Fig. 7-8 (transcribed in Ex. 7-8) displays one more virtuoso act of “combining” that uses material we
have encountered before. This one is a real quodlibet—a grab-bag (literally “whatever you want”) of
found objects. At last we have an example of a macaronic motet, combining texts in Latin and the
vernacular. Both the triplum (a French pastourelle) and the motetus (a Latin sermon) are stuffed with
refrains, making the piece doubly a motet enté. The tenor, meanwhile, is drawn from a new source: it is a
traditional “Gregorian” or Frankish chant melody, but one unrelated to the polyphonic repertory at Notre
Dame. Despite some slight melodic embellishment it is familiar to us as the first acclamation from the
Kyrie “Cum jubilo” (Ex. 3-5). It has been cast into a little talea consisting of a single long plus a first
mode ordo, with a single cadential long inserted to complete the color after the fifth repetition of the talea.
The whole tenor melody goes through a double cursus and starts up again a third time, but gets only as far
as the third talea.
FIG. 7-7 Mout me fu grief/Robin m’aime/PORTARE (Ba, fol. 52 v).
Thanks to the new resources of Franconian notation, the parts are neatly differentiated in rhythm—or,
to be more exact, in prosody, the relationship of the text to the music. The triplum carries separate text
syllables on semibreves; the motetus contains semibreves but places the text only on longs and breves,
while the tenor, as noted, is confined to “modal” patterns of longs and breves.
EX. 7-7 Transcription of Fig. 7-7