortis,” 23–5. Since the first sections have
only sparse upper-voice talea throughout, it is difficult to argue for this motet, as I do
for others here, that there is a particular upper-voice form which wields more explana-
tory power than the tenor’s. Thomas Brown’s suggestion that Machaut based the tenor
structure of He Mors/Fine Amour on that of Flos/Celsa wields explanatory power here,
whether or not his hypothesis of an original 24-breve talea for He Mors/Fine Amour can
be sustained; see Brown, “Flos/Celsa and Machaut’s Motets,” in Leach, Machaut’s Music,
39–52.

79
 a) |talea 1 |talea 2 |talea 3 | :||:
b) |talea 1 |talea 2 |talea 3 | :||:
c) |talea 1 |talea 2 |talea 3 | :||:
d) |talea 1 |talea 2 |talea 3 | :||:

Figure 5.5 Four ways of parsing the notated tenor of S’il estoit/S’Amours; GB-Ccc Fer, fol.
266r, image courtesy of DIAMM
 The hermeneutic stakes

beloved in courtly discourse—a precarious or seeming balance created

by extending the lengths of taleae to eighteen breves and allowing them
to overlap. This form in turn led him to highlight ideas of excess thema-
tized in the upper voices. In my analysis nine breves stand outside of
the motet’s two large sections, and these can also certainly be read as a
comment on the idea of “too much.” But perhaps the larger point here
is that the motet as depicted in Example 5.4 is nothing if not balanced.
Not only do its upper voices suggest symmetrical groupings around
the midpoint, but they also allow us to reinterpret the tenor as also
balanced on the whole. If the upper-voice texts and their disposition
in time were conceived prior to the tenor’s selection or organization,
the tenor nevertheless fits into their form quite well, supporting their
slightly excessive but legible structure with its own flexible repeating
patterns.
Finally, on this analytical journey from top to bottom, we might ask
how the composer came to choose and structure this particular tenor
in support of the upper-voice themes. As we have seen, the chant snip-
pet Et gaudebit cor vestrum works nicely within the united message of
triplum and motetus: it makes the same consoling point, speaking this
time directly to lovers and promising them that their current (excess of)
desire will be replaced by joy. The tenor’s structure, too (or, rather, its
notational peculiarity, since its structure cannot be determined, other
than with reference to the upper voices) could be interpreted through
the lens of the upper-voice materia. It might, for example, be read as
suggesting that the same thing (a lover, a notated melody) can be sub-
ject to different states. Perhaps the covertly bipartite tenor comments
on the contradictory nature of the courtly lady, who seems at some
times to be one thing and at others to be another.31 Its mensural insuf-
ficiency as written could also be interpreted as a clever illustration of
the idea that, if we only wait, things will resolve themselves: in the end,
the notated melody does fit into the perfect modus in which it must
be interpreted, the final breve and two-breve rest making a perfection
where they could not do so upon initial singing.
Or it might be the case that the motet’s formal excesses—and even the
tenor’s notational transformation—were arrived at pragmatically in the
later stages of composition. An upper-voice structure of six spans last-
ing fifteen longs might well have been the original plan for the motet—
in this case, three of the eighteen triplum lines could be set to each talea,
while the thirteen-line motetus would allow for a dynamically shifting
phrase differential. It is perhaps significant that the measures preced-
ing regions α and β in Example 5.4 are by no means necessary, and
both upper-voice texts can be easily moved to as to exclude them (see
Examples 5.5 and 5.6, where the original text-underlay is represented in
roman type, and the hypothetical changes in italics, below the originals).

31
On the musical depiction of the courtly lady as divided or fragmented, see Zayaruz-
naya, The Monstrous New Art, 189–203.

81
Example 5.5 S’il estoit/S’Amours, upper voices, mm. 1–12; original in roman type,
revisions necessary to excise mm. 1–3 in italics

Example 5.6 S’il estoit/S’Amours, upper voices, mm. 46–57; original in roman

type, revisions necessary to excise mm. 49–51 in italics
 The hermeneutic stakes

Making these excisions is easy because line 1 of the motetus and line 2
of the triplum, as well as triplum l. 10 and motetus l. 7 (labeled in Exam-
ple 5.4) are much longer than their corresponding lines in neighboring
blocks.
All of this may suggest that only after the upper-voice texts had been
written and mapped out roughly as musico-poetic blocks did Machaut
go in search of a suitable chant—something appropriate to the subject
matter of delayed gratification and divisible by three: a twenty-seven-
note tenor stated twice would have fit perfectly, yielding nine notes per
talea for six taleae. Et gaudebit cor vestrum might have struck him as perfect
as far as its words went, but not of the right length. If the chant source he
used had the same pitches as his tenor, then it was two notes too long:
twenty-nine notes, rather than twenty-seven. At this point, Machaut
may have come upon the notational trick that would allow him to use a
tenor with a prime number of notes in a motet made of six blocks, and he
might have stretched the upper-voice phrases to make this work.
Additionally—and importantly—it is probable that the tenor of S’il
estoit/S’Amours is already a modified version of its source chant. Of the
fifteen sources for Sicut mater consolatur consulted by Clark, none has
twenty-nine notes for the phrase et gaudebit cor vestrum: the majority
(eleven) and the ones that are the closest melodic matches have twenty-
eight notes; three have twenty-seven; and the worst melodic match has
thirty (see Clark’s comparison in Figure 5.6). Moreover, Clark notes
that S’il estoit/S’Amours shares with two other motets, M4 and M10,
the circumstance that its tenor has only one variant with the late thir-
teenth- or early fourteenth-century Chalons-sur-Marne Missal-breviary
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 595: a filled-in third. While she cau-
tions that “the difference is so minor that it would be difficult to prove
compositional alteration as distinct from local tradition,” it is indeed
“easy to envision a composer filling in the one leap in his chant source,”
especially given the entirely stepwise nature of some of Machaut’s tenors.32
What does all of this suggest if we insist that the tenor must have
been the first element of the motet to be set in place? If it really started
out as twenty-nine notes, Machaut could have made it thirty by means
of an inserted repeated note, or by filling in its opening third—the only
interval left to fill in the otherwise stepwise tenor. A thirty-note tenor
might perhaps have been color-ized with three long ten-note taleae or
six shorter ones using five pitches each. One of these long taleae or two
of the short ones could have undergirded each upper-voice block, and
the texts as written could have fit easily over this structure without
any extra material resulting (though if there were two shorter tenor
taleae per block, the blocks probably would have been an even num-
ber of breves in length, rather than fifteen, and the whole motet might

32
“Concordare cum materia,” 28. For further evidence that ars nova composers did at
times modify the chants they used as tenors, see ibid., 35–69.

83
 The hermeneutic stakes

Figure 5.6 Melodic comparison between the tenor of S’il estoit/S’amours and

fifteen chant sources, reproduced with kind permission from Clark,
“Concordare cum materia,” 190; for sources see ibid., 280–87. Paren-
thetical numbers at right, which have been added, indicate the total
number of pitches on each staff.

perhaps have been in imperfect modus). On the other hand, if the tenor
Machaut borrowed had been one of twenty-eight notes, that would
have suggested a division into four shorter taleae with seven tenor notes
in each and a motet with four blocks in each half, or a total of eight
blocks. In this case, the triplum text would likely have been sixteen or
twenty-four lines long, and the motetus perhaps nine or seventeen, in
order to ensure phrase differential.
In all such scenarios that assume the priority of tenor selection as the
structural basis of the motet, the tenor would not have been required
to pursue the odd, partial repetition that we find in it, or the mensu-
ral transformation that this occasioned. And there would have been no
need for the kind of stretching posited by Examples 5.5 and 5.6. Seen
through these lenses (counterintuitive as they might be with regard to
more traditional narratives), the accommodation of the upper voices to
the tenor’s scheme attests in this case not to the latter’s primacy but to a
compositional order in which it entered in medias res.

84
 6

A new paradigm for motet

composition: Colla/Bona
reconstructed
What, then, of Murino? The scenario proposed in Chapter  5 for the
creation of S’il estoit/S’Amours might seem to be in conflict with his the-
oretical testimony if we read him as implying that ars nova motet com-
position began with tenors that were either chosen to suit some main
upper-voice theme or allowed to dictate that theme (both of which
interpretations were chronicled in Chapter 2).1 And, more broadly, the
range of upper-voice structures analyzed in Chapter 4 throws a poten-
tial wrench into this system by decoupling tenor form from upper-
voice form to a range of extents. How might keeping all of this in mind
inflect our understanding of Murino’s directives? The important point,
it seems to me, is to ask what Murino’s own main theme is.
His treatise is often referred to as “De motettis componendis” and
its most recent editor, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, describes its contents
as “detailed instructions for the composition of motets.”2 Reading
Murino’s text as a treatise on motet composition we might well wonder
that it does not contain more information about upper voices and texts,
mentioning the latter only in passing and telling us no more about the
former than what order to compose them in and to color-ize them if
we like (Appendix, text II.6–10).3 But this title is a modern conflation.
In two of its sources the treatise is introduced by the much more lim-
ited rubric De modo componendi tenores motet(t)orum (“On the manner
of composing motet tenors”).4 This is a more accurate description of

1
For example, Busse Berger, Medieval Music, 228–32, after discussing Murino on 224–
5. Boogaart also cites Murino’s evidence about materia at the outset of his analysis of S’il
estoit/S’Amours, “Love’s Unstable Balance,” 4–5.
2
Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques, 1:23, 18.
3
Gilbert Reaney, calling it a “treatise on motets,” approves of the “refreshingly practi-
cal” primary concern with the tenor’s organization; “Egidius de Murino,” Grove Music
Online.
4
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 5321, fol. 7v (late 14th c.); and Wash-
ington, Library of Congress, ML 171.J6, fol. 74r (15th c.). One other source (the eighteenth-
century London, British Library Add. 4909, fol. 14v) has no title, and the others have
unique titles: “Ordo ad componendum motettum cum tribus vel quatuor sive cum
quinque tam de modo perfecto quam de imperfecto, et cetera” in Siena, Biblioteca Comu-
nale, L.V.30, fol. 44r (c. 1400); and “Incipit ars qualiter et quomodo debent fieri mottetti”
 A new paradigm for motet composition

a text that has at its heart seventeen exemplary tenors annotated and
analyzed with respect to their modus, note-values, and use of color and
that also includes detailed discussions of tenor diminution.5
Taking Murino’s directions as addressing primarily the construction
of tenors inflects their meaning considerably. It may well be that he
does not say much about the upper voices because they are not his
theme. Tenors may have been of particular interest to theorists because
their rhythmically repetitious nature made them a good testing ground
for new notational ideas. For example, tenors are the place where col-
oration and diminution first appear, and later are the site of other novel
kinds of transformations in fifteenth-century music built on a cantus
firmus. This might also explain why Johannes de Muris copied—and
annotated—the tenor of Vitry’s Vos/Gratissima in the margin of a per-
sonal manuscript.6
The text of the popular motet Apollinis/Zodiacum even suggests that
tenors were of special interest to Murino on historical-biographical
grounds when, in the course of its long list of musicians, the
motet’s triplum records that he sang tenor or contratenor.7 And—
coincidentally—the motetus of this same motet gives us a rather

in Seville, Biblioteca Capitular Columbina 5–2-25 (mid-fourteenth to early fifteenth cen-

tury). This last source does frame the treatise as an ars motettorum, beginning it with
Moctetti debent fieri hoc modo. Prime accipe tenorem. However, this tag is unique and clearly
related to the unique title. Elsewhere the treatise begins Prime accipe tenorem. See Leech-
Wilkinson, “Related Motets,” 223, and Philip Evan Schreur, ed., Tractatus figurarum (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 49.
5
That neither the exemplary tenors nor the discussions of diminution are included in
Leech-Wilkinson’s partial edition has probably influenced the treatise’s reception. Cous-
semaker edits the full text, but his examples are often faulty, and have been newly edited
for the excerpts included in Appendix II; Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker, Scrip-
torum de musica medii ævi novam seriem a Gerbertina alteram collegit nuncque primum edidit,
4 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1864–76; reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1963), 3:124–8. A new edi-
tion and translation of Murino’s full treatise will be included in a source book of readings
on notation that Andrew Hicks and I are in the process of compiling.
6
Escorial, MS O.II. IO, fol. 223v; published in Lawrence Gushee, “New Sources for the
Biography of Johannes de Muris,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 22 (1969):
11; identified in Karl Kügle, “Die Musik des 14. Jahrhunderts: Frankreich und sein direk-
ter Einflussbereich,” Die Musik des Mittelalters, Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft
2, ed. Hartmut Möller and Rudolph Stephan (Laaber: Laaber, 1991), 354. For an insightful
analysis of the notational problems presented by this tenor and Muris’s annotations see
Karen Desmond, Music and the moderni, 1300–1350: The ars nova in Theory and Practice,
chapter 6 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
7
Egidius de Morino baritonans cum Garino, triplum ll. 22–3, which Alberto Gallo reads
as “Egidius de Murino singing tenorista with Garino,” Music of the Middle Ages II, trans.
Karen Eales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127. Henricus Helene is
identified as one who noscit . . . tonorum tenorem bene, which may indicate that he sang
tenor. Others are characterized as having higher voices, such as Arnold of Martin, who
is compared to a nightingale. On voice types and ranges in slightly later repertory, see
David Fallows, “Specific Information on the Ensembles for Composed Polyphony, 1400–
1474,” in Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music, ed. Stanley Boorman (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 109–59.

86
 A new paradigm for motet composition

precise definition for materia when it refers to its own triplum as the
place where the names of the musicians lauded in the motet may be
found: musicorum tripli materia/noticiam dat de nominibus (the materia of
the triplum gives the names of the musicians).8 In this context materia
cannot mean anything as general as “main idea” or “theme” because
the main idea of the motet is to celebrate the achievements of a group
of singers. It is only in the actual words set to music that the names of
the singers can be found. Thus tripli materia here can only mean the
triplum text.
Of course Murino could have meant something else by the term.
But, given the tight-knit circle of theorists and composers evoked by
motets like Apollinis/Zodiacum, this evidence is more than a little perti-
nent, reminding us once again that it would be rash to assume that the
beginning of Murino’s treatise is also the beginning of the composi-
tional process. It is amply clear from Murino’s account that the materia
is already decided upon when the tenor is chosen, since the words of
the tenor should be suited to it (Appendix, text II.1). This could well
mean that, more than having been imagined in some conjectural sense,
the upper-voice texts must already have been written: Murino never
tells us to write them and yet assumes their existence.9 Like a cook
reading a recipe from the middle, after the ingredients have already
been measured out the student-composer reading Murino’s instruc-
tions doesn’t know where these upper-voice texts are to be gotten, or
what has been done to them before this—he is simply instructed to
“take the words that are to be in the motet and divide them into four
parts” (II.9).10
It is also possible to read Johannes Boen’s evidence as supporting
the process proposed here. Because his discussion of (rhythmic) color,
excerpted above, is not situated within a larger process, it is unclear
where the step of tenor organization falls in relation to upper-voice
compositional planning. But when he describes the construction of
the tenor of Impudenter/Virtutibus, Boen explains that the composer
“first took a group of thirty notes and divided it into five parts . . . but
since the tenor would be still too short if only thirty notes were used,
he added another thirty” in diminution.11 The question follows: too

8
Ll. 11–12, edited by A. G. Rigg in Harrison, Motets of French Provenance, supplement
p. 9. See also Zayaruznaya, “Materia matters.”
9
I echo Bent’s reading of this passage: “Egidius . . . implied that the words might exist
before a tenor was chosen to go with them,” “Polyphony of Texts,” 89.
10
Accipe verba que debent esse in moteto et divide ea in quatuor partes, Leech-Wilkinson,
Compositional Techniques, 1:22.
11
Isto modo fuit color factus in tenore Virtutibus. Cepit enim primo triginta corpora que divisit
in partes quinque . . . sed quia nimis brevis mansisset tenor si solis triginta corporibus fuisset
usus, ergo adiunxit et alia triginta que medietatem faciunt aliorum et servatur in ipsis idem color
qui prius, Johannes Boen, Ars (musicae), ed. F. Alberto Gallo, CSM 19 (American Insti-
tute of Musicology, 1972), 29. Trans. Busse Berger in Medieval Music, 223. The passage in
Appendix, text III.1–10 precedes this one.

87
 A new paradigm for motet composition

short for what? Certainly one answer would be “too short for generic
norms,” but thirty tenor notes can be very flexibly stretched depend-
ing on talea—especially in a four-voice motet. And if everything does
indeed begin with the composition of a tenor, why not select a longer
chant excerpt at the outset? Boen’s passage hints, though by no means
asserts, that some larger formal plan preceded the choice and arrange-
ment of a tenor. Taken together, these theoretical texts can support
the analytical observations that point toward a manner of composing
motets in which tenors are chosen to concord with a range of param-
eters that precede them.

If the composition of ars nova motets did not begin with the selection
and organization of tenors, how did it begin? I  agree with Leech-
Wilkinson and others that it likely began with a poetic or moral idea,
the general theme(s) of the texts. Any prominent quotations would
have been chosen at an early stage, since these could generate or sup-
port main ideas, and would have consequences for the rest of the poet-
ry.12 The poetic meter and stanzaic structures might then have been
decided on (or decided on in the course of writing), including versifi-
cation schemes for two voices and their length in absolute terms and
relative to each other. These texts, created specifically for motets, could
have been composed with motettish things in mind—images and
words to be counterposed, for example, or ideas that can be expressed
with number symbolism.
Once written, the upper-voice texts would have had a range of
musical and structural implications for the finished work. They would
relate formally to an upper-voice musical structure designed to mir-
ror or accommodate them, and perhaps even to take their sense into
account (as in the stratified creatures set to divided musical forms in In
virtute/Decens and Cum statua/Hugo).13 Where hockets, especially tex-
ted hockets, were intended, decisions about versification would have
gone hand-in-hand with decisions about upper-voice blocks, given the
convention of placing hockets near the ends of blocks and the aver-
sion to breaking up words with rests voiced by contemporaries and

12
See Bent, “Polyphony of Texts and Music,” and Zayaruznaya, “Quotation, Perfec-
tion, and the Eloquence of Form,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 24 (2015): 129–66. Often
quotations have been borrowed without their attendant meters. In Colla/Bona, the final
couplet of the triplum (discussed below) jumps out of the tridecasyllabic lines, and in
Garrit/In nova, two borrowed hexameters—the famous Ovidian opening of the motetus
and the line from Joseph of Exeter that caps off the triplum— are extrametrical. It may be
that in these cases upper-voice metrical schemes were decided upon before quotations
were chosen. On the quotations in Garrit/In nova, see Holford-Strevens, “Fauvel Goes
to School,” in Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learn-
ing from the Learned, ed. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2005): 63–4.
13
See Examples 4.2–3 and Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art, 70–131.

