Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

constitute it burst into a multitude of simultaneous songs. Dante is reminded of the sunset, when the
brightness of the one great heavenly orb is replaced by the myriad tiny points of astral illumination: “...
and this change in the sky came to my mind/when the standard of the world and of its chiefs/was silent in
the blessed beak./For all those living lights,/shining still more brightly, began songs/that slip and fall from
my memory.” As Julie Cumming comments, for Dante,

total   comprehension   of  text    or  music   is  not necessary   for appreciation.   He  describes   in  these   passages    the sublime

musical experience  of  the inexpressible.  This    description of  the musical experience  is  also    a   way of  describing  the

apprehension    of  God:    God’s   will    is  not comprehensible, but nevertheless    it  is  possible    to  believe in  it  and appreciate  it.^13

This, at last, may be the answer to the riddle of polytextuality, to us perhaps the most salient feature of
the French thirteenth- and fourteenth-century motet because it is the most uncanny. We need not assume that
proper performance practice or greater familiarity rendered comprehensible to contemporary listeners
that which is incomprehensible to us. The mind-boggling effect of the fourteenth-century ceremonial
motet, confirmed by numerous witnesses, may have actually depended on the sensory overload delivered
by its multiplicity of voices and texts. If so, it was not the first time that what we would call esthetic value
and power would be extracted from the inscrutable. (A large part of the esthetic value, as well as the
sacredness, of the earliest melismatic chant derived from what Dante might have called its slipperiness.)
And it certainly will not be the last. Whenever the “sublime” is valued as an artistic quality, so is awe.
And what produces awe must be unfathomable as well as thrilling.