Carmen,” a name we enclose in quotes because it is so obviously a Latin pseudonym (“John Song”) for a
Parisian composer active in the first decades of the fifteenth century. A likely patron for such a musician
would have been Nicholas of Clémanges, the rector of the University of Paris from 1393 as well as
secretary and chief legal defender of the notorious Benedict XIII, the unsinkable Avignon antipope; the
prayer on behalf of St. Nicholas’s “servants,” then, might well have been a name-day tribute to the ancient
saint’s living namesake. Ex. 10-9 shows the first and second of its five quatrains.
But for the language of its text, this motet looks in its manuscript source for all the world like a
chanson. Only the cantus part is texted, and there are an accompanying pair of voices (tenor and
contratenor) that share the same pitch-space. The text, divided into five quatrains of iambic pentameters,
all in the same rhyme scheme but with different actual rhyme-words (thus: abab/cdcd/efef/ghgh/ijij)
resembles the conductus texts of old (or the new-fangled sonnet) far more than it does the typical motet
text of its day. So why is the piece called a motet? Because it is isorhythmic: each texted stanza is sung by
the cantus to the same talea. (There is no color—unless one is content to describe the nonrepetitive
melody of the cantus as a single continuous color, which rather defeats the meaning of the word.) Thus,
what usually characterizes the tenor in an isorhythmic motet here characterizes the cantus.
All of this is indeed unconventional for a French motet, but where is the Italian connection? It comes
in the inconspicuous little “sign of congruence” (signum congruentiae) that directs a second singer to
enter at the beginning when the first has reached the end of the first phrase. The work, in short, is a canon.
But it is not just any sort of canon; it is a two-part canon for a cantus over a tenor. In other words, it is a
caccia—but not an entirely conventional caccia, either, since it has a “French” contratenor in addition to
the tenor.
Nor are conventional caccie isorhythmic. But like a motet, a caccia does have to be composed
“successively.” The canonic pair of voices have to be worked out in advance of the accompanying voices,
just as an isorhythmic tenor, with or without a corresponding contratenor, has to be worked out in advance
of the upper parts. So the motet and the caccia have a genuine affinity; the addition of isorhythm to the
canonic part(s) of a caccia emphasizes that affinity. As in Sy dolce non sonò, Landini’s madrigal motet,
the result is a genuine stylistic synthesis—something more than a stylistic juxtaposition or a hodgepodge
of genres—and a step toward genuine internationalization.
EX. 10-9 Johannes Carmen, Pontifici decora speculi (motet in caccia style)