88
 A new paradigm for motet composition

observable in the repertory.14 The shapes of lines and stanzas also have
implications for the location of the longer notes and rests that fall at
the ends of upper-voice phrases. Because these are the very elements
that tend to exhibit talea, the design of texts and of upper-voice struc-
tures would have gone hand-in-hand, and these parameters, once set
in place, would have suggested a repeating structure and rough rhyth-
mic profile for the tenor (e.g., where and how much it might rest). At
this point, with a notion of how long a tenor was needed, the composer
could go in search of a chant that would concord with all of this accu-
mulated materia, both formal and semantic. The selection criteria here
would have included the words of the snippet as well as its number of
pitches and melodic considerations (the latter being less crucial where
a contratenor was planned). The liturgical context of the snippet and
the biblical context(s) of its text may also have influenced its selec-
tion. The chosen tenor melody was then color-ized, that is, subjected
to repetition and rhythmicization, so as to fit into the already elabo-
rate partial compositional plan that awaited it. A contratenor could be
added at this point. Then the working-out of the upper voices ensued,
their pitches to an extent dictated by tenor notes, and their rhythms
designed to set the texts and coordinate the phrases of triplum and
motetus.15
Vitry’s Colla/Bona, the only motet listed in Table 1.1 remaining to
be discussed, affords an opportunity to test out the proposed para-
digm in a specific case. Like Flos/Celsa and S’il estoit/S’Amours, it fea-
tures a tenor that does not divide into a whole number of rhythmic
cycles. Both its integer valor and diminution sections consist of seven
loops of a simple talea followed by a remainder of one note and a
rest (see Example 6.1).16 The obvious hypothesis that the extra-taleaic

14
Some composers evidently did not worry about this, while others considered it an
affront to Rhetoric and Music alike; see Zayaruznaya, “Hockets as Compositional and
Scribal Practice in the ars nova Motet—A Letter from Lady Music,” Journal of Musicology
30 (2013): 461–501. For a good example of a text clearly written with hockets planned and
whose upper voices are arranged in blocks, see the carefully placed mono- and trisylla-
bles in the second section of Vitry’s Vos/Gratissima.
15
Upper-voice pitches were dictated by tenor pitches only to an extent owing to
the frequency of tenor rests (especially later in the century), the lack of borrowed
pitches in contratenors, and the multiple options for descanting above any given
tenor note. On the varying extents to which tenor pitches dictated upper-voice pitches
in Machaut’s motets, see Lavacek, “Contrapuntal Confrontation and Expressive Sig-
nification in the Motets of Machaut.” See also the analyses in Leech-Wikinson, Com-
positional Techniques, which are frequently concerned with the relationships between
upper-voice and tenor pitches (for example, see the discussion of intentional disso-
nances in Post missarum/Post misse on pp. 188–9).
16
Examples 6.1, 6.2, and 6.4 follow I-Iv 115, fols. 17v–18r, and the text edition in
Andrew Wathey, “Auctoritas and the Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” in Citation and Author-
ity in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned, edited by Suzan-
nah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 75.

89
Example 6.1 Colla/Bona, tenor, repeating pitches and taleae marked (ligatures expanded)
 A new paradigm for motet composition

fragments are there to “use up” remaining chant notes, as in S’il

estoit/S’Amours, is disproven by the circumstance that the borrowed
chant melody is itself subject to partial repetition: in each section it
is stated two times fully and then followed by its first three notes
(as noted below the staves of Example 6.1).17 Together, these “extra
bits” of chant and talea suggest that the tenor is being made to fit into
something else that preceded it.
In what follows, I offer a hypothetical narrative of composition for
Colla/Bona. In doing so I seek to find the most probable order in which
various compositional processes might have taken place to result in
the motet that has come down to us. But the process of composition
was certainly not as linear as my narrative suggests. At any stage the
composer might have made a decision that overruled those made in
previous steps. For example, even though I will posit that the triplum
and motetus texts were written early on, nothing would have stopped
Vitry from changing words in either voice once he perceived how the
polyphonic framework aligned their poetry. Such changes can hardly
be gleaned in hindsight, since a retrospective reconstruction can only
lead to the motet as it ultimately comes down to us, and not any of
its hypothetical other versions. The finished motet hints at an order
that might have made its composition manageable, and below I specu-
late about that order. But composition is by its nature recursive, as are
many creative acts.

The thing that would eventually become Colla/Bona probably began as

an idea to write a motet criticizing the dishonest ways of the groveling
courtier. That this topic was important to Vitry can be gleaned from
his bucolic Dit de franc Gontier, whose narrator wistfully describes a
meal shared in the woods by a peasant couple, Gontier and Helayne.
After observing their humble but appetizing fare (“fresh cheese,
milk, butter, cream and cheese, curd, apple, nuts, plums, pears, garlic
and onion, chopped shallots on a brown crust, with coarse salt”), he
overhears Gontier wax eloquent about his freedom from courts and
tyrants:18

“Ne sçay,” dit-il, “que sont pilliers de marbre,

Pommeaux luisans, murs vestus de paincture;
Je n’ay paour de traïson tissue
Soubz beau semblant, ne qu’empoisonné soye

17
Leech-Wilkinson’s characterization of the color as twenty-nine notes (“Related
Motets,” 2) is incorrect.
18
Fromage frais, laict, burre, fromaigee/Craime, matton, pomme, nois, prune, poire,/Aulx et
oignons, escaillongne froyee/Sur crouste bise, au gros sel, ll. 5–8; ed. Arthur Piaget, “Le Chapel
des fleurs de lis par Philippe de Vitri,”  Romania 27 (1897): 63–4; all further references are to
this edition. The resonances between Colla/Bona and the Dit de franc Gontier are noted in
Besseler, “Studien II,” 204.

91
 A new paradigm for motet composition

En vaisseau d’or. Je n’ay la teste nue

Devant thirant, ne genoil qui s’i ploye.

Verge d’uissier jamais ne me deboute,

Car jusques la ne m’esprent convoitise,
Ambicion, ne lescherie gloute.
Labour me paist en joieuse franchise;
Moult j’ame Helayne et elle moy sans faille,
Et c’est assez. De tom bel n’avons cure.”

“I know nothing,” said he, “of marble pillars, glittering summits, walls covered
with paintings; I do not dread a web of treachery beneath a kind countenance,
nor that I’ll be poisoned with a golden cup. I bare my head before no tyrant, nor
do I bend a knee. The doorman’s rod has never pushed me back, for greed, ambi-
tion, and gluttonous lechery have not threatened to bring me within its range.
My labor feeds me in my happy liberty; I dearly love Elaine, and she loves me
without reservation, and that’s enough. We want no splendid tomb.” (ll. 19–30)

The narrator never reveals himself—this is no pastourelle—but only lis-

tens and watches jealously, sighing in the final lines: “Alas! a slave of
the court is not worth a dime, but honest Gontier is worth a rare gem
set in gold.”19
Like this Dit (whose chronological relationship to the motet can-
not be determined), Colla/Bona condemns courtiers as mere servants
without agency while valorizing the simplicity—and even the simple
diet—that comes with liberty. Unlike the Dit, which is strophic and
not set to music, the motet needed two texts that would be compat-
ible both semantically and structurally, of which one was significantly
longer than the other, and whose formal properties would in turn have
implications for the musical form. Vitry chose to render both texts in
tridecasyllable, with caesural rhymes splitting each line into 7pp+6p
syllables. Both voices are monorhymed, the triplum on –ari (with –ere at
the caesura); the motetus on –atis (–era at the caesura). The only depar-
ture from this scheme comes at the end of the triplum, where a sixteen-
syllable hexameter from Lucan in the final line imposes its rhyme, -tur,
on the penultimate line. This pithy condemnation of fawning cronies
by an author much cited in the Middle Ages makes for a suitable cap to
the text, and it is joined by a half-dozen other quotations (in bold in the
Latin below).20 These borrowed snippets may have dictated the choice
of the –ere and –era caesural rhymes:

19
Las! serf de court ne vault maille,/Mais Franc Gontier vault en or jame pure, ll. 31–2.
20
Wathey, who identified these quotations, has suggested Vitry might have found
them in a florilegium; “Auctoritas and the Motets of Philippe de Vitry,” 69–71. On the
reception of Lucan see most recently Edoardo D’Angelo, “Lucan in Medieval Latin:
A Survey of the Bibliography,” in Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. Paolo Asso (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2011), 465–79.

92
 A new paradigm for motet composition

Triplum:21
Colla iugo subdere curias sectari,
quarum sunt innumere clades, mores rari.
Potens suo vivere debet exequari.
Aliena desere, quadra convivari
5 pane tuo vescere, tibi dominari.
Si vis es, effugere curis lacerari.
Malo fabam rodere liber et letari
quam cibis affluere servus et tristari.
Aulici sunt opere semper adulari,
10 fictas laudes promere lucraque venari,
ab implumis tollere plumas et conari,
dominis alludere, falsa commentari.
Ve quos habent pongere verba que subduntur:
Nulla fides pietasque viris qui castra secuntur.

One puts one’s neck under a yoke by attending courts, at which disasters are
innumerable, good habits few. He who can should be up to living on what is
his own. Leave the property of others alone; live together in an open square; eat
your own bread; be your own master. If you want money, avoid being mangled
by cares. I prefer to nibble a bean and rejoice as a free man than to abound with
provisions and be sad as a slave. The duties of a courtier are always to flatter,
to utter feigned praises, and to hunt for profits, and to try to take feathers away
from the unfeathered, to play up to lords, to compose false things. Woe to those
whom the words which are placed below have to sting: there is no faith or piety
in camp followers.

Motetus:
Bona condit cetera bonum libertatis.
Qui gazarum genera tot thesaurisatis,
multiplici fallera vos qui falleratis,
et cum libet ubera fercula libatis,
5 si vivere libera vita nequeatis
numquam saporifera servi degustatis.
Vincit auri pondera sue potestatis
esse. Vobis funera, servi, propinatis
mala per innumera dum magis optatis.

The good of liberty gives zest to other good things. You who lay up as treas-
ure so many kinds of wealth, who harness yourselves with manifold ornament
and at a whim sample rich dishes, if you cannot live a free life, you never taste
savor-bearing things as slaves. To be one’s own master is better than masses of

21
Trans. David Howlett in Wathey, “Auctoritas and the Motets,” 75–6; motetus transla-
tion modified for line 4.

93
 A new paradigm for motet composition

gold. You slaves, you administer death to yourselves, when among countless
evils, you desire (even) more.

The triplum is fourteen lines long, the motetus nine—strange dimen-

sions for two texts meant to go together, since fourteen and nine have
no common factors. Obviously Vitry could have written more compat-
ible verses, and we cannot know why he did not do so. Perhaps a poetic
impulse was the primary driving force behind each text—that is, they
were written as poems that could stand alone despite their shared sub-
ject matter and musical destiny. It is also possible that either or both
of these texts were originally written for some other purpose and later
adapted to a motet. In any case, their mismatched lengths, whether
deliberate or incidental, had important consequences for the motet’s
structure. The fact that fourteen is divisible by two, and nine by three,
may be reflected in, or precipitated by, the decision to cast the triplum
in imperfect modus and the motetus in perfect—a conflict that persists
throughout the finished motet. The openings of the two texts may also
have played a role in this decision, matching their valence to imperfec-
tion and perfection respectively: in the worse scenario of the two (the
metrically imperfect triplum), “one puts one’s neck under a yoke by
attending courts”; in the better (the perfect motetus), “the good of lib-
erty gives zest to other good things.”22
Counterpoising three and two is not a problem—Vitry did so in
many of his motets, and everything fits as long as the basic building
block is six breves or imperfect longs in duration. But counterpoising
fourteen and nine takes some creativity, and it was to this issue that
the composer presumably turned after writing his texts. To see how he
faced the self-imposed challenge we must look to the finished motet.
The duration of each line of the triplum and motetus in Colla/Bona is
given in Table 6.1. It becomes apparent here that the motetus is set more
regularly than the triplum, its lines generally lasting around twelve
breves, with some variation in order to effect Phasendifferenz (that is,
breves “borrowed” for lines 1 and 6 are “paid back” in the shortened
line 9). Additionally, an extra untexted twelve-breve span is inserted
after motetus line 1, and another after motetus line 2.23 Although the
exact rhythms of the motetus text would be worked out later, I  sug-
gest that at this stage Vitry might have had an abstract breve-count of
twelve breves per line in mind. The added untexted phrases give the
motetus two “phantom” lines for a total of eleven twelve-breve spans.
The finished length of the motet reflects this structure: it is 11×12, or 132

22
On the relationship between mensural and worldly perfection in ars nova theory and
practice, see Zayaruznaya, “Quotation, Perfection,” 140–8.
23
Vitry makes interesting use of untexted singing throughout his oeuvre; see Zayaru-
znaya, “Hockets as Compositional and Scribal Practice,” 488–93; and ead., “Evidence of
Reworkings in Ars nova Motets,” Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis 38 (forthcom-
ing): 155–75.

94
Table 6.1 Duration of poetic lines in Colla/Bona

Triplum line Brevesa Motetus line Brevesa

α  1. Colla iugo subdere curias sectari 10

 2. quarum sunt innumere clades, mores rari. 6 1. Bona condit cetera bonum libertatis. 15+12
 3. Potens suo vivere debet exequari. 12 [+Untexted phrase]

 4. Aliena desere, quadra convivari 12 2. Qui gazarum genera tot thesaurisatis, 12 +12
 5. pane tuo vescere, tibi dominari. 12 [+Untexted phrase]
β  6. Si vis es, effugere curis lacerari. 12 3. multiplici fallera vos qui falleratis, 12
 7. Malo fabam rodere liber et letari 12 4. et cum libet ubera fercula libatis, 12
 8. quam cibis affluere servus et tristari. 12 5. si vivere libera vita nequeatis 12
γ  9. Aulici sunt opere semper adulari, 6
10. fictas laudes promere lucraque venari 6 6. numquam saporifera servi degustatis. 15
11. ab implumis tollere plumas et conari, 5
7. Vincit auri pondera sue potestatis 12
12. dominis alludere, falsa commentari. 7
δ 13. Ve quos habent pongere verba que subduntur: 12 8. esse. Vobis funera, servi, propinatis 12
b
14. “Nulla fides pietasque viris qui castra secuntur.” 12 9. mala per innumera dum magis 10b
optatis.
a
Includes any rests following the phrase
b
Including a final maxima notionally lasting four breves
 A new paradigm for motet composition

breves, plus a final maxima theoretically lasting four breves. By bring-

ing its notional line length up from nine to eleven, the two untexted
spans functionally serve to decrease the difference in length between
the motetus and the triplum.
The triplum, meanwhile, has fourteen lines, which cannot all be of
twelve breves in duration. To fit fourteen into eleven, Vitry grouped
together lines 9 and 10, and 11 and 12, setting each pair in a span of
twelve breves. Additionally, the opening couplet is declaimed over
sixteen breves, which we might take to be twelve plus four more bor-
rowed from line 14 for the sake of staggered phrasing (likely this
was not part of the plan at this stage). In this way, two texts of rather
incompatible length are made amenable to alignment: the motetus has
been stretched, and the triplum compressed, to eleven twelve-breve
units.
The different alignments between triplum and motetus summarized
in Table 6.1 divide the motet into four sections. In sections α and γ the
triplum packs in more text than the motetus, whether due to the mote-
tus’s untexted lines (in section α) or the speeding-up of the triplum’s
declamation (in section γ). In sections β and δ, the two voices declaim
at the same rate. It is much more common in the repertory of ars nova
motets, and especially in Machaut’s oeuvre, to see a motetus that con-
sistently carries less text than the triplum. In Colla/Bona, the decision to
have them occasionally match their rates of text declamation seems to
have stemmed from the meanings and locations of specific lines.
Section δ pairs the pithy final couplets of both voices, which address
the court’s minions. And in section β the declamatory parity enables
a superimposition of lines that are related by mentions of food (also
important in the Dit de franc Gontier) and allusions to the differences
between those who taste life as servants of the court and those who
are free in their poverty. “I prefer to nibble a bean and rejoice as a free
man,” the triplum declares, “than to abound with food and be sad as a
slave” (ll. 7–8). And the motetus puts the same thing in a different way:
“you who . . . sample rich dishes at a whim, if you cannot live a free life,
never taste flavorful things as slaves” (ll. 4–6). Indeed, the confronta-
tion between beans and rich dishes staged by triplum l. 7 and motetus l.
4 is literally central to the motet, whose midpoint, marked by an arrow
in Example 6.2, falls on the bean. Moreover, the thirty-six-breve section
β in its entirely is central: the material on either side of it averages fifty
breves in duration.24 The bringing-into-alignment of these similar senti-
ments in the two voices likely motivated the stretching and contraction
to which the texts are subject in sections α and γ.
A schematic sketch for the motet at this stage might have looked
something like Figure 6.1. This figure reflects the various approaches

24
The lengths differ due to staggered phrasing: the triplum spends fifty-two breves in
section α and forty-eight in section γ, and the motetus fifty-one and forty-nine, respec-
tively, including the final maxima.

96
Example 6.2 Colla/Bona, breves 64–75
 A new paradigm for motet composition

Figure 6.1 Hypothetical compositional plan for Colla/Bona, summarizing the

combination of text-lines in triplum (black circles) and motetus
(white diamonds; hollow diamonds represent untexted motetus
passages)

to text coordination described above and suggests that the triplum

might declaim its first line alone, or in a section of music that stands
outside of some repetitive structure. While Figure 6.1 has no informa-
tion about the specific rhythms that we might find in each section, deci-
sions about the alignment of the two texts have implications for their
periodic structures. The addition of untexted material to the motetus
at two different points, for example, has clear taleaic implications,
while the differing rates of text declamation needed to achieve differ-
ent kinds of coordination between the two texts will necessarily have
impact on the rhythms used to set them. Finally, the possibility of a
bipartite tenor with the second part in diminution is suggested by the
coexistence of blocks that are twenty-four breves long with those that
are twelve (compare with the differing block lengths in Quant/Amour,
Hareu/Hélas, and Vos/Gratissima, all with tenors subject to diminution
or comparable renotation; see Figures 4.5 and 4.6). A tenor in imperfect
modus is implied by the 2:1 ratio between longer and shorter blocks
(as in Hareu/Hélas), since a tenor in perfect modus would produce a 3:1
ratio between sections (as in Quant/Amour). The most straightforward
way to make a motet with 2:1 diminution last 136 breves is to have the
integer valor statement last ninety breves, so that the second section is
forty-five, for a total of 135 breves—close enough.
In considering upper-voice block dimensions we move seamlessly from
the upper voices to the tenor that will underlie them, and I suggest that
it was at this point in the creative process that Vitry decided on a source
chant to concord with these various materials (though he certainly may
have already had some contenders in mind). His choice was Libera me de
sanguinibus, the Lauds antiphon for Wednesday of Holy Week (Example
6.3).25 The relationship between its opening words, “Free me,” and the
concern with liberty, slavery, and servitude in the upper-voice texts is

25
For sources see Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 209, 255–6.

98
 A new paradigm for motet composition

Example 6.3 Libera me de sanguinibus, F-Pn Lat. 10482, fol. 163v

unambiguous. Libera me, however, encompasses only six notes. Adding

the next syntactical unit makes it Libera me de sanguinibus—“free me from
blood.” Blood is less relevant than freedom to the upper voices, whose
texts ask to be delivered from servitude rather than death. Though bodily
harm could be linked loosely with the cutthroat atmosphere at court, it is
perhaps telling that only the words Libera me seem to have traveled with
the motet.26 After this the antiphon turns to praise God’s justice (“Free me
from blood my Lord, and my tongue shall extol thy justice”), the invocation
of which is even less pertinent to the motet’s message than that of blood.27
Libera me de sanguinibus gave Vitry thirteen notes—a nice coinci-
dence, perhaps, with the thirteen-syllable lines of the upper voices.
But in other respects the snippet is less than ideal. Neither thirteen (a
prime number) nor its smaller multiples have any denominators in
common with ninety, which is the target length of the integer valor sec-
tion. This means that no talea could be applied to some whole number
of iterations of the melody without leaving a remainder of notes unac-
counted for. The ascent at the fragment’s end is also problematic, since
a stepwise descent in the tenor is useful for making a final cadence in
a three-voice motet. Evidently realizing that neither the length of his
chosen melody nor its melodic profile were quite right for the planned
structure of his motet, but nevertheless wishing to use this tenor, Vitry
treated the melody and its talea as flexible building blocks that could be
molded to fill out the form of the upper voices.

