of the arts. Music received special attention at this time (writes Julie Cumming, another motet historian),
because
Nothing made as good a show or traveled as well as musicians ready to perform in public. Dignitaries of church and state
traveled with their chapels, and put on the best show possible; they also listened to the music sung by the chapels of other
dignitaries, and tried to hire the best possible musicians. Musicians met, exchanged repertoire, and looked for more
lucrative and comfortable employment.^10Composers who had training in the techniques of monumental musical architecture, and who could
produce works of grandiose (and somewhat archaic, therefore venerable) design, could put on the best of
all such legitimizing shows for their patrons, and found a rich market for their skills. Such composers
came from the north, the land of the Ars Nova, where such techniques had been chiefly developed. That is
one of the reasons why the most sought after, the best paid—and therefore in retrospect the most typical—
court and cathedral musicians of northern Italy in the fifteenth century were immigrants from France and
Flanders.
The first of this distinguished quasi-official line was Johannes Ciconia. His surname, Latin for
“stork,” is probably a Latinized (that is, cosmopolitanized) version of a more prosaic French or Flemish
family name. He was born in the Belgian town of Liège during the 1370s and received his basic training
there, but by 1401 he was employed by the municipal cathedral in the north Italian city of Padua, where he
died in 1412.
His chief Paduan patron was Francesco Zabarella (1360–1417), the cathedral archpriest or chief
canon, and a famous university professor of canon law, who reached the height of his career as the chief
negotiator of peace between Padua and Venice after the Venetian conquest of his native city. Thereafter he
served both Venice and the Roman pope John XXIII as a diplomat. John made him bishop of Florence,
and later a cardinal. Zabarella played a major role at the Council of Constance, where the end of the
schism was brokered. It was he who finally persuaded his own patron, Pope John, to resign in the
interests of church harmony. (John, the loser in the resolution of the schism, is not a pope but an
“antipope” in the official history of the Catholic church, which is why his number could be reused by a
much later pope, the illustrious John XXIII who convened the second Vatican council in 1962, at which
the Latin liturgy, and with it the Gregorian chant, were decanonized.) At the time of his death, Zabarella
was widely regarded as being next in line for the papacy.
In honor of this illustrious statesman and churchman, Ciconia composed two exceptionally grand
isorhythmic motets. Their style is somewhat influenced by Italian secular genres to be described in a later
chapter, but their culminating place in the development of the Ars Nova motet, and their consummate
embodiment of the aesthetics of their genre, make this the appropriate place to analyze Ciconia’s work.
It has been suggested that Doctorum principem super ethera/Melodia suavissima cantemus
(excerpted in Ex. 8-7), the second and more ample of Ciconia’s two Zabarella-inspired motets, was
composed as a send off from Padua when Zabarella left to assume his bishopric at Florence. The triplum
and motetus texts are of equal length, sung at equal rates, and they actually spell one another at times so
that the two texts seem to interlock like a hocket in a single encomium to the honored patron. But the tenor
layout and the mensural scheme are a virtual summation of Ars Nova practices, and in their combination
of diversity and comprehensiveness they symbolize the harmonizing of competing interests—the discordia
concors—that is the primary undertaking of any diplomat, as well as any motet. This motet, then, is
emblematic both of its recipient and of the genre itself, especially in this phase of its history, when it had
become primarily a political instrument.
EX. 8-7A Johannes Ciconia, Doctorum principem super ethera/Melodia suavissima cantemus, mm. 1–14