CHAPTER 13

Middle and Low

THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MOTET AND CHANSON; EARLY INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC; MUSIC PRINTING

HAILING MARY

Over the course of the fifteenth century, the cyclic Mass Ordinary, a new genre, displaced the motet

from its position at the high end of the musical style spectrum. That is one of the reasons why the motet, of
all preexisting literate genres, underwent the most radical transformation during that time. From an
isorhythmic, tenor-dominated, polytextual construction, it became a Latin “cantilena,” a sacred song that
primarily served devotional rather than ceremonial purposes. Connection with plainchant was retained
but modified. Paraphrase—the technique pioneered in fauxbourdon settings, whereby an old chant was
melodically refurbished and turned into a new “cantus”—began to dominate the motet just as the cantus-
firmus technique was being appropriated by the Mass. Textual and expressive factors began to weigh
more heavily than before both in the structure and in the detail-work of the newly renovated motet. The
aim was lowered, so to speak, from the altogether transcendent to somewhere nearer the human plane.
The result was the perfect embodiment of Tinctoris’s stylus mediocris, the “middle style.”

It became all the more fitting, then, that the middle style should continue to address the “middle
being,” the nexus and mediatrix between the transcendent and the human, especially as votive appeals to
the Virgin Mary continued to burgeon in the liturgy. Accordingly, the latter fifteenth century witnessed the
zenith of musical “Mariolatry.” Its chief expressive outlet became the polyphonic arrangement of the
Marian antiphons. For composers of the “Tinctoris generations,” that was the basic motet category.

A wonderful introduction to the “classic” fifteenth-century Marian motet is a Salve Regina setting by
Philippe Basiron (d. 1491), mentioned in chapter 12 as the composer of one of the numerous satellite
Masses that surrounded Busnoys’s enormously influential Missa L’Homme Armé. The original melody,
signaled by the little crosses (“+”) in Ex. 13-1a, has been familiar to us since the third chapter of this
book (see Ex. 3-12b). As pointed out then, it resembles a troubadour canso—or, in terms more
contemporary with the polyphonic setting, a ballade—in its repeated opening phrase. That repeated
opening phrase is in fact identically paraphrased in Basiron’s superius up to its cadence on both of its
appearances in the motet, pointing up the composer’s awareness of the melody’s resemblance to a secular
love song, and his wish to preserve that resonant resemblance in his cantilena setting.

EX. 13-1A   Philippe    Basiron,    Salve   Regina, mm. 1–25