26
No surviving source for the motet includes the full tenor text; Cambrai, Médiathèque
municipale, B 1328 (olim 1176), fol. 5r (DIAMM foliation)/13r (Irmgaard Lerch’s foliation,
Fragmente aus Cambrai: Ein Beitrag zur Rekonstruktion einer Handschrift mit spätmittelalterli-
cher Polyphonie [Kassel, 1987]) gives Libera me, and F-Pn nouvelles acquisitions françaises
23190 (olim Angers, Château de Serrant, Duchesse de la Trémoïlle), fol. 1v, has Libera me
domine, which is incorrect. Other sources do not label the chant.
27
We can never know whether Vitry considered other chants. Machaut’s Hélas/Corde
mesto (M12), which probably post-dates Colla/Bona, has a tenor also labeled Libera me, but
drawn from the Lenten responsory Minor sum and encompassing twenty-one notes. See
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 195, 245; and Zayaruznaya, “ ‘She has a Wheel’,” 205.

99
 A new paradigm for motet composition

To be sure, a tenor melody chosen earlier in the process could also

be treated flexibly. But, as a counterfactual thought experiment read-
ily shows, different kinds of flexibility would likely have been called
upon. If a composer began writing a motet by selecting—or committed
early in the process of composition to—this particular section of Libera
me de sanguinibus, what might be the expected formal consequences for
the motet being composed? The borrowed notes total thirteen. With so
short a snippet the composer would need to state his melody multi-
ple times—perhaps as many as four or five, or even six times, accord-
ing to the testimony of motets built on similarly short segments.28 The
resulting tenor might therefore have been fifty-two, sixty-five, or seventy-
eight notes long. Since these multiples of a prime number do not pre-
sent many options for division into sections that are not themselves
thirteen notes long, or which would not result in excessively long taleae
(three twenty-six-note taleae, for example), the composer might have
gone on to modify his melody.29 He might, for example, have added
an extra final pitch to make sixty-five into sixty-six (which could then
be arranged as six eleven-note taleae) or he might have added a passing
tone or tones to fill in one or both leaps in the melody, lengthening the
snippet to fourteen or fifteen notes and thus rendering its multiples
easier to divide in various ways.30 None of this comes close to the con-
struction of Colla/Bona.
The tenor talea upon which Vitry settled combines a maxima and
three longs with a longa rest in the penultimate position (   ), shrink-
ing to a long, three breves, and a breve rest in diminution (   ). This is
both a short and a nondescript pattern compared to some of his other
taleae, but its avoidance of small notes and moderate amount of rest
make it versatile. In its original form the talea has a duration of twelve
breves, and in diminution six; it is thus compatible with the motet’s
twenty-four- and twelve-breve upper-voice units and superimposition
of perfect and imperfect modus. As mentioned above, ninety breves
of integer valor would be needed before diminution set in. Ninety
divides by twelve to make 7.5, and 7.5 taleae would have used thirty
chant notes—two cycles of thirteen, plus the first four notes, A-G-F-G.
But this does not yield a descending step at the end, and Vitry chose
to repeat only three extra chant notes, ending his first cursus with a

28
Li enseignement de chaton/De touz les biens qu’amours ha a donner/Ecce tu pulchra et
amica mea (‘M24’) uses a fifteen-note snippet that is stated four times; Se päour d’umble
astinance/Diex, tan desire estre ames de m’amour/Concupisco uses a twelve-note snippet
stated four times; and Fons tocius superbie/O livoris feritas/Fera pessima (M9) uses a twelve-
note snippet stated six times.
29
It previously appeared that Vitry’s later Petre/Lugentium was built on a thirty-three-
note tenor talea, but this voice can now be identified as a solus tenor; the original tenor
consists of fifteen-note taleae: See Zayaruznaya, “New Voices for Vitry,” Early Music 46
(forthcoming 2018).
30
On composers altering their chant material in the course of constructing tenors, see
Clark, “Concordare cum materia,” 66–8.

100
 A new paradigm for motet composition

rest instead of a G longa.31 The second section features the same tenor
scheme of repetition—two cycles of the chant plus three more notes
stretched over seven taleae and an extra bit. The remainder here is a
maxima, rather than the longa-plus-breve rest that would result from
diminution, and the maxima adds the beat that makes the motet a total
of 136, rather than 135 breves. With this untidy but functional scheme
of repetition settled on, the tenor’s pitches were ready to dictate the
motet’s harmonic and melodic elements, to which the composer pre-
sumably turned at this point, fleshing out the staggered phrasing of
voices and setting the text as he went. At this stage, the motet really
was composed from the bottom up as pertains to its harmonic content,
in that the tenor’s pitches partially dictated the choice of pitches in the
upper voices. Decisions about rhythm would stem from text-setting
conventions of the genre, in which each line of poetry—or a group of
lines, if they are grouped—ends with a breve or a longa, usually fol-
lowed by a breve rest. Thus text-setting is intimately linked with talea at
line-ends, whereas the beginnings and middles of lines can have more
or less unique rhythmic profiles.
As the schematic analysis of Colla/Bona given in Example 6.4 shows,
the varying zones of triplum–motetus coordination marked in Table 6.1
have their analogues in sets of upper-voice blocks with different taleae.
The opening four breves seem to stand on their own, giving the triplum
a chance to declaim its extra line and the motetus a chance to get ahead
for the sake of staggered phrasing. Section α is particularly salient in
the motetus, whose two long untexted spans are sung in nearly identi-
cal rhythms (see the melismas underlaid by dotted lines in Example
6.4). Section β, which houses the lines about food, consists of a shorter
and almost entirely taleaic twelve-breve block stated thrice. Together,
sections α and β make up the integer valor portion of the motet. In sec-
tions γ and δ the tenor speeds up, running through two of its taleae dur-
ing each of the twelve-breve upper-voice blocks. Section γ features a
fast-talking triplum with some recurring rhythms in both voices, while
the upper voices in section δ have only a sprinkling of talea.
No edition or scholarly discussion of Colla/Bona notes the presence of
the upper-voice structures shown in Example 6.4. Instead, editors have
represented the work’s structure as that of its tenor—seven taleae in
each of two sections, with an eighth incomplete one directly before the

31
Clark points out that the excerpted chant melody, which ends on a B approached
from below, would have been unsatisfactory in a final cadence, given the preference for
final major-third tonalities and an “overall favor given to F and G finals in the fourteenth
century motet repertory,” “Concordare cum materia,” 46, 166. This manipulation of the
snippet allows the motet to end on F. However, this does not explain the re-statement
of three, rather than two, extra notes from the beginning of the chant, since ending on G
(pitch 2) would have done just as well, and left no notes beyond the seventh talea. This
“remainder” has been described as a partial talea VIII (for example in Schrade, The Roman
de Fauvel, 85–7; and Besseler, “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters II,” 222), but in that case
it would be a maxima followed by a longa.

101
Example 6.4 Colla/Bona, upper-voice blocks aligned, taleae shaded
 A new paradigm for motet composition

diminution begins.32 But the upper-voice form of Colla/Bona is far more

regular than the tenor’s ad hoc combination of whole and partial rhyth-
mic and melodic repetitions: after a four-breve opening, the triplum
and motetus are organized in blocks of two different lengths (twenty-
four breves, twelve breves) that repeat either two or three times. The
total number of blocks is the same as the number of lines in the mote-
tus: nine. This is another way of saying that to a large extent the mote-
tus’s structure determines the form of the whole, though the addition
of long untexted stretches in section α takes the longer triplum text
into account. The tenor’s combination of structured and unstructured,
regular and irregular repetitions only makes sense if the upper-voice
texts and their periodic structure were already in place when the com-
poser selected his chant snippet. The alternate hypothesis—that the
haphazard repetition schemes of the tenor would have been decided
upon first, and would end up perfectly fitting into the more regular
structures of upper voices that had not yet been written—is untenable.

32
While Besseler noted that the upper voices group into larger blocks in the diminu-
tion section (sections γ and δ here; see “Studien II,” 222n3), the larger groupings in sec-
tion α are described here for the first time. Editions consulted include: Besseler, “Studien
II,” 247–50; Mildred Jane Johnson, “The Motets of the Codex Ivrea” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana
University, 1955), 2:116–20; Schrade, The Works of Philippe de Vitry, 85–7. Amédée Gas-
toué does not label taleae in Le Manuscrit de musique du trésor d’Apt (Paris: E. Droz, 1936),
139–42.

103
 Conclusion

It is something of a cliché to describe ars nova motets as musico-poetic

objects, or to pay lip-service to the inclusion of the mot in their generic
designation. But examples such as Colla/Bona bring the depth of the
cross-medial connections into sharp relief. It is not simply a case of main
themes linking the tenor’s text or liturgical context with the upper-voice
texts. Rather, text design and formal design are intimately connected,
and talea, which under its modern name of “isorhythm” has often been
characterized as a purely musical, structuralist tool, is better understood
as stemming instead from textual and conceptual impulses. And in this
supremely musico-poetic genre, the formal has important implications
for the semantic: if a tenor melody was selected after all of these texts
had been written, and after many formal decisions had been made,
then interpreting the upper-voice texts primarily through the semantic
and liturgical lens of the tenor begins to look like a precarious exercise.
This is not to exclude the possibility that the liturgical context of a given
tenor can fruitfully speak to the upper-voice texts. Tenors may well have
been chosen because their texts, dimensions, and liturgical contexts were
suited to the motet. But the revised compositional order proposed here
does stand at odds with Anne Robertson’s claim that “the liturgy serves
as . . . the starting point” in motet creation.1 I suggest instead that the
starting point of Machaut’s motets was the intricate poetry of their upper
voices—poetry that is in harmony with his courtly poetic output.
And Machaut was unlikely to be alone in his working model. Granted,
the repertory under discussion in this study overwhelmingly comprises
works attributed to Machaut and Vitry, both famous in their day for
being poets as well as composers.2 While it is possible that Machaut and
Vitry composed motets differently than did their less productive or less
lauded colleagues, it is at least as likely that the works under consid-
eration here only make apparent the broader compositional priorities of
their genre. In a motet like Colla/Bona there can be little doubt that the
upper voices dictate the structure of the whole. Where the tenor taleae

1
Guillaume de Machaut and Reims, 277. While it is possible that Machaut’s motets are
ordered according to a narrative built around their tenor incipits, the compositional pro-
cess proposed here makes this less likely: if the tenor is chosen in the midst of com-
position, its ability to define the meaning of the whole is more limited than if it is the
generating kernel.
2
While problems of attribution abound with respect to Vitry, many of the works listed
here are relatively secure; see notes 1 on page 1 (Chapter 1) and 14 on page 49 (Chapter 4).
The composer listed in Coussemaker’s copy of Ida/Portio from F-Sm 222 as “Egidius de
Pusiex” has been identified as the priest and composer Egidius de Puisieus, who died in
1348; see Hoppin and Clercx, “Notes biographiques sur quelques musiciens français du
XIVe siècle,” 86.
 Conclusion

and upper-voice blocks are ruled by the same schemes of repetition, on

the other hand, it is much more difficult to tease out the order of the
steps involved in their composition. A common—though by no means
universal—assumption up to now has been that when structures are
shared they originate in the tenor: that is why Harrison evaluated each
upper-voice text based on its co-ordination with the tenor taleae rather
than, for instance, evaluating each tenor for its extent of conformity with
the motetus and triplum in turn. But such evaluation is based on the
hypothesis that the tenor was planned first—a hypothesis supported by
little more than the conformity it seeks to explain.
In this context, the evidence provided by the motets analyzed in this
book invites us to reconsider the rest of the repertory, asking whether,
even in works whose tenor structures perfectly explain the disposition
of taleae in the upper voices, the order of composition might not have
been akin to the one proposed for Colla/Bona in Chapter 6. Indeed, the
large number of texts that do get good grades on Harrison’s report-
card can be used to support the proposition that motet structures are
dictated by upper-voice metrical schemes as easily as it can attest to
the structural supremacy of tenors.3 Also interesting are several motets
(Apollinis/Zodiacum, Fortune/Ma dolour) in which a tenor and a mote-
tus obviously related in their structures are combined with a compara-
tively formless triplum. Here it may be that the germinating materia
was born with the motetus.
Finally, we may note the lack of contrafacts in the repertory.4 When
motets were modified, which did apparently happen, it was through
the updating of their notation and rhythms, the addition of untexted
contratenors, and even perhaps the insertion of untexted introitus and
hocket sections.5 But the addition of new texted voices, so common in
the ars antiqua repertory, was all but unheard-of in the ars nova.6 One
way to explain this circumstance would be that, since the writing of

3
Once Flos/Celsa and In virtute/Decens have been re-graded, the GPA for Motets of
French Provenance is 3.16; but with a bimodal distribution: most motets have a high level
of coordination, and a few do not; of the latter, some, like the skillfully constructed Mon
chant/Qui doloreus, may in fact reward analysis along the outlines proposed.
4
In cases of contrafacture words obviously would have been written after the music,
but there is no evidence of ars nova motets receiving new text in French orbits. The
replacement of French texts with Latin seems to have occurred in England, as attested by
the triplum of the five-voice motet Are post libamina/Nunc surgunt by Matheus de Sancto
Johanne; see Margaret Bent, “The Progeny of Old Hall: More Leaves from a Royal Eng-
lish Choirbook,” in Gordon Athol Anderson, 1929–1981: In memoriam von seinen Studenten,
Freunden und Kollegen (Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1984), 5–20.
5
Notational updating can be observed in those motets concordant between Fauvel in
F-Pn 146 and B-Br MS 19606. On the addition of introitus sections, see Zayaruznaya,
“[I]ntroitus”; on the addition of untexted hocket sections, see Zayaruznaya, “Evidence
of Reworkings.”
6
The only surviving exception shows what voices added later would look like, prov-
ing the rule: the version of Apollinis/Zodiacum in the copy of the lost Strasbourg MS has
the added upper voice Pantheon abluitur, which does not reflect the structure of the

106
 Conclusion

texts was how motet composition began, writing extra texts at a late
stage would have been an awkward proposition—like adding a base-
ment after a house has been built.
I propose that the motets analyzed here are not exceptional but
rather only exceptionally clear examples that point toward the com-
positional process behind many or even most ars nova motets. To be
sure, some works might have begun with a tenor, but the creation of
texts must often have happened at an earlier stage in the compositional
process than has often been assumed, and the same is likely true of the
periodic design of the upper voices. In those motets where a very short
tenor talea is doubled underneath upper-voice blocks, the difference
between tenor and upper-voice structures is neither dramatic nor par-
ticularly hard to explain, and it may be tempting to lean on the more
comfortable tenor-centric story. But even these cases challenge received
notions about the respective roles of the upper voices and the tenor in
motet construction, since their forms are represented more meaning-
fully by upper-voice blocks than by tenor taleae. When considered as a
group, the motets analyzed here belie the cliché that upper-voice taleae
stem from, or amplify, the tenor’s structure. In these works, and per-
haps more broadly in the ars nova motet repertory, the tenor talea is a
building block in a formal scheme initially generated in response to the
upper-voice texts.

motetus, tenor, or triplum and accordingly earned a D from Harrison; Motets of French
Provenance, Table IV, text no. 20; edition on pp. 54–61.

107
 Appendix
Music-theoretical discussions of color
and talea, c. 1340–1430

This appendix draws together the most extended and most signifi-
cant discussions and uses of the terms color and talea from the period
under consideration. However, it is not exhaustive, especially as
regards the myriad texts that are versions of or commentaries on
the Libellus (text I). For further occurences and bibliography, see the
citations in the Lexicon musicum latinum medii aevi (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1996–2016) for color (vol. 5, 550–6) and talea (vol.  17, 1421).
Unless noted otherwise, translations are my own, carried out with
the generous assistance of Andrew Hicks. On the translation of fig-
ura, rendered as “note-shape” below, see note 8 on page 29 (Chap-
ter 3). On ipsis motetis, translated as “motet [upper] voices,” see note
11 on page 30 (Chapter 3).

I. Johannes de Muris (attrib.), Ars practica mensurabilis

cantus (c. 1340 or later)1
1
Sequitur de colore. 1
Here follows [a chapter] on color.
2
Unde color in musica vocatur 2
In music, a passage of similar
similium figurarum unius note-shapes repeated several times
processus pluries repetita positio in the same voice is called color.
in eodem cantu. 3Pro quo nota, 3
Concerning this, take note that
quod nonnulli cantores ponunt some singers make a distinction
differentiam inter colorem et between color and talla: for they
tallam: nam vocant colorem, call it color when the same pitches
quando repetuntur eedem are repeated, but talla when similar
voces, tallam vero, quando note-shapes are repeated and
repetuntur similes figure et thus [the note-shapes] occur on
sic fiunt diversarum vocum. different pitches. 4This distinction,
4
Que differentia, licet servetur although it is preserved in quite a
in quampluribus tenoribus few motet tenors, is not preserved
motetorum, non tamen servatur in the motet [upper] voices.
in ipsis motetis. 5Exempla patent 5
Examples can be found in
in motetis. motets.

