Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era

Esperanza Rodríguez-García, Daniele V. Filippi, Esperanza Rodríguez-García, Daniele V. Filippi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315463070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era provides new dimensions to the discussion of the immense corpus of polyphonic motets produced and performed in the decades following the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Beyond the genre's rich connections with contemporary spiritual life and religious experience, the motet is understood here as having a multifaceted life in transmission, performance and reception. By analysing the repertoire itself, but also by studying its material life in books and accounts, in physical places and concrete sonic environments, and by investigating the ways in which the motet was listened to and talked about by contemporaries, the eleven chapters in this book redefine the cultural role of the genre. The motet, thanks to its own protean nature, not bound to any given textual, functional or compositional constraint, was able to convey cultural meanings powerfully, give voice to individual and collective identities, cross linguistic and confessional divides, and incarnate a model of learned and highly expressive musical composition. Case studies include considerations of composers (Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso), cities (Seville and Granada, Milan), books (calendrically ordered collections, non-liturgical music books) and special portions of the repertoire (motets pro defunctis, instrumental intabulations).

1 Proper to the day

Calendrical ordering in post-Tridentine motet books

David Crook

An early biography of Michele Lauretano, rector of the German College in Rome from 1573 to 1587, reports that musicians employed by the college composed motets on texts that the rector himself had chosen expressly for that purpose. One of the musicians in question, Annibale Stabile, had studied under Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and served three years as maestro di cappella at the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran prior to his tenure in the same capacity at the German College from 1578 to 1590. Yet, according to Matthias Schrick, the author of Lauretano’s biography and a man who as a student at the college had known both Lauretano and Stabile, the latter maintained that he had learned more from Lauretano than from anyone else regarding the use of music to inspire piety.¹

Schrick’s account hints at the kind of instruction and conversation that must have attended the cultivation of motets at many institutions across Europe and the New World in the decades following the close of the Council of Trent in 1563. It also reminds us that the principal topic of discussion between those who composed and performed motets and those who listened to them concerned not the technical aspects of composition but the meaning of the verbal texts that polyphony conveyed. Today we would like to know the details of such discussions. What did Lauretano, the chief administrator of one of the most important institutions in the Jesuits’ rapidly expanding network of colleges and seminaries, feel composers needed to know about the texts they set? According to what criteria did he select, compose and emend the texts he delivered to composers? And, perhaps most intriguing of all, what did he think made a text appropriate to a particular occasion?

Neither church authorities nor the musicians themselves recorded the details of such exchanges, yet surviving documents occasionally contain clues as to the way they conceived of the function of the motet in daily life. Consider in this respect an Ordo cantionum directus prepared for the Franconian city of Hof in 1592.² Like many other Lutheran secondary schools of the period, Hof’s gymnasium provided an ideal milieu for the cultivation of the motet. Latin served as the language of instruction, and students put the musical training they received in school to practical use in the city’s Michaelskirche, providing music for the Mass and Vespers on Sundays and the principal feasts of the church year, for Vespers on Saturdays and the vigils of the principal feasts, and for the Mass on Wednesdays and Fridays.³ The Ordo cantionum directus, composed by the school’s deputy headmaster Enoch Widmann, cites nearly 300 polyphonic compositions – principally Latin Masses, Magnificats and motets – by composers ranging from Josquin des Prez and Heinrich Isaac to Tomás Luis de Victoria and Orlando di Lasso. Widmann assigns each composition to a specific occasion and position within the liturgy. The diaries of the Sistine Chapel in Rome preserve similarly detailed information for the motets performed at that institution during the year 1616.⁴

Valued for the precision and immediacy of the information they provide, documents like Widmann’s Ordo and the Sistine Chapel diaries nonetheless remain rarities in the history of post-Tridentine music. More numerous – and more diverse in terms of their organisation and geographical distribution – are the calendrically ordered printed collections that proliferated during the decades following the close of the Council in 1563. Table 1.1 presents a representative sample drawn from the dozens of publications printed 1563–1633 that provide a repertory of motets for the annual observance of the liturgical year. The collections of Montagnana, Palestrina, Varotto, Gabrieli, Ruffo, Marenzio and Hassler transmit in each case a repertory of moderate size by a single composer.⁵ The remaining six collections are large – and, with the exception of Rühling’s Tabulaturbuch, multivolume – collections of motets by diverse composers compiled by a named editor.⁶ The third item in Table 1.1, the Novus thesaurus musicus, preserves motets composed principally by musicians active at the court chapels of the Austrian Habsburgs and owes its existence to the collecting – and most likely financing – of Pietro Giovanelli, scion of a wealthy merchant family. A sumptuous expression of respect and royal representation, it ranks, according to Jane Bernstein, as ‘the most ambitious music anthology published in mid-sixteenth century Venice’.⁷ The far more modest Tabulaturbuch of Johannes Rühling, which transmits unembellished intabulations of motets (mainly by Orlando di Lasso, Clemens non Papa and other Catholic composers), reflects the quotidian duties of a provincial Lutheran organist.⁸

