FIG. 7-4 French motet, Se j’ai ame/EX SEMINE (W 2 , fols. 136–136 v). The triplum and motetus, sung to the same words, are
vertically aligned. The tenor occupies the last two lines of music before the capital M that marks the beginning of the next
motet.Allowing for a bit of urbanization (“Paris town”), this is a trouvère poem in all but name. Indeed, at
the point where we left it in chapter 4, we may recall, the trouvère chanson tradition was in the process
of transplantation from its original abode in the aristocratic countryside to the towns of northern France.
The new motet genre was its destination. It became the primary site for the production of French “literary
song” in the late thirteenth century.
The motet in French was thus an interesting hybrid, crossbred from two exceedingly disparate strains.
“We can imagine a schema,” Richard Crocker deftly observes, “in which music from the monastery [that
is, organum] converges on the cathedral, hence on the town, from one side; and music from the court [that
is, the chanson] converges on the town, hence on the cathedral, from the other. They meet at the residences