1
Ed. Christian Berktold, Ars practica mensurabilis cantus secundum Iohannem de Muris:
Die Recensio maior des sogenannten “Libellus practice cantus mensurabilis,” Bayerische Aka-
demie der Wissenschaften, Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission 14
(Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften; C. H. Beck, 1999), 78–9.
 Appendix

II. Egidius de Murino, De modo componendi tenores

motetorum (third quarter, fourteenth century)2
1
Primo accipe tenorem 1
First take a tenor from some
alicuius antiphone vel antiphon or responsory or another
responsorii vel alterius cantus chant from the antiphoner and
de antiphonario et debent the words should be suited to the
verba concordare cum materia materia out of which you wish to
de qua vis facere motetum. construct the motet. 2And then take
2
Et tunc recipe tenorem, this tenor, and you will arrange
et ordinabis et colorabis and color-ize it according to what is
secundum quod inferius explained below about perfect and
patebit de modo perfecto vel imperfect modus.
imperfecto.
3
Et modus perfectus est 3
And the modus is perfect when
quando comparantur tria three or six tempora [i.e. breve-length
tempora vel sex pro nota; spans] are grouped in a note [i.e., in
et modus imperfectus est a longa or maxima]; and the modus
quando comparantur duo is imperfect when two or four
tempora vel quatuor pro nota. tempora are grouped in a note.
4
Et quando tenor est bene 4
And when the tenor is well
ordinatus tunc si vis facere regulated then if you wish to
motetum cum quatuor tunc compose a motet in four [voices]
etiam ordinabis et colorabis then you will regulate and color-ize
contratenorem supra tenorem the contratenor above the tenor, and
et quando vis potes dividere you can divide up the contratenor
contratenorem. [into colores] if you wish to.
5
Tunc accipe tenorem et 5
Then take the tenor and contratenor
contratenorem si componis (if you are composing in four voices)
cum quatuor et ordinabis and you will regulate the triplum
triplum supra bene ut above it so that it concords well with
concordet cum tenore et the tenor and contratenor. 6And if
contratenore. 6Et si vis ipsum you wish it [the triplum] to

2
Sentences 1–13, 21–36 ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Compositional Techniques in the
Four-Part Isorhythmic Motets of Philippe de Vitry and His Contemporaries, 2 vols. (New York:
Garland, 1989), 1:18–20, with changed punctuation in sentences 6, 13, and 21, omitting
rectus in signatus rectus tenor in sentence 13 and also preferring tale signum to hoc talem
signum there, preferring deduci to diversi in 21, and changes as made in 22; sentences
14–20 ed. Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker, Scriptorum de musica medii ævi novam
seriem a Gerbertina alteram collegit nuncque primum edidit, 4 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1864–76;
reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1963), 3:124–8. Examples newly edited from Vat. lat. 5321,
fol. 8r–v. A new edition and translation of Murino’s full text will be included in a source-
book of readings on notation compiled by Andrew Hicks and Anna Zayaruznaya which
is currently in progress.

110
 Appendix

superius concordare tunc be in even greater agreement [i.e.,

divide tenorem in duas partes formally, with the lower voices] then
vel quatuor vel tot partes sicut divide up the tenor into two parts,
tibi placuerit, et cum feceris or four, or as many parts as you like,
unam partem super tenorem, and when you compose a section
tunc illa pars debet ita esse above the tenor, this section should
figurata sicut prima pars, et be set out in the same note-shapes
sicut alia pars; et istud vocatur as the first section, and as the next
colorare motetos. section; and this is called color-izing
motets.
7
Item potes sibi adiungere 7
And you can add a further subtlety,
aliam subtilitatem, et hoc est si which is, if you want to, to compose
vis potes eum facere de modo [the triplum] in perfect modus, that
perfecto, id est comparare is to always group together three
semper tria tempora insimul; tempora; and after three tempora
et post tria tempora debet there should always be a dot of
semper esse punctus division.
divisionis.
8
Hoc facto procede ad 8
With this done, move on to the
motetum, id est ad quintam, motetus, that is to [the voice at] the
et concordabis et colorabis fifth, and you will arrange and color-
cum triplo et tenore, et cum ize it with the triplum and tenor,
contratenore si est cum and with the contratenor if [the
quatuor; et ita fac usque ad motet] is in four voices; and go on in
finem. this way until the end.
9
Postquam cantus est factus 9
After the music is made and
et ordinatus tunc accipe verba arranged, take the words that are to
que debent esse in moteto et be in the motet and divide them into
divide ea in quatuor partes, four sections, and similarly divide
et sic divide cantum in the music into four sections, and
quatuor partes, et prima pars arrange the first section of the words
verborum compone supra above the first section of the music,
primam partem cantus, sicut to the best of your ability. And go on
melius potes. Et sic procede in this way until the end.
usque ad finem.
Et aliquando est necesse
10
And occasionally it is necessary to
10

extendere multas notas super stretch out many notes over a few
pauca verba, et aliquando words, and sometimes it is
est necesse extendere multa necessary to spread many words
verba super pauca tempora over few tempora until it is
quousque perveniatur ad completed.
complementum.

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 Appendix

11
Nunc ostendam qualiter 11
Now I will show how you shall
tenores ordinabis et colorabis; arrange and color-ize tenors; and
et ita ordinabis et colorabis you will arrange and color-ize
contratenores sicut tenores. contratenors in the same way as
Tunc contratenor potest aliter tenors. Then the contratenor can be
colorari quam tenor si vis. 12Et color-ized differently from the tenor,
primo de modo perfecto ut if you wish. 12And first [I will speak]
consequenter patebit. of the perfect mode, as will be clear
below.
13
Et si tenor dicitur pluries 13
And if the tenor is stated more
quam semel debet esse than once, then the tenor ought
signatus tenor, quod si dicitur to be signed; if it is stated twice,
bis quia prima vice non est since it is not necessary to sign the
necesse signare quando dicitur first time, when it is stated twice
bis tunc appone tale signum then affix the following sign—“2”;
2; quod si dicitur ter appone if it is stated three times, affix
hoc signum 3; quod si dicitur this sign—“3”; if it is stated four
quater appone hoc signum 4; et times, affix this sign—“4”; and
secundum antiquos magistros according to the old masters 2, 3,
figuratur sic II III IIII 2 3 4. and 4 are written thus: “II,” “III,”
“IIII.”
Tenor iste est de modo
14 14
This tenor is of the perfect modus
perfecto et quelibet nota valet and every note is worth six tempora,
sex tempora, et est coloratus, and it is color-ized, since all the
quia omnes sunt similes, et [figurae] are alike, and it is called
vocatur tenor ordinatus, quia a regular tenor [tenor ordinatus],
non est aliqua mixtura in eo because there is no mixture in it
nisi pause: except for the rests:

15
Tenor iste est de modo 15
This tenor is of perfect modus, and
perfecto, et plene valent sex the filled notes are worth six tempora,
tempora, et vacue valent and the void ones are worth four
quatuor tempora et iste tres tempora and three of the void ones
vacue valent duas plenas. are worth two filled ones.
16
Et iste tenor vocatur mixtus; 16
And this tenor is called mixed;
tamen est coloratus, et tamen nevertheless it is color-ized, and still
possunt plures vacue poni in many void notes can be used in a
tenore si vis; tamen custode tenor if you wish; but be always
semper colorem; careful of the color;

112
 Appendix

et sic de aliis mixturis que and it is the same with other mixed
ponuntur. 17Intende videlicet [tenors] which can be adduced. 17Pay
de longis et de brevibus et de attention to the longs and the breves
pausis: and the rests:

. . . [eight more similarly annotated

examples of tenors in perfect
modus followed by a discussion of
diminution]
Tenor iste quando est de
18 18
When this tenor is in imperfect
modo imperfecto, tunc valet modus, every [note] is worth four
quelibet quatuor tempora; tempora; and when it is in perfect
et quando est de modo modus, then each one is worth
perfecto, tunc quelibet valet six tempora, as is written above
sex tempora, sicut superius concerning tenors in perfect modus,
dictum est de tenoribus de and the tenor is ordered and
modo perfecto, et est tenor color-ized:3
ordinatus atque coloratus:

19
Tenor iste quando vis quod 19
When you wish this tenor to be in
sit de modo imperfecto, tunc imperfect modus, then every [note]
valet quelibet duo tempora; et is worth two tempora; and when you
quando vis quod sit de modo want it to be in perfect modus, then
perfecto, tunc valet quelibet each one is worth three tempora, as
tria tempora, sicut superius is written above concerning tenors
ponitur in tenoribus de modo in perfect modus, and the tenor is
perfecto, et est tenor ordinatus ordered and
atque coloratus: color-ized:

3
The example (Vat. lat. 5321, fol. 8v) has vertical strokes as reproduced here.
Given that the example is meant to be a tenor in imperfect modus, perhaps these
should be interpreted as dividing lines rather than rests in perfect modus; pos-
sibly another set of such dividing lines belongs between notes 4 and 5.

113
 Appendix

20
Tenor iste quando est de When this tenor is in imperfect
20

modo imperfecto, tunc modus, then the bigger notes are

majores valent quatuor worth four tempora and the smaller
tempora et minores duo; et ones two; and when it is in perfect
quando est de modo modus, then the bigger notes are
perfecto, tunc majores worth six tempora and the smaller
valent sex tempora et ones three (as is explained above):
minores tria, sicut
superius patet:

 . . . [four more annotated examples

of tenors in various combinations
of modus and tempus, further
discussion of diminution]
21
Sciendum est quod per 21
It should be known that through
tenores supradictos possunt the tenors discussed above many
inveniri quamplures alii modi other ways can be discovered, and
et deduci alii tenores per other tenors deduced through the
viam subtilitatis, et ideo non path of subtlety; therefore, it is not
est necesse omnes tenores necessary to compose all the tenors,
componere <sed tantum> [but only] many of those that can
plures eorum qui possunt be discovered, because from them
inveniri, quia ex istis subtilis a subtilis cantor can make still more
cantor potest facere alios tenors. 22And thus for the wise and
tenores quamplures [del the learned only a little will suffice.
eorum]. 22Et ideo sapienti et 23
But what is written above is written
intelligenti pauca sufficiunt. for the education of children.
23
Sed que scripta sunt
superius ad doctrinam
parvulorum scripta
sunt.
. . . [a discussion of rests]

114
 Appendix

24
Si maiores subtilitates If you desire to have more
24

cupis habere quam in isto subtleties than are contained in

volumine continentur tunc this treatise, apply yourself boldly
stude fortiter in musicam, to music, and maybe God through
et forte deus prestabit his grace will grant you greater
tibi per suam gratiam discernment and subtlety.
majorem intellectum atque
subtilitatem.
25
Est autem alius modus 25
There is also another way of
componendi motetos quam composing motets besides the one
superius dictum est videlicet described above, namely that the
quod tenor vadat supra tenor goes above the motetus, and
motetum, et sic ordinabis. you will compose it as follows.
26
Accipe tenorem de 26
Take a tenor from the antiphoner
antiphonario sicut superius as is written above, and you will
dictum est quem colorabis et color-ize and arrange it. 27And it is in
ordinabis. 27Et stat in gamma a low register and you can place it
bassa et tu potes eum mittere in the high register. 28And when it is
in gamma alta. 28Et quando well ordered, then you will make a
est ordinatus bene tunc facies discant [i.e. the motetus voice] below
discantum sub tenore sicut the tenor as well as you are able.
melius scis. 29Et potes ipsum 29
And you can color-ize it and render
colorare et de modo perfecto it in perfect modus if you wish.
facere si vis. 30Hoc facto 30
With this done, you will make the
facias triplum concordare triplum concord above the motetus
supra motetum sicut melius to the best of your ability.
scis et potes.
31
Et si vis ipsum facere cum 31
And if you want to compose it in
quatuor tunc debet ibi esse four [voices] then there needs to be a
contratenor; sed oportet quod contratenor there; but it is necessary
contratenor sit primus et that the contratenor be first and that
concordat cum tenore aliter it concord with the tenor, otherwise
non posset colorari. it cannot be color-ized.
32
Item si vis facere motetum 32
And if you wish to compose a
cum quinque per hunc motet with five [voices], it can be
modum potest fieri. 33Fac done in this way. 33First fashion a
primo tenorem sicut dictum tenor as has been described, and
est, et fac mottectum make the motetus discant below
discantare subtus tenorem the tenor and fit with it. 34With this
et concordare. 34Hoc facto done, fashion the triplum to discant
fac triplum discantare super above the motetus to the best of your
motetum sicut melius scis. ability. 35At this point you can make
35
Ad huc potes facere alium another discanting voice which is in
discantum qui ibi the same range as the triplum,

115
 Appendix

circumquaque triplum ornamenting this triplum, and this

fulgendo ipsum triplum, et fifth voice is called the quadruplum,
iste quintus cantus vocatur and thus the motet will be wholly
quadruplum, et sic erit filled in. 36And I believe that it is not
motetus totaliter plenus. 36Et possible to compose with more [than
credo quod non possent fieri five] voices at the same time.
plures cantus insimul.

III. Johannes Boen, Ars (before 1367)4

1
Quia de colore mentionem 1
Since we have mentioned color,
fecimus, ideo quid sit color, let us briefly discuss what color
qualiter inventus fuit, et qualiter is, how it was discovered, and
habet fieri, parum pertractemus. how it should be implemented.
2
Est ergo color, prout in cantu 2
Color, as we use it in song, is the
utimur, aliquarum figurarum in comparability of some note-shapes
aliqua similitudine comparabilitas. through some resemblance. 3Color
3
Fuit autem inventus color, ut was discovered so that we might
figuram perditam vel negligenter be able to recognize the lost or
positam per correspondentiam carelessly written note-shape
reperire valeamus. 4Et habet through [its] correspondence
fieri hoc modo. 5Primo quidem [with others]. 4And it should be
inspicias quot corpora notarum implemented in the following
habeas que colorare volueris. way. 5First look to see how many
6
Sint verbi gratia triginta, hunc distinct pitches you have, which
numerum multis modis dividere you wish to color-ize. 6If, for the
potes. 7Divide ipsum ergo, gratia sake of argument, there are thirty,
exempli, in quinque partes you can divide this quantity
equales, et tunc quelibet pars in many ways. 7Divide it, for
retinebit notas sex, nam sexies example, into five equal parts,
quinque triginta constituent. and thus every part will comprise
8
Ordina ergo primam partem ut six notes, since six times five is
habeat sex. 9Sic ergo disposueris thirty. 8Compose the first section
sex notas secunde partis ad so that it will have six [notes]. 9In
similitudinem sex notarum the same way, therefore, lay out
in prima parte, ut prima nota the six notes of the second section
correspondeat prime et secunda in likeness to the six notes of the
secunde. 10Et sic consequenter erit first section, so that the first note
cantus ille colore iunctus . . . corresponds with the first, and
the second with the second. 10And
consequently the melody will be
united by the color . . .

4
Johannes Boen, Ars (musicae), ed. F. Alberto Gallo, Corpus scriptorum de musica 19
(Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1972), 29–30, emending improperare to impro­
perari and auri to aure in 11. Translated with the help of Andrew Hicks.

116
 Appendix

11
Quia tamen color plus visui 11
Because color, however, is more
obicitur quam auditui, ideo non obvious to sight than to hearing,
tantam curiositatem seu expensas I advise against excessive fussiness
intelligentium consulo circa ipsum or intellectual expense about it
fieri in hac materia, quo magis [color] in this matter, lest it detract
melodie derogetur et oculus from the melody and give the eye
occasionem habeat unde juxta occasion to be rebuked by the ear
sonum improperari possit aure. on account of the sound.

IV. Johannes Pipudi, De arte cantus (last quarter

of the fourteenth century)5
1
Item nota quod color in musica Note that, broadly speaking, it is
largo modo dicitur quando called color in music when the same
eaedem voces vel eaedem pitches, or the same note-shapes,
figurae in eodem cantu plures are repeated multiple times in the
repetuntur sed corto modo color same voice; but in a narrow sense
quando repetuntur eaedem voces it is color when the same pitches are
etsi sint diversarum figurarum. repeated, even if they are of different
2
Et tunc quando repetuntur note-shapes [upon repetition]. 2And
eaedem figurae etiam si sint when the same note-shapes are
diversarum notarum hoc vocatur repeated even if they be of differing
taylla, et ista differentia servatur pitches this is called taylla, and this
in pluribus tenoribus motetorum distinction is indeed preserved in
etiam. many motet tenors.

V. (?)Goscalcus, Third Berkeley Treatise (1375)6

Ultimo de colore volo facere

1 1
Finally I wish to make mention
mencionem. 2Unde color in musica of color. 2In music a passage of

5
Maria del Carmen Gómez, “De arte cantus de Johannes Pipudi, sus Regulae contra-
punctus y los Apuntes de teoría de un estudiante catalán del siglo XIV,” Anuario Musical
31–2 (1976–7): 45, but omitting her significata in sentence 1 since it is deleted in the manu-
script and reading differentia instead of drina in sentence 2. Gómez’s text is edited from
Seville, Biblioteca Colombina MS 5-2-25, fols. 99–104v; later in the same manuscript a sec-
ond version of this text follows a similar statement followed by fragmented versions of
Libellus sentences 3–4. I thank Karen Cook for alerting me to this difference and sharing
manuscript images and transcriptions with me, as well as sharing a new identification of
Pipudi, which she will discuss in a forthcoming publication.
6
Ed. Oliver B. Ellsworth, The Berkeley Manuscript (University of California, Music
Library, MS. 744) (olim Phillipps 4450) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 180,
182. In the final clause, the manuscript’s liquide has been retained in favor of the editorial
liquidem. The attribution is found in the later concordant MS Catania, Biblioteche Riunite
Civica e A. Ursino Recupero D. 39.

117
 Appendix

dicitur earumdem vel similium the same or similar note-shapes

figurarum unius processus repeated several times in the
pluries repetita posicio in eodem same voice is called color.
cantu. 3Pro quo notandum est 3
Regarding this, it should be
quod nonnulli cantores ponunt noted that some singers make
differenciam inter colorem et a distinction between color
tailliam. 4Nam colorem vocant and talea. 4For they call it color
quando repetuntur eedem voces, when the same pitches are
eciam si fuerint diversarum repeated, even if they should be
formarum. 5Tailliam vero quando of different shapes. 5But [they
repetuntur similes figure, eciam call it] taillia when similar note-
si sint diversarum vocum. 6Que shapes are repeated, even if they
differencia licet in quampluribus should be of different pitches.
motetorum tenoribus observetur, 6
This distinction, although it is
non tamen observatur in ipsis observed in quite a few motet
motetis, ut in eis liquide est videre. tenors, cannot be observed in
the motet [upper] voices, as can
easily be seen in them.

VI. Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris

(Coussemaker’s Anonymous V, c. 1376–1400)7
1
Sequitur de talla et colore 1
Here follows [a chapter] on talla
2
Prima conclusio: and color
Quod talla dicitur quando 2
First conclusion: That it is said to
repetuntur eedem note sub be talla when the same notes are
eisdem figuris sub diversis repeated with the same note-
tamen vocibus, ut apparet shapes but different pitches, as
in tenore illius motecti Rex can be observed in the tenor of
Iohannes. the motet Rex Johannes.
3
Secunda conclusio: Quod color 3
Second conclusion: That it is
est quando repetuntur eedem color when the same pitches
voces sub diversis tamen figuris, are repeated but with different
ut habetur in tenore Portio nature note-shapes, as in the tenor of
vel Ida capillorum ... Portio nature or Ida capillorum . . .
4
Sic enim est color in musica, 4
Such is color in music, and these
et possunt hec fieri in modo, can occur in perfect or imperfect
tempore, et prolatione perfecta modus, tempus, and prolation.
vel imperfecta.

