description of how various types of music ought to be used. All the genres of music that we have
encountered thus far are given not so much an actual as an ideal place in what is less a realistic than a
utopian depiction of social harmony.
Thus epic songs (chansons de geste), for example, ought to be provided, Grocheio says, “for old
men, working citizens, and for average people when they rest from their accustomed labor, so that, having
heard the miseries and calamities of others, they may more easily bear up under their own, and go about
their tasks more gladly,” and without threatening the peace with any newfangled notions about social
justice.^2 “By these means,” Grocheio adds, “this kind of music has the power to protect the whole state.”
The philologist and music historian Christopher Page has found some striking parallels for this passage in
sermons by Parisian churchmen who, while basically rejecting the music of minstrels as a “low” or
sensual pleasure, nevertheless conceded its utility in mitigating the sadness of human life and enabling
men to bear their lot without protest.^3 (For the same reason, he notes, some medieval churchmen were
even “prepared to countenance prostitution within the civitas as a measure to preserve public order.”)
For an example at the other end of the social spectrum, Grocheio says that cantus coronatus (by
which he means the kind of trouvère songs that competed for prizes) are ordained among kings and nobles
in order to “move their souls to audacity and bravery, to magnanimity and liberality,”^4 qualities that also
keep society running smoothly. Lower types of secular song, namely those with refrains, are meant for
“the feasts of the vulgar,” where they serve a similar edifying purpose, but more artlessly.
The chant, and its polyphonic offspring, the organum, “is sung in churches or holy places for the praise
of God and reverence of His high place.” Even dance music has its assigned place in a well-ordered
polity, for it “excites the soul of man to move ornately” and in its more artful forms it “makes the soul of
the performer and also the soul of the listener pay close attention and frequently turns the soul of the
wealthy from depraved thinking.”
So despite Grocheio’s disavowal of all interest in metaphysics and his insistence that he meant only to
describe music in the world he knew, his account of it is quite consistent with that of Plato, the greatest of
all utopians and idealists. For both of them, music was above all a social regulator, a means for
organizing and controlling society. As Page emphasizes, “Grocheio belonged to the class which supplied
princes with their advisers and provided the whole of France with the principal agents and beneficiaries
of bureaucratic power.”^5 Indeed, his treatise reads like nothing so much as musical advice to a prince, of
a kind that we now (after the greatest and most cynical of princely advisers) call “Machiavellian.”
The one part of Grocheio’s treatise that does have a realistic ring, and which can be taken as truly
descriptive, is the part devoted to the music of Grocheio’s own class, the music he knew best and valued
most. It was a new sort of music, one that we have not encountered as yet. Johannes de Grocheio was the
preeminent social theorist of the medieval motet.
THE NASCENT MOTET
The simplest definition of a motet, in its earliest form, would simply be a texted bit of discant. In its
origins, as we may surmise from the genre’s earliest sources, the motet was actually a prosulated bit of
discant—discant (by definition melismatic in tenor as well as added voices) to which a syllabic text has
been grafted onto the added voice or voices in the manner of a prosula. We can trace the process by
returning to a piece already familiar from the previous chapter: the “Ex semine” clausula from the
Alleluia Nativitas attributed by Anonymus IV to Perotin.
A transcription of the clausula was included in Ex. 6-5. Figure 7-2a shows the clausula in its original