Table 1.1 A representative sample of motet collections for the liturgical year, 1563–1633.

Montagnana, Rinaldo da. Il primo libro di motetti … per tutte le feste dell’anno. Venice, 1563. 31 motets. Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da. Motecta festorum totius anni cum communi sanctorum. Venice, 1564. 36 motets. Giovanelli, Pietro, ed. Novi thesauri musici liber … quo … cantiones sacre (quas vulgo moteta vocant) continentur … que in … summis solemnibusque festivitatibus canuntur. 4 vols. Venice, 1568. 222 motets (a fifth volume contains 32 motets honouring great personages). Varotto, Michele. Sacrae cantiones in omnes anni festivitates. Venice, 1568. 30 motets. Gabrieli, Andrea. Ecclesiasticarum cantionum … omnibus sanctorum solemnitatibus … liber. Venice, 1576. 29 motets. Ruffo, Vincenzo. Sacrae modulationes … (vulgo motecta) quae potissimos totius anni festos dies compraehendunt. 2 vols. Brescia, 1583. 33 motets. Rühling, Johannes, ed. Tabulaturbuch auff Orgeln … auff alle Sontage und hohen Fest. Leipzig, 1583. 85 motets. Marenzio, Luca. Motecta festorum totius anni, cum communi sanctorum. Rome, 1585. 42 motets. Lindner, Friedrich, ed. Sacrae cantiones … de festis praecipuis totius anni. 3 vols. Nuremberg, 1585, 1588 and 1590. 167 motets. Hassler, Hans Leo. Cantiones sacrae de festis praecipuis totius anni. Augsburg, 1591. 31 motets. Bodenschatz, Erhard, ed. Florilegium Portense. Leipzig, 1603; enlarged in 2 vols., 1618 and 1621. 265 motets. Schadaeus, Abraham and Caspar Vincentius, eds. Promptuarii musici, sacras harmonias sive motetas. 4 vols. Strasbourg, 1611, 1612, 1613 and 1617. 436 motets. Donfrid, Johann, ed. Promptuarii musici, concentus ecclesiasticos. 3 vols. Strasbourg, 1622, 1623 and 1627. 693 motets.

The editors of the remaining four anthologies in my sample all worked as cantors or rectors at German schools and their associated churches. The title pages of the three volumes of Friedrich Lindner’s Sacrae cantiones printed at Nuremberg 1585–90 advertise motets ‘recently composed by the most excellent Italian musicians’ and selected for ‘use in German schools and churches’ by Lindner, who served as cantor at the city’s grammar school and church of Saint Giles (St. Egidien). Erhard Bodenschatz’s Florilegium Portense, first published in 1603 and greatly expanded in two volumes in 1618 and 1621, reflects its compiler’s tenure as cantor at Schulpforta 1600–3. Abraham Schadaeus had served as cantor at Bautzen prior to his appointment in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Music examples
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• The motet in the post-Tridentine world: an introduction
• 1 Proper to the day: calendrical ordering in post-Tridentine motet books
• 2 Motets, Vespers antiphons and the performance of the post-Tridentine liturgy in Italy
• 3 Motets and the liturgy for the Dead in Italy: text typologies and contexts of performance
• 4 Motets pro defunctis in the Iberian world: texts and performance contexts
• 5 Palestrina’s mid-life compositional summary: the three motet books of 1569–75
• 6 Modality as orthodoxy and exegesis: strategies of tonal organisation in Victoria’s motets
• 7 Beyond the denominational paradigm: the motet as confessional(ising) practice in the later sixteenth century
• 8 In search of the English motet
• 9 Songs without words: the motet as solo instrumental music after Trent
• 10 The soundtrack for a miracle and other stories of the motet from post-Tridentine Milan
• 11 Mapping the motet in post-Tridentine Seville and Granada: repertoire, meanings and functions
• Index of names
• Index of musical prints