7
Ed. C. Matthew Balensuela, Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris, Greek
and Latin Music Theory 10 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 254, 256.

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VII. Notitia del valore delle note del canto misurato (c. 1400)8

Che sia colore o taglia 1Onde What is a color or a taglia? 1Color

colore nella musicha pratica in musica practica will be a passage
sara un processo di piu note of notes with sincope and rests
con sincope <et> con spirationi, (spirationi), which is then repeated
et poi, ripreso un’ altra volta one or several more times, with
o piu, le medesime sincope et the same sincope and rests and
spirationi et valore, dissimili values, with different pitches. 2A
le voci. 2Niente di meno taglia taglia [lit: “a cut”] is the exact same
ancora é medessimo modo. thing. 3But it is used in constructed
3
Ma usasi ne’ tenori artificiali, tenors, dividing the tenor into
partendo il tinore in certe parti, sections, as in the tenors of certain
si come el tinore di certi motetti, motets, such as Luce Clarus, or Sub
cioe Luce clarus o Sub Arturo Arturo, or Omni Habenti. 4The tenor
o Omni habenti. 4Tenor Luce [of] Luce clarus has three taglie with
clarus a tre taglie di valore a these durations [referring to the
questo modo; ma in voce sono written-out example, which gives
differentiate. one talea], but they [the repetitions]
5
Sub Arturo a tre taglie di valore; are differentiated in pitch.
ma in voce sono differentiate. 5
Sub Arturo has three taglie of
6
Tenor Omni habenti a due durations; but they differ in pitch.
taglie, non in medesma voce. 6
The tenor [of] Omni habenti has
7
Pero che se fossono le taglie in two taglie, not in the same pitches.
valore et in medesima voce, una 7
But if the taglie should be made
compositione piu volte repetuta with [repeated] durations and in
parebbe, et non altro. the same pitches, it would appear
to be one composition repeated
several times, not otherwise.

VIII. Prosdocimus de Beldemandis, Expositiones tractatus

pratice cantus mensurabilis Johannis de Muris (c. 1404)9
1
Sequitur de colore. 1
Here follows [a chapter] on color.
2
Unde color in musica est vel 2
In music, a passage of similar note-
vocatur similium figurarum shapes repeated several times in the
unus processus pluries repetitus same voice is, or is called, color.
in eodem cantu.

8
Ed. Armen Carapetyan, Notitia del valore delle note del canto misurato ([Rome] : Ameri-
can Institute of Musicology, 1957), 56–7, with punctuation modified and music exam-
ples omitted. Translation adapted with permission from an unpublished translation by
Michael Scott Cuthbert.
9
Ed. F. Alberto Gallo, Prosdocimi de Beldemandis opera 1: Expositiones tractatus pratice
cantus mensurabilis magistri Johannis di Muris, Antiquae musicae italicae scriptores 3 (Bolo-
gna: Università degli Studi di Bologna, Istituto di Studi Musicali e Teatrali - Sez. Musico-
logia, 1966), 215–18.

119
 Appendix

3
Istud est nonum et ultimum 3
This is the ninth and last chapter
capitulum istius tractatus of the treatise, in which the
in quo auctor determinat de author discusses color and talea.
colore et talea. 4Et duo facit, 4
And he does this in two [parts],
quoniam primo continuat se for first he continues to what
ad dicenda determinando he intends to say by discussing
de colore et talea secundum color and talea according to his
mentem propriam et own judgment and making no
nullam inter ea ponendo distinction between them, and
differentiam, secundo vero second he discusses color and talea
determinat de ipso colore et according to the opinion held by
talea secundum opinionem others who do make a distinction
aliorum inter ipsa ponentium between them. 5(The second [part]
differentiam. 5Secunda ibi: starts there: “Concerning this, take
Pro quo nota. note.”)
6
De prima ergo parte ait: 6
Regarding the first part he says:
sequitur supple in presenti “It follows (understand ‘in the
capitulo determinare de present chapter to discuss’) color.”
colore. 7Et ipsum colorem 7
And he supplies a definition
diffiniendo subdit: unde of color: “In music, a passage of
color in musica est vel similar note-shapes repeated
vocatur unus processus several times in the same voice is,
similium figurarum repetitus or is called, color.”
pluries in eodem cantu.
8
Supra quam partem 8
Concerning this part, it should
notandum, quod auctor be noted that by “note-shapes”
in hoc loco per figuras the author here understands not
non solum intelligit notas, only notes, but also rests. 9Further
sed etiam pausas. 9Item it should be noted that Johannes
notandum, quod Johannes de Muris was of the opinion that
de Muris fuit istius opinionis color and talea in music were one
quod color et talea in musica and the same, and because of
forent unum et idem, et this in the continuation of his
propter hoc in continuatione chapter he said “here follows
capituli dixit: sequitur de concerning color” and not “here
colore, et non dixit: sequitur follows concerning color and talea,”
de colore et talea, iam quod because he already thought them
ipsa unum et idem reputabat. to be one and the same. 10And this,
10
Item etiam propter hoc in moreover, is why he defined only
determinando de ipsis solum one of them in the course of his
unum diffinivit, quod ad discussion, which sufficed in his
suam opinionem sufficiebat, opinion, because he did not make
iam quod inter ipsa nullam a distinction between them. 11And
ponebat differentiam. therefore in defining color he said

120
 Appendix

11
Et ideo in diffiniendo that color is a passage of similar
colorem dixit ipsum colorem note-shapes, and did not say “of
esse unum processum similar pitches,” because then
similium figurarum et non such a definition would not have
dixit: similium vocum, been appropriate for talea, where
quoniam tunc talee non similar pitches are not repeated.
convenisset talis diffinitio, 12
Therefore, because he wanted
ubi non repetuntur similes such a definition to apply to both,
voces. 12Quia ergo voluit that is, to talea as well as to color,
talem diffinitionem utrique since he believed them to be one
convenire, scilicet tam talee and the same, for this reason he
quam colori, iam quod ipsa said that color is “a passage of
unum et idem reputabat, similar note-shapes” and did not
hinc est quod colorem say “of similar pitches.”
dixit esse unum processum
similium figurarum et non
dixit: similium vocum.
13
Pro quo nota, quod aliqui 13
Concerning this, take note that some
cantores ponunt differentiam singers make a distinction between
inter colorem et taleam, color and talea: for they call it color
nam vocant colorem quando when similar pitches are repeated, but
repetuntur voces similes, talea when similar note-shapes are
taleam vero quando repetuntur repeated, and thus the note-shapes
similes figure, et sic fiunt figure occur on different pitches.
diversarum vocum.
14
Nunc auctor sequitur Now the author continues
14

determinando de colore et by discussing color and talea

talea secundum mentem according to the opinion held by
aliorum ponentium others who do make a distinction
differentiam inter ipsum between color and talea.
colorem et taleam.
15
Et dividitur ista pars in 15
This part is divided into two
partes duas, quoniam in parts, for in the first part he
prima parte facit quod reports what has been said, but in
dictum est, in secunda vero, the second, perhaps because this
quia forsan talis differentia distinction was not everywhere
suo tempore non ubique recognized in his time, he shows
reperiebatur, ostendit us where such a distinction was
nobis ubi talis differentia recognized in his time. 16The
suo tempore reperiebatur. second [part] starts there: “Which
16
Secunda ibi: Que differentia. distinction . . .”
De prima ergo parte dicit:
17
Regarding the first part he says
17

pro quo scilicet supradicto “concerning this (namely

121
 Appendix

nota, quod licet supple the abovesaid) take note that

nullam ponam differentiam (supply: ‘although I make no
inter colorem et taleam, distinction between color and
tamen aliqui cantores inter talea, nevertheless’) some singers
ipsa ponunt differentiam, do (among these two) make
nam pro quia, quia vocant a distinction, for (meaning
colorem quando repetuntur ‘because’) they call it color when
voces similes solum supple similar pitches (supply: ‘only,
et non figure similes, taleam and not similar note-shapes’) are
vero supple vocant quando repeated, but (supply: ‘they call
repetuntur similes figure it’) talea when similar note-shapes
supple solum et non voces (supply: ‘only, and not similar
similes, et sic fiunt figure pitches’) are repeated, and thus
diversarum vocum. the note-shapes occur on different
pitches.”
18
Supra quam partem 18
Concerning this part, it should
notandum, quod ex be noted that from these words
huiusmodi dictis patere it is clear how those singers
potest quomodo isti cantores believed that in talea there occurs
volebant quod in talea fieret a repetition only of similar note-
repetitio solum similium shapes and not of similar pitches,
figurarum et non similium and that in color the opposite
vocum et quod in colore fieret occurs, namely a repetition only of
e converso, scilicet repetitio similar pitches and not of similar
solum similium vocum et note-shapes; Johannes de Muris
non similium figurarum; held the opposite of this view,
cuius oppositum voluit since he made no distinction
Johannes de Muris qui nullam between color and talea but
differentiam ponebat inter believed them to be one and the
colorem et taleam sed ipsa same, as we saw above.
pro uno et eodem reputabat,
ut superius visum est.
19
Est tamen sciendum, But it should be known that
19

quod aliqui moderni some moderni, upon further

ulterius speculantes consideration and not willing
nulli istarum opinionum wholly to contradict either of these
in totum contradicere opinions, since both were held by
volentes, eo quod ambe masters not little experienced in
fuerant magistrorum non this art, have come upon a third
parum expertorum in arte opinion, which is something of
ista, terciam invenerunt a compromise between the two
opinionem quodammodo above-cited opinions. 20For they
mediam inter opiniones iam would have it, in opposition to
recitatas. 20Volunt namque Johannes de Muris (who made no
moderni isti contra distinction between color and talea

122
 Appendix

Johannem de Muris qui but believed them to be one and

nullam ponebat differentiam the same) that there is a sort of
inter colorem et taleam distinction between color and talea,
sed ipsa esse unum et and in this they agree with those
idem reputabat, quod other singers who also made a
aliqualis sit differentia inter distinction between them. 21These
colorem et taleam et per moderni also maintain that in color
hoc conveniunt cum aliis there is a repetition of similar
cantoribus qui etiam inter note-shapes—and in this they
ipsa ponebant differentiam. agree with Johannes de Muris,
21
Volunt etiam isti moderni, as is clear in his description of
quod in colore fiat repetitio color, and disagree with the other
similium figurarum et singers who believed that in color
per hoc conveniunt cum there is a repetition only of similar
Johanne de Muris, ut patet pitches. 22Moreover, they maintain
in sua descriptione coloris, that in color there is a repetition
et se discrepant ab aliis of similar pitches, and in this
cantoribus qui volebant agree with those other singers and
in colore fieri repetitiones disagree with Johannes de Muris,
solum similium vocum. as we have seen. 23Furthermore,
22
Item volunt, quod in colore they maintain that in talea there
fiat repetitio similium vocum occurs a repetition only of similar
et per hoc conveniunt cum note-shapes, and in this they
aliis cantoribus et discrepant accord as much with Johannes de
se a Johanne de Muris, ut Muris as with the other singers
visum est. 23Item volunt, who held the other opinion. 24In
quod in talea fiat repetitio sum, these moderni make the
solum similium figurarum following distinction between color
et per hoc conveniunt tam and talea: that in color there is a
cum Johanne de Muris quam repetition of similar pitches and
cum aliis cantoribus de alia similar note-shapes, but in talea
opinione. 24In summa ergo there is a repetition only of similar
volunt isti moderni talem note-shapes. 25But they make a
esse differentiam inter second distinction, for they say
colorem et taleam, quoniam that color occurs with something
in colore fit repetitio intervening between one repetition
similium vocum et similium and another, whereas talea occurs
figurarum, in talea vero fit without anything intervening,
repetitio solum similium and so they make the following
figurarum. 25Secundam vero definitions of color and talea. 26First,
ponunt differentiam talem, they make the following definition
quia dicunt colorem fieri of color: Color is a passage of
cum medio interposito inter similar note-shapes and similar
unam repetitionem et aliam, pitches repeated several times in
taleam vero fieri sine aliquo the middle of some voice, in the
medio, et per hoc same order, and with something

123
 Appendix

tales ponunt descriptiones intervening [between repetitions].

de ipso colore atque talea. 27
But they describe talea thus: talea
26
Et primo de colore talem is a passage only of similar note-
ponunt diffinitionem: color shapes repeated several times in
est unus processus similium some voice in the same order and
figurarum atque similium without something intervening.
vocum repetitus pluries
in medio alicuius cantus
secundum eundem ordinem
et cum aliquo medio.
27
Taleam vero sic describunt:
talea est unus processus
solum similium figurarum
repetitus pluries in aliquo
cantu secundum eundem
ordinem et absque medio.
28
Cantores tamen qui a 28
But the singers who were in
Johanne de Muris [se] disagreement with Johannes
discrepant, alias haberent de Muris would propose other
ponere diffinitiones de ipso definitions of color and talea,
colore et talea, et diversas different from those already
ab iam recitatis. 29Nam cited. 29For they would say that
dicerent quod color est unus color is a passage only of similar
processus solum similium pitches and not of similar note-
vocum et non similium shapes repeated several times in
figurarum repetitus pluries some voice in the same order and
in aliquo cantu secundum with nothing intervening. 30But
eundem ordinem et absque they would describe talea thus:
medio. 30Taleam vero sic talea is a passage only of similar
describerent: talea est unus note-shapes and not of similar
processus solum similium pitches repeated several times
figurarum et non similium in some voice in the same order
vocum repetitus pluries and with nothing intervening.
in aliquo cantu secundum 31
From which descriptions it is
eundem ordinem et apparent that those singers would
absque medio. 31Ex quibus accept neither of the distinctions
descriptionibus patet, between color and talea posited
quod isti cantores nullam above by the moderni, neither the
differentiarum superius first distinction (as is manifest in
ab istis modernis inter the text) nor the second, for they
colorem et taleam positarum maintain that such a repetition
acceptarent, quoniam non happens both in color and in talea
primam, ut apparet in textu, without anything intervening
nec secundam, quoniam between one color and the next,

124
 Appendix

volunt quod talis repetitio or between one talea and the next,
tam in colore quam in talea as is the case in the tenors of their
fiat sine medio inter unum motets, such as in Apta caro/[Flos
colorem et alium sive inter virginum]10 and in others. 32In this
unam taleam et aliam, ut color and talea are analogous, and
apparet in tenoribus suorum they differ only, as was explained
motetorum sicut in “Apta above, in the fact that in a color
caro” et in aliis. 32Et in hoc such repetition occurs only of like
conveniunt color et talea, pitches, and in a talea only of like
differunt tamen ut dictum note-shapes.
est supra solum in hoc, quod
in colore fit talis repetitio
solum similium vocum, in
talea vero solum similium
figurarum.
De istis tamen opinionibus
33
From these definitions choose,
33

tu qui legis elige tibi reader, the one you find more
delectabiliorem. agreeable.
34
Que differentia, quamvis 34
This distinction, although it is
servetur in quampluribus preserved in quite a few motet tenors,
tenoribus motetorum, non is not preserved in the motet [upper]
tamen servatur in ipsis motetis; voices; examples can be found in
exempla patent in motetis. motets.
 . . .  . . .

35
Nunc auctor nobis ostendit 35
Now the author shows us where
ubi reperitur talis differentia the distinction held by those
data ab illis cantoribus dicens, singers may be found, saying
quod quamvis servetur talis that “although this distinction
differentia in quampluribus is preserved in quite a few
tenoribus motetorum, ipsa motet tenors, it does not apply
tamen non servatur in ipsis in the motet [upper] voices,
motetis, et huius supple and examples (read: ‘of this
differentie sive horum distinction,’ or ‘of those things
supradictorum exempla mentioned above’) can be found in
patent in ipsis motetis. motets.”
 . . .  . . .
Supra quam partem
36
Concerning this part, it should be
36

notandum, quod licet noted that although this

10
This tenor is made up of two thirty-note colores organized in three taleae of twenty-
seven breves. Ed. Günther, The Motets of the Manuscripts Chantilly. Musée condé, 564 (olim
1047) and Modena, Biblioteca estense, α. M. 5, 24, (olim lat. 568) (Rome: American Institute of
Musicology, 1965), 8–13.

125
 Appendix

talis differentia tempore distinction was, in the author’s

auctoris solum reperiretur time, to be found only in the
in tenoribus motetorum, tenors of motets, nevertheless the
tamen moderni subtilius moderni, observing more carefully,
speculantes non solum make this distinction not only in
hanc differentiam ponunt in the tenors of motets, but also in
tenoribus motetorum, ymmo the [upper] motet voices. 37This is
etiam in ipsis motetis. 37Ita because in the author’s time talea
quod ubi tempore auctoris was only located in the tenors of
talea solum ponebatur in motets and likewise color itself, but
tenoribus motetorum et at present they are placed by the
etiam ipse color, ad presens moderns as much in tenors as in
a modernis ponuntur tam in the [upper] motet voices.
motetis quam in tenoribus
ipsorum motetorum.

IXa. Prosdocimus de Beldemandis, Tractatus practice

cantus mensurabilis, Autograph first redaction (1408)11
1
Sequitur capitulum de collore Here follows a chapter on color
1

et tallea, unde collor in musica and talea: in music color is a certain

est quidam processus simillium passage of similar note-shapes
figurarum atque simillium and similar pitches repeated
vocum repetitus pluries in several times in the middle of
medio alicuius cantus secundum some voice, in the same order,
eundem ordinem cum alliquo and with something intervening
medio; et sumitur hic collor per [between repetitions]; and such
quandam simillitudinem ad color is derived through a certain
quendam collorem rethoricum similarity to a certain rhetorical
qui repetitio nominatur, nam embellishment (collorem rethoricum)
sicut in talli collore retorico fit called repetitio, for just as in
pluries repetitio eiusdem dicti, this rhetorical color there is the
ita in collore nostro musico repetition of the same words
fit pluries repetitio eiusdem several times, thus in our musical
melodie, sic quod collor color there is the repetition of the
secundum quod hic sumitur same melody several times; hence,
non est alliud quam quedam color, as it is used here, is nothing
repe<ti>tio simillis mellodie, other than a particular repetition
largo modo sumendo mellodiam of a similar melody, taking melody
ut pro quocumque processu broadly to mean any passage of
simillium figurarum atque similar note-shapes and similar
simillium uocum. pitches.

11
Unpublished edition by Jan Herlinger from Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Lauren-
ziana, Ashburnham 206, fol. 50r; 1 capitulum in marg., nam unclear; 3 duplicem fore in
marg.; 6 perhaps tallia. Used with kind permission.

