UW-Madison Faculty
David Crook (profile)
Professor of Musicology
Location: Humanities 1641
What was the function of the sixteenth-century motet? When and where was it used, and what did its performance mean to those who heard it? We know the genre provided pious entertainment during, for example, meals and siestas, and both Catholics and Lutherans performed it within the context of their respective liturgies. But what made a particular motet appropriate to a particular day or occasion? About this, music historians have had surprisingly little to say beyond the general assumption that the liturgical associations of a motet’s text provide a guide. In an influential study of motet performances recorded in the Sistine Chapel diaries, for example, Anthony Cummings reported that, “for the most part, the texts of the motets clearly pertain to the liturgy of the feast on which they were performed.” He acknowledged, however, that some “atypical” motets set texts that were unrelated, or only marginally related, to the day’s liturgy. My study of published motet collections ordered according to the church year shows, however, that the liturgical assignment of the motet’s own text was incidental not causal: what mattered was the motet text’s ability to gloss—sometimes in unexpected and fanciful ways—the Gospel and Epistle readings of the day. This new view of the motet as a form of biblical exegesis not only resolves Cummings’s anomalies, it provides a new understanding of the relationship between motet performance, the mystery of the Incarnation, and the value contemporary reformers ascribed to the aural experience of the Word.
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