126
 Appendix

2
Tallea uero sic describitur: 2
And talea is defined thus: Talea
Tallea in musica est quidam in music is a certain passage of
processus sollum simillium only similar note-shapes repeated
figurarum repetitus pluries in several times in the some voice,
aliquo cantu secundum eundem in the same order, and without
ordinem et absque medio. anything intervening [between
repetitions].
3
Ex istis descriptionibus 3
From of these definitions it
patere potest duplicem fore becomes evident that there is
differentiam inter collorem a twofold distinction between
et talleam in musica. 4Prima color and talea in music. 4The first
namque differentia est quia distinction is that in color similar
in collore repetuntur similles note-shapes and similar pitches
figure et similles uoces; in are repeated; but in talea only the
tallea uero non repetuntur similar note-shapes are repeated.
nisi similles figure. 5Secunda 5
The second distinction is that
differentia est quia collor fit cum color occurs with something
medio interposito inter unam intervening between one repetition
repetitionem et alliam; tallea and another, whereas talea occurs
uero fit sine talli medio. without anything intervening.
6
[ins. in marg.:] Sed licet hec 6
But although this opinion is
oppinio sit contra Johanem de opposed to Johannes de Muris and
muris et allios musice antiquitus other explicators of music of the
introductores, past,
[ins. within insertion:] ut as can be seen in the Pratica cantus
uideri habet in pratica cantus mensurabilis by Johannes de Muris,
mensurabillis Johanis de muris, in the last chapter, namely the
in capitulo ultimo, scilicet in chapter on color and talea,
capitulo de collore et tallea, I have nevertheless recorded it as
ipsam tamen recitavi tamquam a being commonly considered usual
modernis comuniter usitatam et and reasonable by the moderns,
rationabilem, allias oppiniones while leaving out other opinions
propter brevitatem dimittendo. for reasons of space.

IXb. Prosdocimus, Tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis,

second redaction12
1
Sequitur capitulum de colore et 1
Here follows a chapter on color
talea. 2Unde est sciendum, and talea. 2Whereof it should

12
Ed. Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker, Scriptorum de musica medii ævi novam
seriem a Gerbertina alteram collegit nuncque primum edidit (Paris: Durand, 1864–76;
reprinted Hildesheim: Olms) 3:225–7, with the following changes (Hicks): 3 quemdam for
quemdem; 12, 14, 15 punctuation altered; 14 si for et si and color vel supplied.

127
 Appendix

quod de colore et talea tres be known that there are three

reperiuntur varie opiniones, different views about color
quarum una fuit Johannis and talea, of which one was
de Muris; secunda vero that of Johannes de Muris;
quorumdam aliorum the second was that of certain
musicorum qui tempore other musicians who were
Johannis de Muris fuerunt, contemporaries of Johannes de
quam opinionem etiam recitat Muris (which view Johannes
Johannes de Muris in suo de Muris also reports in his
tractatu cantus mensurabilis Tractatus cantus mensurabilis in
in capitulo de colore et talea; the chapter on color and talea);
tertia vero est quorumdam and the third is that of certain
modernorum aliter quam moderni, who think about color
priores de colore et talea and talea differently than their
sentientium, partim tamen predecessors but nevertheless
concordantium cum quolibet partially agree with each of the
priorum, quam opinionem quia prior views. This opinion, since
satis rationabilis est, inter alias it is reasonable enough, I will
recitabo ordinate. record along with the others, in
order.
3
Unde primitus est sciendum 3
First it should be known that
quod omnes iste tres opiniones all these three opinions are in
in hoc concordate sunt, quod agreement that color in music
color in musica sit sumptus derives from a certain similarity to
sub quadam similitudine ad a rhetorical embellishment (color
quemdam colorem rethoricum rethoricum) called repetitio, for just
qui repetitio nominatur, as in this rhetorical color there is
quoniam sicut in tali colore the repetition of the same word
rethorico fit pluries repetitio several times, so too in musical
ejusdem dicti, ita in colore color there is a repetition several
musico fit pluries repetitio times of similar note-shapes, or
similium figurarum, sive of similar pitches, or of similar
similium vocum, sive similium note-shapes and pitches at the
figurarum et vocum simul, same time; it is in this respect that
secundum quod varie sunt iste opinions differ. 4That said, I come
opiniones. 4Hoc posito, venio now to the disclosure of the
ad declarationem opinionum aforesaid opinions, which, once
jam dictarum, quibus recitatis we have related and understood
et intellectis, scire tunc bene them, we will then be able to
poterimus quod sit ipse color, et know better what color is, and
ipsa talea, et differentiam inter what talea is, and the distinction
ipsa, si inter ipsa differentiam between them, if we should wish
ponere volemus. to make a distinction between
them.

128
 Appendix

5
Prima ergo opinio, que fuit 5
The first opinion, which, as
Johannis de Muris ut dixi, vult I have said, was that of Johannes
quod nulla sit differentia inter de Muris, would have it that
colorem et talem, immo quod there is no distinction between
unam et idem sint, et ideo in color and talea, but rather that
suo Libello de cantu mensurato they are one and the same, and
colorem diffinivit et non taleam, therefore in his Libellus de cantu
eo quod diffinitionem quam mensurato he defined color and not
dabat de colore intelligebat talea, because he understood the
etiam de talea. 6Unde color et definition he gave of color to apply
talea in musica secundum istam also to talea. 6Whence according
opinionem sic simul in una to this opinion color and talea in
diffinitione diffiniri possunt. music can be defined at the same
time with one definition.
7
Color sive talea in musica 7
Color or talea in music is a
est unus processus similium passage repeated several times
figurarum repetitus, pluries with similar note-shapes in some
in aliquo cantu secundum voice in the same order. 8You
eumdem ordinem. 8Habes can see therefore according to
igitur secundum istam this opinion how two things are
opinionem quomodo duo required for some passage of note-
requiruntur ad hoc quod shapes to be called color or talea;
aliquis processus figurarum first it is required that in such
dicatur color vel talea, primo a passage similar note-shapes
namque requiritur quod in tali should be repeated, and second
processu repetantur similes that these similar note-shapes (in
figure, secundo requiritur whichever color of the same voice)
quod tales figure similes in should be repeated in the same
quolibet colore ejusdem cantus or similar order; and all these
repetantur secundum eumdem things should be understood to be
ordinem sive similem; et hec in the same voice. If one of these
omnia debent intelligi fore in two requirements is wanting, this
eodem cantu, quorum duorum passage will be neither color nor
uno deficiente non erit talis talea according to this opinion.
processus color neque talea
secundum istam opinionem.
9
Secunda vero opinio quam 9
The second opinion which, as
etiam, ut dixi, recitat Johannes I said, Johannes de Muris reports
de Muris in suo Libello de in his Libellus de cantu mensurato
cantu mensurato, in capitulo in the chapter on color and talea,
de colore et talea, vult quod holds that there is a distinction
differentia sit inter colorem between color and talea. The
et taleam; que differentia distinction is plainly evident in
manifeste apparet the descriptions of them, which

129
 Appendix

in eorum descriptionibus que are as follows: “Color in music is

tales sunt: Color in musica a passage only of similar pitches
est unus processus solum repeated several times in some
similium vocum repetitus voice in the same order. 10But
pluries in cantu aliquo talea in music is a passage only
secundum eumdem ordinem. of similar note-shapes repeated
10
Talea vero in musica est unus several times in some voice in
processus solum similium the same order.” 11Therefore you
figurarum repetitus pluries have from these descriptions the
in aliquo cantu secundum distinction between color and
eumdem ordinem. 11Habes talea according to this opinion,
ergo ex his descriptionibus for in color only similar pitches
differentiam talem inter are repeated, but in talea only
colorem et taleam secundum similar note-shapes; and thus for
istam opinionem, quia in colore something to be color it is required
repetuntur solum similes voces, that similar pitches be repeated,
in talea vero repetuntur solum but for something to be talea it is
similes figure; et sic ad hoc required that similar note-shapes
quod aliquis sit color requiritur be repeated, and this according
quod repetantur similes voces, to this opinion. 12But the other
ad hoc vero quod sit talea requirement for any passage of
requiritur quod repetantur note-shapes to be color or talea
similes figure, et hoc secundum according to the first opinion
istam opinionem. 12Aliud vero is also required here for some
quod requirebatur ad hoc quod passage of note-shapes to be color
aliquis processus figurarum or talea according to this [second]
esset color vel talea secundum opinion. If any one of all these
primam opinionem requiritur requirements is wanting, there is
etiam hic ad hoc quod aliquis neither color nor talea according to
processus figurarum sit color this [second] opinion.
vel talea secundum istam
opinionem; quorum omnium
uno deficiente non est color,
nec talea secundum opinionem
hanc.
13
Tertia vero opinio quorumdam 13
The third opinion, held by
modernorum, ut dixi, nulli some moderns (not wishing
predictarum opinionum to contradict either of the
contradicere volens eo quod aforementioned opinions
fuerant magistrorum in hac arte because they were put forth by
multum expertorum conata est teachers very expert in this art)
quodammodo quasi medium is an attempt in a certain way to
inter ipsas insequi velle, vult follow a middle way between the
namque ista opinio quod two, for it holds that there is a
differentia sit distinction between color and

130
 Appendix

inter colorem et taleam, et per talea (and in this agrees with the
hoc convenit cum opinione second opinion and disagrees
secunda et disconvenit cum with the first); and it also assigns
prima; vult etiam ista opinio the following distinction, that
talem differentiam assignando, in color there is a repetition of
quod in colore fiat repetitio the same pitches and the same
similium vocum et similium note-shapes at the same time
figurarum simul et per hoc (and in this it differs from both
disconvenit cum utraque of the foregoing opinions), and
preteritarum opinionum; et that in talea there is a repetition
quod in talea fiat repetitio only of similar note-shapes (and
solum similium figurarum, in this it agrees with them both).
et per hoc convenit cum 14
It also agrees with both in the
utraque ipsarum. 14Convenit other condition stated in the
etiam cum ambabus in alia first opinion, if some passage of
conditione recitata in prima note-shapes is to be called <color
opinione, si aliquis processus or> talea. 15From this opinion,
figurarum denominari habeat therefore, you can derive such
<color vel> talea. 15Ex ista definitions of color and talea.
ergo opinione tales potes 16
Therefore according to this
sumere diffinitiones de colore opinion color is to be defined
et de talea. 16Color ergo thus: Color is a passage of similar
secundum istam opinionem note-shapes and similar pitches
sic diffinitur: color est unus repeated several times in the
processus similium figurarum course of some voice in the same
atque similium vocum repetitus order. 17But talea is accordingly
pluries in medio alicujus cantus defined: talea is a passage only
secundum eumdem ordinem. of similar note-shapes repeated
17
Talea vero sic diffinitur several times in some voice in the
secundum ipsam: talea est same order and without anything
unus processus solum similium intervening. 18Therefore you have
figurarum repetitus pluries a double distinction between color
in aliquo cantu secundum and talea in this case, the first
eumdem ordinem et absque that in color there is a repetition
medio. 18Duplicem ergo habes of similar pitches and similar
differentiam inter colorem note-shapes at the same time,
et taleam secundum opinionem but in talea only of similar note-
hanc, prima est quod in colore shapes. 19The second distinction
fit repetitio similium vocum is that such repetition in the talea
et similium figurarum simul, should occur without anything
in talea vero solum similium intervening, as is set out above
figurarum. 19Secunda differentia in the first opinion; but in color
est quia talis repetitio in talea it can happen with or without
debet fieri absque medio, ut intervening material. 20These are
expositum est superius the three opinions concerning

131
 Appendix

in prima opinione; in colore color and talea, from which you,

vero potest fieri cum medio reader, should select for yourself
et absque medio. 20Iste ergo the one you like most; but the
sunt tres opiniones de colore middle [second] one is the more
et talea, de quibus tu, qui legis, commonly used, although all
elige tibi illam que tibi magis three are reasonable enough.
delectabilis est; media tamen 21
And let that suffice for the
magis communiter est usitata, present regarding color and talea.
licet omnes satis rationabiles
sint. 21Et hic de colore et talea
pro nunc sufficiant.

IXc. Prosdocimus, Tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis,

third redaction13
1
Sequitur Capitulum de colore 1
Here follows a chapter on color
et tallea. 2Unde sciendum est and talea. 2It should be known
quod de colore et tallea tres that there are three different
reperiuntur varie opiniones, views about color and talea, of
quarum una fuit Johannis which one was that of Johannes
de Muris; secunda vero de Muris; the second was that of
fuit quorundam aliorum certain other musicians who were
musicorum qui tempore contemporaries of Johannes de
Johannis de Muris fuerunt, Muris (which view Johannes de
quam opinionem etiam Muris also reports in his Tractatus
recitat ipse Johannes de cantus mensurabilis in the chapter
Muris in suo tractatu cantus on color and talea); and the third is
mensurabilis, in capitulo de that of certain moderni, who think
colore et talea; tertia vero est about color and talea differently
quorundam modernorum than their predecessors but
aliter quam priores de nevertheless partially agree with
colore et tallea sentientium, each of the prior views, which
partim tamen cum quolibet opinion, since it is reasonable
priorum concordantium, enough, I will record along with
quam opinionem, quia satis the others, in order.
rationabilis videtur, inter alias
ordinate recitabo.
3
Prima ergo opinio, que fuit 3
The first opinion, which, as
Johannis de Muris, ut dixi, vult I have said, was that of Johannes
quod nulla sit differentia inter de Muris, would have it that

13
Unpublished edition by Jan Herlinger, from Lucca, Biblioteca Governativa 359, fols.
25v–26v. Capitalization, punctuation, paragraphing, j/i, and v/u normalized; abbrevia-
tions expanded silently; otherwise, manuscript spellings retained (including talea/tallea
and hretoricus). Used with kind permission.

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 Appendix

colorem et taleam, imo quod there is no distinction between

unum et idem sint, et ideo in color and talea, but rather that
suo libello de cantu mensurato they are one and the same, and
colorem diffinivit et non therefore in his Libellus de cantu
taleam, eo quod diffinitionem mensurato he defined color and
quam dabat de colore not talea, because he understood
inteligebat etiam de tallea; the definition he gave of color
unde color et talea in musica, to apply also to talea, and thus
secundum istam opinionem, according to this opinion color
sic insimul et unica diffinitione and talea in music can be defined
diffiniuntur. at the same time with one
definition.
4
Color sive tallea in musica 4
Color or talea in music is a
est unus processus solum passage of only similar note-
similium figurarum atque shapes and rests repeated several
pausarum repetitus pluries times in one and the same
in uno et eodem cantu voice in the same order and
secundum eundem ordinem without anything intervening
et absque aliquo medio, ex [between repetitions], from
qua diffinitione habere potes which definition you can see
quomodo, secundum istam how, according to this opinion,
opinionem, tria requiruntur three things are required for
ad hoc quod aliquis processus some passage of note-shapes
figurarum et pausarum dicatur and rests to be called color or
color vel talea. 5Primo nanque talea. 5First it is required that
requiritur quod in tali processu in such a passage only similar
repetantur solum similes figure note-shapes and rests should be
et pause, et non voces; secundo repeated, and not the pitches;
requiritur quod tales figure et second that these note-shapes
pause repetantur secundum and pauses should be repeated
similem ordinem priori; in an order similar to the first
tertio requiritur quod tales time; third it is required that such
processus positi sint in uno et passages be placed in one and
eodem cantu sine medio aliquo the same voice without anything
interposito, ita quod post interposed between them, so that
primum immediate sequatur after the first the second should
secundus, et post secundum follow immediately, and after
tercius, et post tertium quartus, the second the third, and after
et sic ultra secundum numerum the third the fourth, and thus
repetitionis talis processus further according to the number
quorum trium requisitorum of repetitions of this passage,
uno deficiente non erit talis in which if one of these three
processus color neque tallea, requirements is wanting this
secundum istam opinionem. passage will be neither color nor
talea according to this opinion.

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 Appendix

6
Secunda vero opinio, quam, 6
The second opinion that, as
ut dixi, recitat Johannes I said, Johannes de Muris reports
de Muris in suo libello de in his Libellus de cantu mensurato,
cantu mensurato, vult quod holds that there is a distinction
differentia sit inter colorem between color and talea; such that
et taleam; unde color, color, according to this opinion,
secundum hanc opinionem, is defined thus: color in music is
sic diffinitur: color in musica a passage of only similar pitches
est unus processus solum and rests repeated several times
similium vocum et pausarum in one and the same voice in the
repetitus pluries in uno et same order and with nothing
eodem cantu secundum intervening [between repetitions];
eundem ordinem et absque but talea, according to this view,
medio aliquo; talea vero, is described thus: talea in music
secundum hanc opinionem, is a passage only of similar
taliter describitur: tallea in note-shapes and rests repeated
musica est unus processus several times in one and the
solum similium figurarum et same voice in the same order
pausarum repetitus pluries in and with nothing intervening
uno et eodem cantu secundum [between repetitions]. 7From
eundem ordinem et absque these two descriptions we may
medio aliquo. 7Ex quibus infer the distinction between
duabus descriptionibus talem color and talea according to this
coligere possumus differentiam opinion, for in color only similar
inter colorem et taleam, pitches and rests are repeated,
secundum istam opinionem, if there be any rests, but in talea
quoniam in colore repetuntur only similar note-shapes and
solum similes voces et pause, rests are repeated, if there be any
si pause ibi reperiantur; in rests, and both color and talea,
talea vero repetuntur solum according to this opinion, must
similes figure et pause, si ibi be repeated in the same order
pause reperiantur, et tam and with nothing intervening,
color quam talea, secundum just as in the color or talea of the
istam opinionem, debet repeti first opinion.
secundum eundem ordinem
et absque medio aliquo,
prout color vel talea de prima
opinione.
8
Tertia vero opinio 8
The third opinion, held by some
quorundam modernorum, moderns who, as I have said, do
ut dixi, nulli predictarum not wish to wholly contradict
duarum opinionum in totum either of the aforementioned
contradicere volentium, eo opinions, since they were put
quod fuerant magistrorum in forth by teachers very expert in
hac arte multum expertorum, this art, is an attempt in a

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 Appendix

medium quodammodo inter certain way to follow a middle

duas opiniones primas tenet way between the two opinions
iam recitatas. 9Vult nanque already discussed. 9First, this
primo opinio ista, quod opinon holds that there is a
differentia sit inter collorem distinction between color and
et taleam, et per hoc convenit talea, and in this agrees with the
cum opinione secunda et second opinion and disagrees
disconvenit cum prima. 10Vult with the first. 10Second, [it holds]
secundo quod in colore fiat that in color there is a repetition
repetitio simul similium vocum of the same pitches and the same
et similium figurarum atque note-shapes and rests, if there
pausarum, si ibi reperiantur, be any, and this with or without
et hoc cum medio vel sine something intervening between
medio interposito inter unum one color and the next, for
colorem et alium, ut verbi example between the first color
gratia inter primum colorem et and the second, and between
secundum, et inter secundum the second and the third, and so
et tertium, et sic ultra, forth, according to the number of
secundum numerum colorum colores found in that voice; and in
in eodem cantu repertorum; this [the third opinion] disagrees
et per hoc disconvenit cum with both of the preceding ones.
utraque primarum opinionum. 11
Third, it holds that in talea there
11
Vult tertio quod in tallea is a repetition only of similar
fiat repetitio solum similium note-shapes and pauses, if pauses
figurarum et pausarum, si ibi there be, and in this it agrees
reperiantur, et per hoc convenit with both of the earlier opinions.
cum utraque primarum 12
Fourth, it holds that this kind of
opinionum. 12Vult quarto repetition in talea can be carried
quod huiusmodi repetitio in out with or without intervening
talea possit esse cum medio material placed between one
et sine medio interposito inter talea and another, and in this
unam taleam et aliam, et per it disagrees with both of the
hoc disconvenit cum utraque prior opinions. 13Fifth, it holds
primarum opinionum. 13Vult that these repetitions of similar
quinto quod iste repetitiones pitches or note-shapes with rests
vocum vel figurarum similium (if any), occur in one and the
cum pausis, si ibi reperiantur, same order, and in this it agrees
fiant secundum unum et with both of the prior opinions.
eundem ordinem, et per
hoc convenit cum utraque
primarum opinionum.
Ex hiis ergo que dicta sunt de
14
From what has been said about
14

hac tercia opinione tales potes this third opinion you can infer
coligere descriptiones de ipso the definitions of color and talea;
colore atque talea; unde whence, according to this third

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 Appendix

color secundum hanc terciam opinion, color is to be defined

opinionem sic describi potest: thus: color in music is a certain
color in musica est quidam passage of similar pitches and
processus similium vocum similar note-shapes and rests
atque similium figurarum et (should there be any), repeated
pausarum, si ibi reperiantur, several times in some voice in
repetitus pluries in aliquo cantu the same order, with or without
secundum eundem ordinem, interposed material [between
cum medio vel sine medio. repetitions]. 15And talea is
15
Tallea vero sic describitur: accordingly defined thus: talea in
tallea in musica est quidam music is a certain passage only
processus solum similium of similar note-shapes and rests
figurarum et pausarum, si ibi (should there be any) repeated
reperiantur, repetitus pluries several times in some voice in
in aliquo cantu secundum the same order, with or without
eundem ordinem, cum medio anything intervening. 16And from
vel sine medio. 16Et ex hiis these definitions you have the
descriptionibus talem habes following distinction between
differentiam inter colorem et color and talea, according to this
taleam, secundum hanc tertiam third opinion: that in color similar
opinionem, quoniam in colore pitches and similar note-shapes
repetuntur similes voces et are repeated, but in talea it is
similes figure; in talea vero non only similar note-shapes that are
repetuntur nisi similes figure. repeated.
17
Istis sic positis, est sciendum 17
All that said, it should be
quod in qualibet istarum known in all these three
trium opinionum quidam opinions color is named from
istorum processuum color a certain similarity to a certain
nominatus est sub quadam rhetorical embellishment (colorem
similitudine ad quendam hretoricum) called repetitio, for just
colorem hretoricum qui as in this rhetorical color there is
repetitio nominatur, quoniam the repetition of the same word
sicut in tali colore hretorico fit several times, so too in musical
pluries repetitio eiusdem dicti, color there is a repetition several
ita in colore musico fit pluries times of similar note-shapes or
repetitio similium figurarum of similar pitches, together or on
vel similium vocum insimul their own. 18The other passage
vel de per se. 18Alius vero is called talea because such a
processus ideo talea nominatur, passage is broken up [talleatus]
quoniam talis processus est ita and divided in such a way that
talleatus et divisus quod ab alio it can be distinguished from
distinguitur atque cognoscitur. another one and recognized.
Ex quibus dictis clarissime
19
From what has been said it is
19

patet quod quilibet istorum obviously manifest that either of

duorum processuum potest these two passages can be called

136
 Appendix

denominari et color et both color and talea according

talea secundum quamlibet to whichever of these three
istarum trium opinionum, et opinions, and rightly so, but they
bene, sed pro tanto diversis are called by so many different
nominibus appellati sunt ut names in order that they should
abinvicem distinguantur atque be distinguished from each other
cognoscantur. and recognized.
20
Iste ergo sunt tres opiniones These therefore are the three
20

diverse de colore et talea, de differing opinions concerning

quibus tu qui legis ellige tibi color and talea, from which you,
illam que tibi magis reader, should select for yourself
delectabilis est. the one you find more agreeable.
Et hec de colore et talea dicta
21
And let that suffice for the
21

pro nunc sufficiant. present regarding color and talea.

Xa. Prosdocimus, Tractatus practicae cantus mensurabilis

ad modum Ytalicorum, first redaction (1412)14
1
Nunc de colore sive talea quod 1
Now we come to define color (or
idem est determinare sequitur; talea, which is the same thing);
unde color sive talea in musica color (or talea) in music is a
est repetitio similium figurarum repetition of similar note-shapes
vel similium vocum pluries or similar pitches found multiple
reperta in aliquo cantu ex qua times in some voice, from which
diffinitione colligere potes definition you can infer how color
quomodo duplex est color sive (or talea) is twofold, for there is one
talea, quoniam quedam est in kind in which there is repetition
qua fit repetitio solum similium only of similar note-shapes, and
figurarum, et quedam est in another kind in which there is
qua fit repetitio solum similium repetition only of similar pitches,
vocum, et potest addi tertia and a third can be added, which is
que est illa in qua fit repetitio that in which there is a repetition
similium vocum et similium of similar pitches and similar note-
figurarum simul. shapes at the same time.
2
Et hec fuit intentio Johannis 2
And this was the premise of
de Muris, qui in suo tractatu Johannes de Muris, who in this
de musica mensurata Gallica, treatise on French mensural music,
in capitulo ultimo, scilicet in in the last chapter, namely in the
capitulo de colore et talea, ponit chapter on color and talea, asserts
colorem et taleam esse unam et that color and talea are the same

14
Ed. Coussemaker, Scriptorum de musica medii aevi, 4:247–8.

137
 Appendix

eamdam rem, dato quod aliqui thing, given that some others
alii ponant differentiam, ut might maintain a distinction, as
ipse recitat in littera, dicentes he himself records in his account,
colorem esse illum in quo saying color to be that in which
fit repetitio solum similium there is a repetition only of similar
vocum, et taleam esse illam in pitches, and talea to be that in
qua fit repetitio solum similium which there is a repetition only of
figurarum quorum opinio licet similar note-shapes; although this
quibusdam videatur veritatem view might seem correct to some,
obtinere, verior tamen mihi to me the opinion of Johannes de
videtur opinio Johannis de Muris seems more correct. Hence,
Muris, propter quod dico quod I say that these two words, color
ista duo nomina color et talea and talea, signify one and the same
unam et eamdem rem important, thing, and differ only in name, just
nec differunt nisi nomine, sicut as these two words: presbiter and
ista duo nomina presbiter et sacerdos.
sacerdos.
3
Unde sicut una et eadem res 3
Just as one and the same thing
istis duobus diversis nominibus, [“priest”] is denoted by these
scilicet presbiter et sacerdos two words, presbiter and sacerdos,
nominata, ipsis nominatur though they name it in different
diversis respectibus, eo quod respects—because presbiter means,
dicitur presbiter, quasi aliis as it were, “aliis prebens iter”
prebens iter, et sacerdos quasi [one showing others the way] and
aliis sacra dans, ita etiam sacerdos “aliis sacra dans” [one
eadem res nominari potest istis giving others the sacrament]—so
duobus diversis nominibus, too one and the same thing can
scilicet color et talea, diversis be named with these two terms,
tamen respectibus, eo quod namely color and talea, although
dicitur color metaphorice ad in different respects, because
quemdam colorem rhetoricum it is called color metaphorically
qui repetitio nominatur, et according to a certain rhetorical
sumitur hoc modo metaphora, embellishment (colorem rhetoricum)
quoniam sicut in colore retorico called repetitio, and the metaphor
fit pluries repetitio ejusdem is taken as follows: just as in the
dicti, ita in colore musico fit rhetorical color there is repetition
pluries repetitio similium vocum of the same word several times,
vel similium figurarum. 4Talea so too in the musical color there
vero dicitur, eo quod hujusmodi is a repetition of similar pitches
repetitiones sunt taliter ordinate, or similar note-shapes several
quod una repetitio taleata sive times. 4But it is called talea because
divisa est ab alia. repetitions of this kind are
arranged in such a way that one
repetition is distinct or divided
(taleata sive divisa) from another.

138
 Appendix

Xb. Prosdocimus, Tractatus practicae cantus mensurabilis ad

modum Ytalicorum, second redaction (c. 1425–8)15
1
Nunc de colore sive talea quod 1
Now we come to define color (or
idem est, sequitur determinare; talea, which is the same thing);
unde color sive talea in musica color (or talea) in music is a
est repetitio similium figurarum repetition of similar note-shapes
vel similium vocum pluries or similar pitches found multiple
reperta in aliquo cantu absque times in some voice without
medio. 2Ex qua diffinitione anything intervening. 2From
colligere potes quomodo duplex this definition you can infer
est color sive talea quoniam how color (or talea) is twofold,
quedam est in qua fit repetitio for there is one kind in which
solum similium figurarum et there is repetition only of similar
quedam est in qua fit repetitio note-shapes, and another kind in
solum similium vocum, et potest which there is repetition only of
addi tertia que est illa in qua similar pitches, and a third can
fit repetitio similium vocum be added, which is that in which
et similium figurarum simul. there is a repetition of similar
3
Propter quod est sciendum quod pitches and similar note-shapes
ista duo nomina color et talea at the same time. 3Regarding
unam et eandem rem important this it should be known that
nec differunt nisi nomine, sicut these two words, color and talea,
ista duo nomina presbiter et signify one and the same thing,
sacerdos. and differ only in name, just
4
Unde sicut una et eadem res as the two words presbiter and
istis duobus nominibus diversis sacerdos.
scilicet presbiter et sacerdos 4
Just as one and the same thing
nominata, ipsis nominatur [“priest”] is denoted by these
diversis respectibus sive two words, presbiter and sacerdos,
rationibus, eo quod dicitur though they name it in different
presbiter quasi aliis prebens respects and for different
iter, et sacerdos quasi aliis dans reasons—because presbiter
sacra, ita etiam una et eadem means, as it were, “aliis prebens
res nominari potest istis duobus iter” [one showing others the
diversis nominibus scilicet way], and sacerdos “aliis dans
color et talea dato quod diversis sacra” [one giving others the
respectibus sive rationibus, eo sacrament]—so too one and the
quod dicitur color metaphorice same thing can be named with

15
Ed. Claudio Sartori, La notazione italiana del Trecento in una redazione inedita del “Tracta-
tus practice cantus mensurabilis ad modum ytalicorum” di Prosdocimo de Beldemandis (Florence:
Leo S. Olschki, 1938), 69–70, but with the errata listed in Prosdocimus de Beldemandis,
A Treatise on the Practice of Mensural Music in the Italian Manner, ed. and trans. Jay A. Huff
(Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1972), 7. The dating is Gallo’s, Music of the Mid-
dle Ages II, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56.

139
 Appendix

ad quemdam colorem rhetoricum these two terms, namely color

qui repetitio nominatur, et and talea, although in different
sumitur hoc modo metaphora, respects and for different
quoniam sicut in colore retorico reasons, because it is called color
fit pluries repetitio eiusdem dicti, metaphorically according to a
ita in colore musico fit pluries certain rhetorical embellishment
repetitio similium vocum vel (colorem rhetoricum) called
similium figurarum. repetitio, and the metaphor is
5
Talea vero dicitur, eo quod taken as follows: just as in the
huiusmodi repetitiones sunt rhetorical color there is repetition
taliter ordinate quod una of the same word several times,
repetitio taleata sive divisa est ab so too in the musical color
alia. there is a repetition of similar
6
Et licet ita sit, illud, tamen, pitches or similar note-shapes
quod apud omnes cantores several times. 5But it is called
communiter tenetur est quod talea because repetitions of this
ipsi vocant colorem quando kind are arranged in such a way
repetuntur similes voces solum, that one repetition is distinct or
taleam vero vocant quando divided [taleata sive divisa] from
repetuntur solum similes figure another.
et semper absque medio aliquo 6
And although this is the case,
interposito inter unam taleam nevertheless it is commonly
[et aliam] sibi immediatam sive believed among all singers
inter unum colorem et alium sibi that it is called color when only
immediatum. similar pitches are repeated, but
talea when only similar note-
shapes are repeated, and always
without anything intervening
between one talea and the one
directly following, or one color
and the following one.

XI. Ugolino of Orvieto, Declaratio Musicae Disciplinae

(c. 1430)16
1
Sequitur de colore, unde color in 1
Here follows [a chapter] on color: in
musica est vel vocatur similium music a passage of similar note-shapes
figurarum unus processus pluries repeated several times in the same voice
repetitus in eodem cantu. is, or is called, color.
. . . . . .

16
Ugolino of Orvieto, Declaratio Musicae Disciplinae, ed. Albert Seay, Corpus Scripto-
rum de Musica 7ii (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1960), 264–6.

140
 Appendix

2
Et ideo dicit auctor, Sequitur 2
And thus the author says “Here
supple capitulum de colore, follows (supply: ‘a chapter’) on
in quo capitulo auctor ponit color.” In this chapter the author sets
diffinitionem coloris musicalis, out the definition of musical color,
dicens, unde color in musica saying that “color” in music is or is
est vel vocatur unus processus called a passage of similar note-shapes
similium figurarum pluries repeated several times in the same voice.
repetitus in eodem cantu.
3
Circa quam diffinitionem 3
Regarding this definition, take note
notandus est processus similium of the phrase “a passage of similar
figurarum, et cetera, quia note-shapes, etc.,” because singers
cantores volentes in cantibus wanting to make color in their
suis colorem facere, cantus songs distinguish their songs in this
suos eo modo distingunt. way. 4When they make a passage
4
Nam quarundam figurarum, from certain note-shapes, such as
ut puta longarum, brevium, from longs, breves, semibreves,
semibrevium, minimarum, et or minims, etc., they repeat the
cetera, facto processu easdem same note-shapes several times
figuras pluries repetunt in that order. 5But this kind of
seriatim. 5Huiusmodi autem repetition is flexible, not foregoing
repetitio voluntaria est, the order of the measure of the
mensurarum modi, temporis mode, tempus, and prolation, and
et prolationis ordine non furthermore the modus of the rests
dimisso, quo etiam pausarum is preserved; therefore the note-
modus servatur, repetuntur shapes are repeated—that is, notes
ergo figurae, id est, notae et and rests—two, three, or four times
pausae, bis, ter vel quater as the composer desires, which
ad componentis voluntatem repetition is called color in music.
quae repetitio color in musica 6
Indeed music is color-ized, that is,
nuncupatur. 6Coloratur enim decorated, by such embellishment
musica, id est, decoratur, (tali colore), through which it
tali colore quo intuentium appears beautiful to the eyes of
oculis et audientium auribus those who look upon it and the ears
praesentatur decora. of those who listen to it.
7
[XI-2] Pro quo nota quod aliqui 8
Concerning this, note that some
cantores ponunt differentiam inter singers make a distinction between
colorem et taleam, nam vocant color and talea: for they call it color
colorem quando repetuntur voces when similar pitches are repeated, but
similes, taleam vero quando talea when similar note-shapes are
repetuntur similes figurae, et sic repeated and thus the note-shapes occur
fiunt figurae diversarum vocum. on different pitches.
8
Posita superius coloris 8
After stating the above-noted
diffinitione ponit hic auctor definition of color the author relates
quandam differentiam quam a certain distinction which singers
suo tempore faciebant in his time made between color and

141
 Appendix

cantores inter colorem et talea, color being, as already noted,

taleam, color enim, ut dictum the multiple repetition of similar
est, est similium figurarum note-shapes. 9This repetition can
plurima repetitio. 9Haec be carried out with similar note-
autem repetitio potest fieri shapes on the same pitches and
per similes figuras earundem through similar note-shapes on
vocum et per similes different pitches. 10Certain singers
figuras diversarum vocum. called repetition of the very same
10
Repetitionem per similes pitches by similar note-shapes
figuras earundem vocum color, but the repetition of different
vocabant quidam cantores pitches by similar note-shapes
colorem, sed repetitionem per talea, which definition of talea the
similes figuras diversarum author did not uphold, because he
vocum vocabant taleam, cuius did not concern himself with this
taleae diffinitionem non posuit distinction. 11And for that reason
auctor quia de ipsa differentia the author writes in his text “note
non curavit. 11Et ideo dicit that some singers make a distinction
auctor in textu, nota quod aliqui between color and talea: for they call
cantores ponunt differentiam inter it color when pitches (also similar
colorem et taleam, nam vocant in note-shapes) are repeated, but
colorem quando voces et similes in talea when similar note-shapes are
figuris repetuntur, sed ipsi vocant repeated (and not similar pitches),
taleam quando similes figurae and thus the note-shapes occur on
repetuntur et non similes voces, different pitches.” 12Therefore color
et sic fiunt figurae diversarum consists in a passage of several
vocum. 12Stat ergo color in note-shapes repeated several times
processu plurium figurarum with similar pitches. 13But talea in a
similium vocum pluries passage only of several note-shapes
repetito. 13Sed talea in processu repeated several times and not with
solum plurium figurarum similar pitches. 14For in fact the
etiam pluries repetitio et non former passage (which is the color)
vocum similium. 14Hic namque has to be found in the middle of a
processus qui color est in voice, [since it is] nothing other than
medio cantus habet reperiri, a certain melody repeated several
qui nihil aliud est quam times in a voice, and that passage
quaedam melodia in cantu [color] differs from that one which
pluries repetita et differt iste is called “introitus.”17 15For this
processus ab eo qui introitus passage happens when some part
nuncupatur. 15Hic enim of any melody follows the end of
processus fit cum aliqua pars another part of the same melody.

17
On Ugolino’s definition of “introitus” in ll. 14–16, see Zayaruznaya, “[I]ntroitus:
Untexted Beginnings and Scribal Confusion in the Machaut and Ivrea Manuscripts,”
Digital Philology 5 (2016): note 6 (pp. 68–9).

142
 Appendix

alicuius cantus finem alterius At the boundary of the parts of

16

partis eiusdem cantus assumit. the song, therefore, this passage has
16
In fine ergo partium cantus to be found, which is improperly
hic habet reperiri processus qui called “color,” although it is
improprie dicitur color licet commonly used in this way.
communiter valeat appellari.
17
Quae differentia quamvis 17
This distinction, although it is
servetur in quam pluribus preserved in quite a few motet tenors,
tenoribus motetorum non is not preserved in the motet [upper]
tamen servatur in ipsis motetis. voices. 18Examples can be found in
18
Exempla patent in motetis . . . motets . . .
19
In hac ultima et finali huius 19
In this last and final part of his
operis parte auctor docet treatise the author shows where
ubi haec differentia coloris this distinction between color and
et taleae habeat reperiri, et talea is to be found, and says that in
dicit quod tempore suo ipsa his time this distinction was only
differentia solum reperiebatur to be found in many motet tenors,
in quam pluribus tenoribus bur not in the [upper] motet voices,
motetorum, sed non as is apparent in the examples of
reperiebatur in ipsis motetis, color and talea in motets . . . 20But
ut coloris et taleae exempla although formerly cantores made use
patent in ipsis motetis. . . . of color and talea only in the tenors
20
Sed quamvis ii cantores of motets, the savvier and more
antiqui solum in motetorum observant moderns use various
tenoribus colore et talea colores and taleae in tenors, upper
uterentur, moderni tamen voices, and contratenors, preserving
perspicacius intelligentes his the metrical organization, and thus
coloris et taleae differentiis in let there be an end to this Declaratio
tenoribus, superioribus atque musicae mensuratae by the master
contratenoribus mensurarum teacher Johannes de Muris.
ordine servato utuntur, et sic
sit finis declarationis huius
musicae mensuratae eximii
doctoris magistri Iohannis de
Muris.

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152
 Index

Alberti, Leon Battista 20 repeating pitches and taleae in

Alpha/Cetus 38n25 tenor (Ex. 6.1) 90
Amours/Faus Semblant (Machaut M15) tenor (Ex. 6.3) 99
7, 44, 57; upper-voice texts of upper voices 93
and tenor structures upper-voice blocks aligned (Ex.
(Fig. 4.2) 45 6.4) 102
Anon. IV on color 24 color:
Anon. V 38 = flowering of sound or pitch
on color 25 – 6, 29, 32, 39 (Garlandia) 25
passage on color and talea from = patterned and repetitive melodic
Ars cantus mensurabilis 118 ornamentation (Garlandia) 24
on talea 25 – 6, 29 – 30, 39 = repetition in the same voice
Apollinis/Zodiacum 86 – 7, 106 (Garlandia) 25
Apta caro 125 = repetition of notes with sincope
Aquinas, Thomas 40 and rests (Notizia) 119
Are post libamina/Nunc surgunt = repetition of same or similar
(Matheus de Sancto Johanne) note-shapes (Goscalcus) 118
106n4 = repetition of same pitches: “some
Arnold of Martin 86n7 singers”, reported by Muris
109; Goscalcus, crediting “some
Bent, Margaret 20 – 1, 30, 38 singers” 118; Pipudi’s narrower
analysis of Fons/O livoris (Machaut definition 117
M9) 17 – 18 = repetition of same pitches or
analysis of Tribum/Quoniam (Vitry) same note-shapes (Pipudi’s
4, 6 broader definition) 117
Besseler, Heinrich 4 = repetition of same pitches and
Billart, see Salve virgo virginum note-shapes (Prosdocimus, citing
Boen, Johannes 12n4, 29n8 the “moderns”) 131
on color 26, 33 – 4, 39, 73n14 = repetition of same pitches
on color-izing 34 and note-shapes and rests
on construction of tenor of (Prosdocimo, reporting on the
Impudenter/Virtutibus 87 – 8 “moderns”) 135 – 6
passage on color from Ars 116 – 17 = repetition of same pitches with
Boogaart, Jacques 4, 15 – 16, 41’; different note-shapes (Anon.
analysis of S’il estoit/S’Amours V) 118
13 – 14, 72 – 4, 76, 79, 81 = repetition of similar note-shapes
(Ugolino, citing Muris) 140 – 1
Ciconia, Johannes, see O proles = repetition of similar note-shapes
Hispanie and pitches (Prosdocimus, citing
Clap/Sus robin 7n12 the “moderni”) 123
Clark, Alice 14 – 15, 83 = repetition of similar note-shapes
Colla/Bona (Vitry) 4n8, 7, 9, 49, and rests with nothing
85 – 103 intervening (Prosdocimus, citing
breves 64 – 75 (Ex. 6.2) 97 Muris) 133
composed top down 105 – 6 = repetition of similar note-shapes
hypothetical compositional plan and similar pitches with
(Fig. 6.1) 98 something intervening
poetic lines in 95 (Prosdoscimo) 126 – 7
Index

= repetition of similar note-shapes as pulchritudo 24 – 5

in the same voice: Muris 109; as rhetorical 40, 126, 128, 136,
Prosdocimus, quoting Muris 138, 140
119 – 20 “some moderns” on 35
= repetition of similar note-shapes “some singers” on 30 – 1, 35,
or similar pitches, or both 38, 109
(Prosdocimus) 137 as a 13th-c. music-theoretical
= repetition of similar note-shapes term 24
or similar pitches with nothing Ugolino on 28, on 37 – 8
intervening (Prosdocimus, citing color and talea not just in tenors but in
Muris) 139 upper voices (Ugolino, citing the
= repetition of similar note-shapes “moderns”) 143
or similar pitches, or both at color-izing notes (Boen) 116
once (Prosdocimus) 128 color-izing tenors (Murino) 115
= repetition of similar pitches: color-izing voices (Murino) 112 – 13
Prosdocimus, citing Muris on conductus 12
“some singers”) 121 – 2, 130, 138; contrafacts 106
Ugolino, citing Muris’s “some “counter-isorhythm” 6
singers” 141 – 2 Cum statua/Hugo (Vitry) 7, 49n14,
= repetition of similar pitches 54, 57, 88; upper-voice blocks
only with nothing intervening aligned (Ex. 4.3) 56
(Prosdocimus, citing singers
disagreeing with Muris) 124 Dame/Fins cuers (Machaut M11)
= repetition of similar pitches and 52n18
rests with nothing intervening diminution 47, 49, 51, 57, 59, 61, 87,
(Prosdocimus, citing Muris’s 89, 100 – 1
“some singers”) 134 Dit de franc Gontier (Vitry)
= repetition of similar pitches or 91 – 2, 96
similar note-shapes with nothing Du Fay, Guillaume, see O gemma lux
intervening (Prosdocimus, citing
“all singers”) 140 Earp, Lawrence 52
= repetition with something Egidius de Pusiex 7, 105n2; see
intervening (Prosdocimus, citing also Ida/Portio Et gaudebit cor
the “moderni”) 123 vestrum
= resemblance of note-shapes Everist, Mark 16
(Boen) 116
= talea 28; Prosdocimus, citing Fibonacci sequence 67, 69
Muris 120 – 1, 129, 133, 138 – 9 figura, translation of 29
= voice exchange (Garlandia) 25 Flos/Celsa (Vitry) 41, 49, 59, 61, 63, 65,
Anon. V on 29, 118 79n29, 79n30, 89, 106n3
Boen on 26, 33 – 4, 116 – 17 periodic rhythmic repetition in
Garlandia on 24 – 5 (Fig. 4.8) 51
Goscalcus on 34 – 5, 117 – 18 upper-voice blocks aligned
more obvious to sight than hearing (Ex. 4.6) 62
(Boen) 117 upper-voice taleae aligned
medieval definition (repetition of (Ex. 4.5) 60
rhythms and pitches together) Fons/O livoris (Machaut M9) 17,
23, 26 – 7 79n29
modern definition (repetition Fortune/Ma dolour 106
of pitch independently of
rhythm) 23 Garlandia, Johannes de, on color
Murino on 26, 110 – 16 24 – 5
Muris on 26, 29, 109 Garrit/In nova (Vitry) 88n12
Notitia on 34, 119 Gombosi, Otto 67 – 8, 72, 76, 78
Pipudi on 26, 34 – 5, 117 Goscalcus 38
Prosdocimus on 35 – 40, 119 – 40 on color and talea 26, 34 – 5, 44

154
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passage on color and talea from Libera me (from Minor sum) 99n27
third Berkeley treatise 117 – 18 Libera me de sanguinibus 98, 99 (Ex.
Grocheio, Johannes de 15n13 6.3), 100
on order of composition 13 Lucan 92
on tenor as foundation 11 – 12, 19 – 20 Luce clarus 119
Großtalea 4, 41, 44 – 5 Ludwig, Friedrich 4, 44, 68
Günther, Ursula 4, 13
Machaut, Guillaume de 44
Hareu/Helas (Machaut M10) 7, 47, motets 59
49, 98; upper-voice and tenor order of composition 83, 105
structures (Fig. 4.5) 48 Phasendifferenz in 61
Harrison, Frank 1, 4, 16, 21, 49, 61 – 2, text relations between motetus and
106; table relating poems to taleae triplum 75, 79n29
(Fig. 2.1) 17 upper-voice texts 96
He Mors/Fine Amour (Machaut M3) use of Großtalea 4
15n13, 79n30 see also Amours/Faus Semblant;
Helene, Henricus 86n7 Hareu/Helas; Hélas/Corde mesto;
Hélas/Corde mesto (Machaut M12) Quant/Amor; Aui’Ha! Fortune;
7, 18n25, 44, 46, 99n27; S’il estoir/S’Amours; Trop plus/
upper-voice and tenor structures Biauté
(Fig. 4.1) 45 manuscripts:
Hicks, Andrew 109 Bologna, Museo Internazionale
hocket 4n6, 12, 19, 46, 51 – 2, 54, 76, e Biblioteca della Musica,
88, 106 MS Q15 57
Horace, Ars poetica 54 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale
Huot, Sylvia 18 Albert Ier, MS 19606 106n5
Cambrai, Médiathèque municipale,
Ida/Portio (Egidius de Pusiex) 7, 29, MS B 1328 7n13, 99n26
49, 105n2, 118; upper-voice and Catania, Biblioteche Riunite Civica
tenor structures (Fig. 4.7) 50 e A. Ursino Recupero D. 39
Impudenter/Virtutibus 87 117n6
In virtute/Decens (Vitry) 1, 4, 6 – 7, 41, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 57
46, 51n14, 57, 88, 106n3 El Escorial, Real Biblioteca del
10-breve taleae (Ex. 1.1) 2 Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El
repeating upper-voice rhythms Escorial, MS O.II. IO 86n6
(Ex. 1.2) 5 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea
structure of tenor and upper Laurenziana, Ashburnham 206
voices 54 126n11
upper-voice blocks aligned (Ex. Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare MS 115
4.2) 55 7, 57
introitus 106, 142 Lucca, Biblioteca Governativa,
isomelism 36n21 MS 359 132n13
isoperiodism 1 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,
isorhythm 1, 21, 38, 40, 76 MS 595 83
definition of 1n2 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
upper-voice 19 – 20 France, f. fr. 146 31n15, 57n25,
106n5
Je voi/Fauvel 6 – 7, 57; upper-voice Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
blocks aligned (Ex. 4.4) 58 France, lat. 16663 24
Joseph of Exeter 88n12 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, lat. 2444 59n29
Kügle, Karl 4, 51 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, n. acq. fr. 23190
Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel 13, 19, (Trémoïlle) 57, 99n26
85, 88 Seville, Biblioteca Capitular
Les l’ormel/Main 7n12 Colombina 5 – 2-25 86, 117n5

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Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Post missarum/Post misse 31

Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5321 113 n. 3 tenor (Ex. 3.1) 32
materia 13 – 14, 16, 20, 87, 106, 110 triplum passages (Ex. 3.2) 32
Minor sum 99n28 Powell, Newman 67 – 9, 72, 76
Mon chant/Qui doloreus 106n3 Prosdocimus de Beldemandis
moteti, as upper voices 31 on color 26 – 8, 40
motets, order of composition: on color and talea 26, 35 – 9
bottom up 11 – 16, 19 – 20, 75 – 73, passage on color and talea: from
856, 106 – 7; Murino 110 – 16 Expositiones tractatus pratice
top down 74 – 103, 106 – 7 cantus mensurabilis Johannis de
Murino, Egidius de 15n13, 87 Muris 119 – 26; from Tractatus
on color 32 – 3, 110 practice cantus mensurabilis
on color-izing 32 – 3 (1408) 126 – 7; from Tractatus
on color and talea 26 pratice cantus mensurabilis
on composing motets 85, 110 – 16 (2nd redaction) 127 – 35;
on order of composition 12 – 14, 16 from Tractatus pratice cantus
Muris, Johannes de 27 – 8, 34 – 5, mensurabilis (3rd redaction)
39, 143 132 – 7; from Tractatus practicae
commentary on his Libellus by cantus mensurabilis ad modum
Prosdocimus 119 – 26 ytalicorum (1st redaction)
copy of tenor of Vos/gratissima 86 137; from Tractatus practice
on color 26, 29 – 31, 39 cantus mensurabilis ad modum
on color and talea 23 – 4, 36, 136, 134, ytalicorum (2nd redaction)
137 – 9 139 – 40
on talea 26 Pusiex, see Egidius de Pusiex
opinion on color and talea
128 – 30, 132 Quant/Amour (Machaut M1) 7, 47,
passage on color and talea from Ars 49, 98; upper-voice and tenor
practica mensurabilis cantus 109 structures (Fig. 4.5) 48
Musicalis/Scientie 13n4 Qui/Ha! Fortune (Machaut M8) 7;
upper-voice and tenor structures
nota, translation of 29 (Fig. 4.3) 46
Notitia del valore delle note quotations, classical 54, 88n12, 92 – 3
on color 26, 34
on color and talea 26 Reichert, Georg 41, 44 – 5, 59,
on talea 34, 40 61 – 2, 68
passage on color and talea 119 repetition 4, 40, 44, 62, 91, 101
with intervening material 26 – 8, 36
O gemma lux (Du Fay) 38n25 rhythmic, differing in tenor and
O proles Hispanie (Ciconia) 36n21 upper voices 6 – 7
Omni habenti 119 see also under color and talea
Ovid 88n12 Rex/Leticie 29, 118
Robertson, Anne 14, 105
pan-isorhythm 36, 19n29 analysis of S’il estoit/S’Amours
periodic structures in upper voices 73 – 4, 76
4 – 9, 43 – 63 reading of tenors 16
Petre/Lugentium (Vitry) 100n29 Roman de Fauvel 6
Phasendifferenz (staggered phrasing) rondelli 25
41, 59, 61 – 2, 68, 72, 94, 101
Pipudi, Johannes 38 S’il estoit/S’Amours (Machaut M6) 7,
on color 34 – 5 9, 13, 65 – 85, 89
on color and talea 26 arranged according to tenor taleae
passage on color and talea from De (Ex. 5.3) 70
arte cantus 117 Boogaart’s analysis of telescopic
Portio nature 118 tenor (Fig. 5.4) 72

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comparison of tenor and chant = repetition of similar note-shapes

sources 84 and rests with nothing
division of triplum text 78 intervening (Prosdocimus, citing
four talea divisions (Fig. 5.5) 80 Muris’s “some singers”) 134
Gombosi’s analysis of tenor = repetition of similar note-shapes
(Fig. 5.1) 68 and rests, with or without
partial repetition in tenor 91 intervening material
Powell’s analysis of tenor (Prosdocimo, reporting on the
(Fig. 5.2) 68 “moderns”) 135 – 6
Powell’s rendering of Fibonacci = repetition of similar note-shapes
hierarchy in (Fig. 5.3) 69 on different pitches
tenor as sung (Ex. 5.2) 66 (Prosdocimus, quoting Muris on
tenor in original note-values “some singers”) 121 – 2
(Ex. 5.1) 66 = repetition of similar note-shapes
text of upper voices 74 – 5 with different pitches or same
upper-voice blocks aligned pitches (“some singers”,
(Ex. 5.4) 77 reported by Muris) 109
upper voices excising mm. 1 – 3 = repetition of similar
(Ex. 5.5) 82 note-shapes with nothing
upper voices excising mm. 49 – 51 intervening: Prosdocimus
(Ex. 5.6) 82 127; Prosdocimus, citing “all
Salve virgo virginum (Billart) 38n25 singers” 140; Prosdocimus,
Sancto Johanne, Matheus de 106n4 citing the “moderns” 123 – 4,
Sanders, Ernest 30, 39 131; Prosdocimus, citing singers
Schrade, Leo 68 disagreeing with Muris 124
Sicut mater consolatur 74, 83 Anon. V on 26, 29 – 30, 118
“some moderns”: Goscalcus on 26, 34 – 5, 117 – 18
on color 35 – 6 influenced by texts 105
on talea 35 – 6 medieval definitions of 26 – 8
“some singers” modern definition
on color 26, 35 (periodic repetition
on color and talea 30 – 32, of rhythm independently
40 – 1, 109 of pitch) 23
Sub Arturo/Fons 57, 119 Muris on 26, 109
supertalea 6n11, 4, 41 Notitia on 26, 34, 40, 119
partial 61, 65 – 73, 79, 81, 84, 89, 91,
talea 100 – 1
= color (Prosdocimus, citing Muris) partial repeats 61
28, 120 – 1, 129, 133, 139 Pipudi on 26, 117
= repetition of notes with placed in upper voices as well as
sincope and rests in tenors (Prosdocimus, citing the
tenors (Notitia) 119 “moderns”) 126
= repetition of same note-shapes Prosdocimus on 26 – 8
(Pipudi) 117 “some moderns” on 27
= repetition of same note-shapes “some singers” on 26, 38, 109
but different pitches telescoped 72 – 3
(Anon. V) 118 Ugolino on 37 – 8, 44
= repetition of similar note-shapes: in upper voices 24, 39
Goscalcus 118; Prosdocimus, tenor:
citing Muris on “some singers”) choice of 13 – 14, 87 – 9, 99 – 100, 103,
130; Ugolino, citing Muris’s 105, 110
“some singers” 141 – 2 as foundation 11 – 12, 15
= repetition of similar note-shapes and materia 13 – 14
and pitches (Prosdocimus, citing modification of 83 – 4, 100
the “moderni”) 123 placement in high register 115

157
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see also under motets, order of on talea 28, 37 – 8, 44

composition, bottom up passage on color and talea from
text: Declaratio musicae disciplinae
conflict with tenor 18 140 – 3
influence on structure 52, 54
and relation to tenor 16 – 20 Vitry, Philippe de:
of tenor: influence on structure changing words 91
73 – 4, 76; and interpretation choice of tenor 99
16 – 20; relation to upper voices 81 order of composition 105
of upper voices 88, 92, 95 – 8, 105; texts, upper-voice 94
influence on structure 57, 73 text-setting in Colla/Bona 96
Tribum/Quoniam (Vitry) 4, 6 – 7, 20, 46; see also Colla/Bona, Cum statua/
upper-voice and tenor structures Hugo, Flos/Celsa; In virtute/
(Fig. 4.4) 47 Decens, Petre/Lugentium;
Trop plus/Biauté (Machaut M20) 7, 52; Tribum/Quoniam; Vos/
upper blocks aligned (Ex. 4.1) 53 Gratissima
Vos/Gratissima (Vitry) 47, 49,
Ugolino of Orvieto: 65, 86, 89n14, 98; upper-
on color 28, 37 – 8, 40 voice and tenor structures
on color and talea 39 (Fig. 4.6) 50

158